SmokeLong Quarterly

This piece is only 207 words, but one of the things that makes it effective is the way in which it compresses time so adeptly. There’s a sense of the repetitiveness of Father’s violence and his drinking, the longevity of Mother’s fear and patience, the pattern that the narrators repeat year after year to try to keep themselves safe. How did you think about time as you were writing this piece, and what was your goal?

I read somewhere that in order to make your characters believable, they have to have existed before their page appearance. By compressing time, I was hoping to cue readers to emotionally abusive signs and let the readers make the connection. Weird as it may sound, I also take my developing characters to therapy through The Negative Trait Thesaurus. I realized that my main character, Yoshi, desires to be better than her mom. She’ll grow into an overprotective sister to offset her mother’s failure to protect them.

One of the things that I loved about this was your decision not to define “awamori” in the first sentence, which serves several functions: It establishes the cultural context for the piece and asks readers to do the work of discovering what kind of drink awamori is outside of the text. Can you talk a little bit about why you made this decision? What does it say about your relationship with your work and with your reader?

On one hand, I like to think my intended audience has access to technology. Whether smartphones have distracted or improved the world’s literacy rate is up for debate, but I think I provide adequate context clues for readers who are curious to learn more versus those that want to remain with the characters and scene.

I also noticed some distinctly poetic patterns in this piece, particularly the repetition of particular words—neck, kitten, leaf, face. In such a short piece, a reader might think that this repetition would impede the piece, but in fact this repetition enlivens it because the ways in which the words are used, and often what they represent, changes over time. Was this a conscious decision for you? If so, what were you hoping to achieve here?

I think repetition in micros is wildly fun, like running with scissors labeled “cliché” or “trite.”

At least I think that’s the danger. But used intentionally, repetition opens up for surprises. On its second appearance, the readers associate an iconic autumnal experience with jumping into war, hearing the crunch of the kitten bones. I was hoping the repetition echoed the complexity of loving and being disappointed by family members.

I’m always interested in what other writers are reading.  Is there anyone, especially any flash or micro writers, whose work you especially admire right now? What are the pieces that have made you see this genre anew?

I like to believe microfiction is ever-evolving: the lyrical, the hybrid, the movement or thoughts of a character. Currently pinned on my computer this weekend are K.B. Carle, Melissa Llanes Brownlee, Lucy Zhang.

The pieces that stick with me keep me wondering. I think about a character, wondering if Christopher Allen’s Kerosene Man is still content. I wonder what Kristen Reneau’s speaker would say about every new movie I see. I worry if Eric Scot Tryon’s couple has survived.

Mostly, I want to know if any character I care about ever wins at this game of life.