In trying to write Culture Shock for this week, I’ve felt like J. Alfred Prufrock: “Then how should I begin ... and how should I presume.” In most respects, I think I’m a bit more realized and less fearful than T.S. Eliot’s cautionary creation, but these lines kept coming back to me as I started to write this, my final column as arts and literature editor.

It seemed like a good idea, a happy confluence of events.

Three minutes. No poems.

Those are the rules at DimeStories—a prose-only open mic trying to gain traction in Albuquerque’s poetry-dominated reading circuit.

The timing bodes well. In recent years, short-form writing like flash fiction, nano-fiction and drabbles (stories composed of exactly 100 words) has taken firm root in our text- and Tweet-obsessed, ADHD world. Flash anthologies abound. Big names like Joyce Carol Oates and Chuck Palahniuk have gotten into the act. NPR hosts a popular Three-Minute Fiction Contest. And the Alibi has its own annual clash of conciseness, the eight-year-old Flash Fiction Contest.