A poet visited a writing class I was in thirteen years ago and wrote a concrete poem — not a poem concerned with the shape it formed from its letters, but one literally written in concrete. He mixed it in front of us, poured it into a cheap crinkly metal baking pan, the kind you cook a Thanksgiving turkey in. As the concrete began to set, he told us how he did this to practice his craft, to force himself to write instinctually.

Once the concrete was solid enough to write in but still liquid, he began to inscribe a poem into its surface. He asked us for starting-words, suggestions for conjunctions, and so on. We wrote together, and to tell the truth, what we ended up with wasn’t a great poem. But that wasn’t the point. Writers spend so much time thinking. We analyze things, we arrange, we revise. It’s hard sometimes to write simply, to write the truth and nothing but.

This site is about that. Everything you see here was written in nine minutes or less — nine being an arbitrary number. The point is to force brevity and inspire new thought. The only other real restriction (beyond basic propriety) is that each piece must be at least 100 words long, but otherwise there are no rules on form or topic. The colors of the posts, for now, signify how quickly the posts were written. Red is fastest, blue slowest. (This may change, though. Right now it’s hard to pick a range that produces a pleasing spread of colors.)

This site is for tiny stories (true and untrue), reviews, dreams, letters — but not single sentences, not haikus, not diary-entries, not aimless ponderings, not twitters. What feels right is instinctual.

Anyone may join in, and everyone is welcome to.