Rising fiction

CONFINED SPACE Devan Perine reads to Dave Snyder,while Andi White takes a solo trip, below.

Dave Snyder thinks he and a few Columbia College students may have stumbled upon a new literary form. They call it nanofiction, and it’s shorter than a short story, briefer than a short-short, and sometimes even runs shorter than this very sentence. It lasts about ten seconds, or the time it would take for an elevator to climb a few floors.

That last bit is important, because the nanofiction is being expressly designed for ascension. On Friday 15, during Columbia’s annual Manifest arts fest, a one-day, year-end arts blowout to celebrate the students’ various projects and cash in another semester, students from the school’s Silver Tongue Reading Series will occupy the lifts in the Ludington Building (1104 S Wabash Ave) and read original pieces of nanofiction to festival attendees as part of a new project called Elevated Diction. Silver Tongue typically pairs Columbia students with more established writers for monthly readings throughout the school year.

“We wanted to figure some way for Silver Tongue to have a presence at Manifest,” Snyder says. “But there are already so many events going on, it didn’t make sense to just have a reading.”

Manifest promises 30,000 people, 50 showcases, 14 galleries and five stages spread out over the one-day festival. There are already a handful of literary events, including the fiction and poetry M.F.A. showcases and undergraduate readings. While the students were brainstorming, senior Andi White mentioned that the best way to meet people at the South Loop festival was in the elevators on the way to and from the various events.

“I consider it a sort of showcase art,” said White. “It’s another side of writing. I was texting my friends the other day, and it dawned on me that I was writing the kind of story for this project.”

Snyder, an accomplished Chicago poet who had work included in Best American Poetry 2008, has put on a few workshops for students to hone their nanofiction. On a recent Monday morning, a few collected in the Ludington Building to read sample stories and time the rides. Students read what may be the most famous example of the genre, the apocryphal Ernest Hemingway story, in which he was challenged to write a story in six words, and he intoned, “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.”

Students have written their own microscopic masterpieces. Mason Johnson, a junior, likes the idea of an elevator’s movement mimicking the movement in a good story. “It’ll be nice to creep people out in an elevator in a positive way,” he says. “With a purpose and with permission.”

Johnson says he’s planning to read multiple linked stories for each stop on the ride up. “I’m calling them stories about cars, not girls,” he says. “They’re all stories about girls.”

Snyder echoes Johnson’s enthusiasm for playing with the form. “I want to have a story for the first stop, then have the next few stops be sequels, and then the last one a prequel,” Snyder says.

Elevated Diction occupies the Ludington’s elevators from 11am–4pm on Friday 15.

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