The reader is invited to be complicit with the action of this story through the use of first-person-plural point of view and literal invitations, using “Let’s” to begin paragraphs several times, for example. What are the consequences of making your reader an insider in a story?
I’ll tell you what I hope the consequences are—you’ll have to tell me if I stuck the landing:
In erasing the distance between reader and character, I’m hoping readers feel swept along in the real-time mythmaking of the story. I’m hoping they question the narrative, and the idea of narrative. They weren’t actually in that forest in Norway—or were they?
How do we construct stories and how do we get people to believe them?
Lines like “it sounded like we were splitting the earth” and “the bone was fanned into sharp points like a Swiss army knife” made me anxious as I read, a terrific use of sensory context cues to imply themes. How do you see tools like this operating in tiny stories compared to longer works?
Reading any story is an act of submission. I love handing my brain to the writer for the length of a story, for them to fill with whatever they’d like. When I’m writing, I’m looking to make the most of that privileged position. In flash, when I have the reader for this tiny amount of space, I need to use every inch. Descriptions must do double, triple, quadruple duty, telling readers about character, setting, and themes while moving the plot forward or foreshadowing what’s to come. Reading interviews from Shayla Frandsen’s “Grocery Store Mama” and Venita Blackburn’s “Easter Egg Surprise,” you see the intentionality behind every sensory description. Effortful drafting for effortless reading: that’s flash.
In Night of the Living Rez, Morgan Talty uses violence and perceived danger to ground us in setting and tension as you have here, but you pack them into a much smaller container. Can you describe your editing process?
Morgan Talty is incredible, so I appreciate the comparison! My editing process has three steps: Share with trusted readers, wait, read out loud. And repeat.
This first draft came quickly from a Christopher Allen prompt on the symbolism of body parts. (That’s where the title comes from—the resource he shared called antlers “a good sign of future happiness.”) I got edits from my SmokeLong Fitness group, and an especially generous one from Ani King, another 2025 Fellow and a dear friend. I sat on their feedback for a while, then shared a new draft with senior editors. A few months later, editor feedback led to another draft. Before submitting, I read the story out loud and heard images that could be sharpened, transitions improved, resonance played up. I begrudgingly killed my favorite line.
After submitting, editors asked me to adjust some of the paragraph openings. I sent the new draft to a friend, who read it out loud to me so I could hear whether they worked. (Thank you, sweet Cam.) They did.
You jumped into the deep end of flash-length fiction and nonfiction writing relatively recently and saw quick success—congrats! What led you here?
I would love to say that I’m simply excellent at everything I’ve ever tried, but I’ve been working on my writing my whole life. The only reader of my first story (about World War III breaking out between peas and grapes in the crisper drawer) was my nana. In college I studied creative writing and wrote a collection that will never see the light of day. In between jobs that paid well, I did some freelance journalism and essay writing. But writing only what really happened felt limiting. I took fiction up again, but I wasn’t submitting anything. I saw a tweet from the wonderful Elissa Field about SmokeLong and signed up. That was 2023. I was looking for community, learning, and accountability, all of which I found. I’m honored that some of my stories have found their readers, and I hope that continues. But I’d be writing even if it didn’t.
I’d love to know how you capture and organize your story ideas and make time for flash as a busy consultant and project manager. Any tips for managing our projects and writing all the things??
I humbly offer two tools: the Swipe File for capturing ideas, and morning hours for turning them into stories.
The name “Swipe File” is stolen from copywriters, who keep snippets of campaigns they’re impressed by to jump-start new projects. I do that with real life. Right now, mine includes a description of a bad Elvis tattoo I saw on a stranger’s calf, a line from a movie I can’t get out of my head (Los Domingos, about a seventeen-year-old deciding to become a cloistered nun), a screenshot from PostSecret about wearing dog-print flip flops to poop in a neighbor’s yard, and some notes about a mother and daughter washing their feet in water pouring from a broken gutter during a rainstorm in Valencia. Plus, another 400 things. It’s like a pantry stocked for inclement weather. I always have enough in there to make a story from scratch. I just have to show up to the page.
Enter morning hours. I finally figured out a writing routine this year, when I was a [SmokeLong] Fellow and expected to read twenty-plus stories in the queue, write one to three drafts, comment on three to nine peers’ drafts, and submit stories to senior editors each week, on top of my day job. What worked was going to the coffee shop near my house, which runs a breakfast special only until a certain time (thus forcing me out of the house), sitting in a comfy armchair, having horrible burnt coffee and perfect tomato toast, looking through my Swipe File, and writing. I do this three mornings a week. I’m starting to like the coffee.
