The Master of Concise: Arlene Duane Hemingway Brings a Twist on Storytelling
Written by Rosa Linda Fallon
Ernest Hemingway had a way of providing his readers stories that were short, yet powerful. Fletcher, NC resident and retired career musician Arlene Duane Hemingway, who coincidentally shares the same surname with the 20th-century novelist, specializes in a rare literary form called “drabble.” Drabble is a short work of fiction precisely one-hundred words in length; its original form was derived from Monty Python’s Big Red Book. Participants of the drabble game were expected to write novels. The first person to finish was declared the winner. This evolved into the current Drabble form — an authentic microfiction story composed at the leisure of the writer. While the parameters of the Drabble are strict, Hemingway says it gave her the ability to craft what she needed to say during times when she needed it the most. She refers to this as the “Drabble Companion.” Now, she primarily uses the Drabble form, or Drabble Companion, as her main forms of expression.
Writing is a belated twist for this retired career musician. Hemingway grew up in New York City. Growing up, her mother insisted on long and rigorous music lessons. She graduated from the Juilliard School of Music and went on to become extremely successful, performing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir at Radio City Music Hall, working numerous other musical events in New York, and helping to launch a composer’s new work at the Lincoln Memorial.
Hemingway taught music for years in a public school system in Long Island, New York. During her years of teaching, she was the only teacher of color in the district and, unfortunately, experienced discrimination. To help process her experiences, Hemingway kept a journal. “I’ve been writing, collecting stories for quite a while. It was the one way I kept my sanity,” she says. One day, she came across an advertisement in the newspaper offering writing classes at the public library. It was during this class Hemingway was introduced to the drabble form. “And that’s when I fell in love.”
Hemingway describes writing her first Drabble assignment as one of the hardest things she has ever done. “I thought, ‘this is going to be a piece of cake!’ but it wasn’t,” Hemingway recalls. This is because a Drabble is a complete story with a beginning, a middle and an end. Hemingway says she recognized that this was a wonderful way for her to be able to speak truth to power in her everyday life. “There’s a lot of truth that can be said in a drabble,” she explains. She not only began crafting stories, but she also began crafting things she wanted to say to those who were besieging her in the workplace. “I realized the empowerment of keeping calm and speaking concisely,” she says. “It kept me balanced.” Now, Hemingway says it is easy for her to pick out redundancies in general. “This is why I can’t watch or listen to too much news,” she laughs.
In March of 2020, Hemingway released A Twist of Lemon, 100 Curious Stories in Exactly 100 Words (The Three Tomatoes Book Publishing), a collection of 100 unique stories each with its own reality. Each page tells the story of a distinctive character, their trials, and tribulations, all within a paragraph or two. Many pieces are based on true stories, or at least originate from real-life prompts.
Hemingway takes inspiration from her experiences, and those of others. For example, she might mentally record a conversation she overhears in the grocery store, or she may find inspiration in something she sees or reads. She always travels with a pen and paper when she is out and about. At home, though, she writes with a pencil. “There’s a reason for that. The ideas hit me. The next thing, it goes down from an idea in my head to my heart. And then it finally goes down to my hand, and my hand scribes the words as the story begins to create itself on paper,” she describes. She goes on to say that because a pencil has graphite in it, it “scratches” the page unlike a pen. “To me, that’s like going to the creative canal. I love the pencil.”
While the Drabble form does not require it, Hemingway’s signature writing style is ending her stories with an unexpected twist. She explains how the title of her book reflects the nature of her storytelling: “Every story I write has a twist in it. It starts off one way, and as you go along, then you go, ‘Oh, it’s a surprise!’ You don’t expect the ending after the way it started!” Hemingway has discovered that, “every person, place or thing is a story waiting to be told.” Or more specifically, a drabble waiting to be written.
For more information on Arlene Hemingway, visit her website: www.arleneduanehemingway.com
To purchase a copy of her book, visit your local bookstore, Amazon or www.indiebound.org/indie-store-finder