Writing influenced
by Sebald.

Sebald walked through Europe carrying its history. The walking is the form.

Walking as method · Memory and catastrophe · The hybrid text

W.G. Sebald is the influence in Tumbleweed Words that is most about form rather than style. Sebald invented a mode of writing — part fiction, part memoir, part essay, part photograph album — that follows memory through landscape, that treats European history as personally present rather than safely past. His narrators walk through cities and the walk becomes an investigation of what the cities have been. The nomadic writing in Tumbleweed Words is not Sebaldian in style, but it inherits his method: go to the place, walk, notice, remember.

"In Sarajevo I walked for three hours without a map, which is the Sebald method: let the city produce its own itinerary. What the city chooses to show you is the story."

David — Tumbleweed Words — Sarajevo

Sebald's lesson for flash fiction is about the relationship between movement and memory — that walking through a place activates a different kind of attention than sitting and observing. The nomadic pieces in Tumbleweed Words that work best are the ones written in motion: on trains, on walks through cities, in the specific between-ness of transit. Move to write. Write to understand the movement.

David — Tumbleweed Words Flash fiction and poetry in the minimalist tradition. Published in Litro, Adelaide Magazine, Cleaver Magazine. Pushcart-nominated. Read the newsletter.