Geneva teacher writes first 'flash fiction' book

If author Rick Holinger were writing this column, I think he would start with the story of his epiphany. The one that came to him late on a cold January night four decades ago when he went for a solitary, head-clearing skate on an ice rink in Oneonta, N.Y., home of Hartwick College, where he got his bachelor's degree in sociology in 1971.

“I started thinking of the four things I could do after college,” Holinger would quote himself as saying, listing his options as:

1. Go off to fight the war in Vietnam.

2. Go into some kind of business.

3. Go to grad school.

4. Get a menial job and pursue his passion for writing.

Or the Geneva writer might lead with the story of how he's a 62-year-old English teacher at Marmion Academy in Aurora who just got his first book published. Or he could tweak that sentence to note that he is the founder of the St. Charles Writers Group. Or he could begin this column by explaining how he has won lots of awards for his poetry, prose, short stories, book reviews, essays, fiction, nonfiction, creative nonfiction, columns, satires and criticisms, and is now publishing a book of his “flash fiction” tales.

Generally meant to describe short stories between 250 and 1,000 words, flash fiction, also known as sudden fiction, is a growing genre in our modern world where a quickly read chapbook might meet a need that a lengthy novel does not.

But if Holinger stuck with the epiphany story, he could tell how he lived with his older, writer brother, Bill, in New Haven, Conn., took a job working the 4 p.m.-midnight shift as a security guard at a Stop & Shop cold-storage warehouse and used his free time to immerse himself in his literary passion.

“I wrote some really bad stories,” Holinger would say, telling how he still remembers his first rejection letter from Esquire that read, “I like the plot, but the telling leaves me cold.”

“And they were absolutely right,” Holinger would concede.

So he took writing classes.

“Then I started writing like Hemingway,” he'd discover. “But Hemingway was already writing like Hemingway.”

So he took a community-college teaching job at the now-defunct St. John's College in Winfield, Kansas, for a year.

“The next year, they needed a basketball coach and I played hockey,” Holinger would explain. So he returned to Chicago, where he lived in a converted-and-expanded Pullman railroad car on his grandfather's farm in Plano, overlooking Rock Creek.

“I lived out there and just played Thoreau for about a year,” he would say of the time before he took a teaching job in St. Louis. Eventually, he would explain how he got his master's degree in English at Washington University in St. Louis and his doctorate in creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, how he met his wife, Tia, who now teaches art at St. Francis High School in Wheaton, and how they have a son, Jay, and a daughter, Molly, both in college.

But he'd mainly focus on how he was the youngest son of a prominent throat surgeon, went to a Connecticut prep school and might have been expected to follow two of his three older brothers into the medical profession, but couldn't escape his desire to be a writer.

“I think it started in about fourth of fifth grade,” Holinger would recall. “I would try to shock or humor my classmates.”

He might note that he was awarded an Illinois Arts Council Artists Grant for poetry, is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, has seen his worked published in more than 100 literary magazines and has inspired and encouraged other writers.

“I know what his teaching and writing skills have done for me and so many others,” says attorney Bruce Steinberg, a St. Charles Writers Group member and author of several novels.

“His strong literary background gives him the ability to be creative in very, very interesting ways, and his ‘flash fiction' shows that,” says fellow group member Donald J. Bingle, a Naperville native who lives in St. Charles and has written novels and short stories in a variety of genres.

With a writer as versatile as Holinger, it's difficult to say what approach he would have taken if he had written this column. But two things are certain:

1. He would have made room to mention that his book, “Hybrid Seeds: Little Fictions,” is published by Kattywompus Press, sells for $12 (plus $2 for postage) and can be ordered by sending an email to rholinger@marmion.org.

2. He would have written this in half the space.

Lunch on the Grass by Rick Holinger

“I still don't know where you're going with this,” the nude woman said in French. “Why does everyone else get to wear clothes, and you stick me out here like a peeled apple?”

“You are the heart of the painting,” Manet growled from behind his easel. “Freedom! Nonconformity! Revolution!”

“What I am is getting bitten by bugs. History will cast me as a dope, not a hero. 'Why is she naked?' people a hundred years from now will ask. 'Doesn't she know ants will eat her bum?'”

“I'm ushering in a new era of art,” the Impressionist assured her. “They won't ask realistic questions because they will be too shocked with style to fixate on content. Your white skin against his black suit. The ghostly background woman wading. The two chauvinists bathing in your sensuousness. It's about composition. It's about shapes. It's about color — or the lack of it.”

“What it's about is a lack of clothing,” the woman grumbled. “What am I doing out here bare as a baked croissant? I'm talking not only as a model, but as the woman in your painting, a wife, a mother; a writer, a barrister. Is it my nature to flaunt my body? Did I do it as a young lady reveling in her own self-worth, or was I merely a quirky flirt, an easy mark?”

“None of those,” Manet replied, “and all of those.”

“I don't want to represent any more than I am, which may be the last vestige of female self-respect,” the woman retorted. “I just want to put on a blouse, skirt and sandals. I want these two apes to stop staring at my chest. You'd think they just escaped from years on Elba. I hope you're at least lifting and rounding my breasts.”

“I'm doing what I need to do,” the painter said. “Now be quiet, can't you, and earn your pay. I cannot create with such a chatterbox.”

“I have to pee, and both my legs are asleep. Have you thought of a title yet?” “Lunch on the Grass,” announced Manet. “Lovely, concise, descriptive.”

“How about, Underpaid Nude Model Sitting Beside Perverts? You want descriptive, that nails it.”

“Enough already!” thundered the artist. “Take half an hour, but don't get dressed. Your robe is on the stump where you left it. My God, what I put up with to change the world.”

“No,” the woman said, rising stiffly. It is what I put up with. You they'll remember. Me they'll gawk at.”

Manet rolled a cigarette and handed it to her. She tied her cover closed as he lit the cigarette for her, then she turned up the road that led back to the village. “Come back!” he called.

She raised her hand, but in a wave “Okay” or telling him to stuff it, he couldn't be sure.