Flash Fiction - Refers to a largely fictional work of relative brevity. It goes by different names such as “short-short story”, “micro-fiction,” “micro-narrative”, and “sudden fiction”.

  • According to Bob Batchelor (2011), it is also known as the “smoke-long” story in China because one is likely to finish reading it before he/she finishes smoking a stick of cigarette.
  • It traces its origins to older genres such as fable and the parable. Notable writers such as American Ernest Hemingway and Italian Italo Calvino wrote short works that exemplify the genre.

Dagli

  • Equivalence of flash fiction in the Philippines
  • Some scholars claim, however, that the term dagli had already been around for decades even before the term flash fiction became popular.
  • Appeared on a regular basis in newspapers and magazines as early as the first few years of the American occupation of the Philippines.
  • Jose Corazon de Jesus, Lope K. Santos, and Teodoro Agoncillo were the popular writers in the genre.
  • There has been a resurgence of interest in the dagli written during the American colonial period through studies done by Rolando Tolentino and Aristotle Atienza.
A Jeepney Tapestry
  • Charlotte Sharon Aninion-De Guzman is a true blue Scholastican. She was an English faculty at De La Salle College of St. Benilde, and later on, she became Chairperson of the English Area for the said institution.

Literary Journalism

  • A genre that bears close affinity to journalistic writing.
  • Unlike traditional journalism that generally requires the detachment of the writer from his/her subject, literary journalism may involve the narrator's closeness to the topic, literally and figuratively.
  • Foreign writers: ==Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and John Didion.==
    • These writers were pejoratively describes as working more like sociologist than journalist.
  • Tom Wolfe’s The Elektrik Kool-Aid Acid Test was controversial for its portrayal of recreational drug use among its subjects. Nonetheless, the work was hailed for its attempt to blur the boundaries between journalism and literature.
  • In the Philippines, literary journalism has also been the genre of choice among writers, including the late National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin, Jose Dalisay, and Krip Yuson.
  • Nick Joaquin wrote regular literary journalism pieces in the Philippines Free Press under his pseudonym Quijano de Manila. At a time when literature was still considered aesthetically superior to journalistic writing, Nick Joaquin called for deconstructing the old traditional distinction between the two genres.

No Stones Unturned

  • The author of this piece is ==Candy Canezo Diez==, a human rights defender campaigning on various issues on peace and conflict. At present, she is a part of the Asian Peacebuilders Scholarship Program, a dual masters program of Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines and the University for Peace in Costa Rica.

Photographic Essay

  • The old cliché, "a picture paints a thousand words," is actually true. We can only say one thing at a time with words because words by nature are sequential.
  • Images, on the other hand, are simultaneous. Several things can be conveyed in one picture all at the same time. So while it may take an entire page to describe something in prose, it only takes one picture to do the job.
  • A photographic essay is a series of pictures that evokes an emotion, conveys an idea, or tells a story. It expresses an artist's personal ideas through narration or exposition in the same way an essay does, but it does so through photographs.
  • The pictures in a photo essay are not put together randomly. Each picture serves a purpose as an integral part of a whole, the same way each paragraph in an essay serves as an essential component to form a unified piece of prose.

Types:

  1. Narrative – tells a story through sequence of events or actions.
  2. Thematic – focuses on a central theme and present the photos relevant to that theme.

Elements: • The Story – expresses a central message or tells a story. The pictures make logical sense to the viewer/reader even without a detailed written article.

• The Range of Photos – a photo essay is comprised of variety of photos. There may be some wide angled shots, some detailed, some portraits, some aerial perspectives. The variety adds to its depth and artistry.

• The Order of The Photos – logical and creative sequence of the photos is very important in communicating the central idea of the photo essay.

• Information and Emotion – the photos provide information to convey context, and effectively evoke emotion.

• Captions – the words chosen by the artist work together with the images to produce meaning.

  1. Catchline/Lead-In – brief, catchy, title of the caption
  2. Body – explains or describes the picture (do not state the obvious)
  3. Credit – source of the picture and/or photographer