SmokeLong Quarterly

First, let me say congratulations. I love “the sentence tree.” I’m a huge linguistics nerd, and when I saw your title in our queue, I was intrigued. Did your micro start out with diagramming sentences as part of the narrative structure?

Thank you! Yes, my original idea was to write a one-sentence story and diagram it out as a little hybrid creature. But the sentence got too complex and the diagram ended up obscuring the heart of the story, I think. So, I put away the diagram and started fresh on a blank page. That’s when I discovered I could use parts of speech in the beginning/end of the story as a cipher for grief.

The narrator’s avoidance through parsing out parts of speech not only works towards character development but also to the narrative movement in the story. How did you decide to embed the words being said and thought around that parsing?

I created a lot of sentence diagrams for a linguistics class once and the beauty of breaking down language has always stuck with me. The spark for this story came from remembering how my polyglot baba often made up her own words and phrasing, things that would have been hard to diagram. As a starting point, I imagined the protagonist thinking a very difficult, almost impossible sentence to diagram—all the moments and emotions it would have to contain, the ways the language would cut and collapse and overlap. I later incorporated the parts of speech to heighten the stakes.

I notice that you also write speculative fiction. Have you found that there is a defining line between speculative literary fiction and literary fiction?

I’m drawn to speculative fiction for many of the same reasons as flash fiction: the focus on voice, language, imagination. In fact, often when I start a story, I don’t know its genre—it’s unimportant to my writing process. Ultimately, I’ve always felt the line between speculative and literary is very man-made. In my mind, it all comes from the same deep dark woods of human experience. The speculative stories just happen to come from places where the trees still talk.