SmokeLong Quarterly

There’s a poignant honesty throughout “Things My Father Said On His Last Day” that makes the story read like creative nonfiction. How much, if anything, actually occurred?

My father died at fifty-six in the arms of my twin brother. I was living overseas at the time and barely made it home to Texas in time for the visitation. Much of my work processes the emotions of that week, which range from guilt (bordering on betrayal), grief, regret, and a tremendous amount of second-guessing. This piece imagines my father leaving after old age and in a traditional departure allowing for farewells. It amalgamates things he said, those things he taught us especially when he was not intending to teach. So, in short, the words of my father are real, the people are real; only the scene is not.

The lines in the story have a stark spareness. Was this intentional?

Last year, I became singularly focused on having one of my pieces published by SLQ. It took me twenty-two times to get it right. I practiced compression repeatedly until every word in the story was load-bearing and provided quiet propulsion. At the same time, I was working with nonfiction influenced by the French writer and essayist, Pascal Quignard. Re-reading Quignard gave me the confidence that erudition can carry feeling instead of insulating against it, that repetition can enhance a story’s development, and that silence — the thing not spoken, the note withheld — is a subject rather than an absence. This confluence of influences turned my flash fiction work into these lists of really striking things. “Things My Father Said On His Last Day” was one of five pieces in this genre and it turned out to be the best of them.

Your writing is absolutely gorgeous! So many powerful, poetic images, like “The light in this room is borrowed,” and “My hands have forgotten where they live,” and my absolute favorite, “Outside, the sky thinned itself into pale threads, as if it were unraveling on purpose.” Did you have to work through multiple drafts to arrive at such striking imagery?

First, thank you. That is among the best compliments I can imagine receiving. Yes, scores of drafts. I labored over every word. I had the ideas and the imagery. I had the emotion and the trajectory. Compressing that from sentences to a mere dozen words in each sentence was pure stubbornness.

The story contains instructions the father gives on how he should be remembered. What’s the most important piece of advice he’s trying to impart? Also, what do you think their relationship has been like up to now?

Your first question reaches the exact part of the story that is almost purely autobiographical. My father taught everything that he taught his four boys by not teaching anything, by imparting wisdom precisely when we were not expecting it, not “ready” for it. Everything I am good at in life has my parents’ fingerprints all over it, and I shudder at times to think what else I might have learned had they both not died young – and then I realize that they had already imparted everything that matters.

While I can describe my relationship with my father as close, I imagined the son in the story to have been somewhat estranged from the father, primarily due to distance, but also in his misunderstanding of the wisdom up until that point.

You identify as neurodivergent. How does that affect your writing process and your choice of what to write about?

My autism deeply affects my writing process, regarding both craft and self-appraisal. There were times in the zero-for-twenty-one streak that I convinced myself that it was my neurodivergence that was keeping me from being successful. I had never missed that many times consecutively. In the middle of the run, I concentrated on trying to write more like a neurotypical. The work suffered. This was not the path to success. Since then, when I’m writing fiction, I embrace the way I write: the way I litigate with myself on the page, the way I use empathy to authenticate my characters, the way I string out series of possibilities on the page and then choose the one that works, the way I allow my pattern thinking to do the work that it wants to do in its own voice.

For my nonfiction work, which leans heavily neurodivergent in subject matter, this writing style works in my favor. The evidentiary grappling provides the reader the chance to feel the point being made and make up his or her mind as we go along, not simply to be on the receiving end of something I state as fact. Not surprisingly, there is some etiology here in algebraic mathematics, the drilled requirement to “show your work,” the idea that it is not the answer or the outcome, but sharing how you got there.

What are you working on next? More family-driven flash or would you consider tackling longer-form fiction?

Is it not every writer’s ambition to write a novel? I will not pretend this isn’t true for me. I have two full-length works of fiction that I sit with a lot. The general consensus is that there’s too much pattern-thinking on the page, that the sentences are too full of the conceit of a writer whose mind does not work like those of “normal” readers. This is fair and not ungenerous criticism. I will keep working and figure it out – it is what pattern thinkers do. In the meantime, I’ll stick mostly with my nonfiction work. I have the follow-up to my first book Quiet Brilliance: What Employers Miss about Neurodivergent Talent and How to See It, and am waiting patiently for its chance to see the world. In addition, I have dozens of essays written in what I consider to be my McPhee-Didion-Dillard register that have been gaining a lot of traction and have reached a critical mass that hopefully can become a collection.