SmokeLong Quarterly

“Undergrowth”: lovely study of the unsaid. A teacher once called that “cloistering the deets,” wherein everything is seen through surrounding events or conditions of character. What is created by cloistering (hard borrow) key information?

I think your teacher got to the heart of one of the best things about flash—both writing it and reading it. The form allows so much room for different people to fill in those intentional blank spaces, which gives it a kind of shapeshifting ability. As readers, we get to assign some of the details and create meanings that are personally relevant, so we’re able to inhabit the story the way we choose, on our own terms.

I think of flash fiction as the naked selfie of writing. Nowhere to hide. Nothing to distract or soften. Is your process in this form a stripping away or a building with exactness?

Oooh, I love this question. When I first tried writing flash, I took a few of my longer stories and chopped them down to fit inside tiny word count parameters. For me, this doesn’t usually wind up being super successful. I have better luck—and more fun—building something I know from the start will be small. I’m also a big fan of repetition and segments and odd forms: sometimes I can see the structure first, and then the story jigsaws into place afterward.

Times are strange, aren’t they? What writing do you find yourself most drawn to in the pandemic/perhaps-post-pandemic days?

In this particular season of my life it seems I can’t stop writing about parents and children, especially all the beautiful and terrible ways our kids leave us. They grow up, they move away, they become full human people you need to learn and relearn forever. The last bit of this micro has echoes of my first SmokeLong story, and it feels really meaningful to me that both pieces get to live side by side in one of my favorite journals.

Recently, I’ve also been writing a lot about space. My kids go through these almost-obsessive phases of interest in random things—world flags, fossils, animal defense mechanisms—and right now they’re dropping solar system facts all over the place, all day long. Sometimes I pick one up and try to wrap it in fiction.