SmokeLong Quarterly

What’s the biggest appeal of writing very short stories for you?

My brilliant professor, Jacinda Townsend, talks about how novels span decades, short stories last weeks, but microfictions are concerned with eternity. I’ve always found myself drawn to this type of timeless conceptual space and how it functions within the gap between poetry and longer prose. There’s something exciting about bending the rules of traditional fiction and poetry conventions.

I know we already interviewed you about “Egg Alien,” but I wanted to talk about it just a little more. One of the things I really admire about this story is how vividly you anchor this story with scenes. You balance setting, mood, and moment so well! When you wrote “Egg Alien,” did you start with the idea of these two people having dinner? Or was it somewhere else?

Thank you! This story actually started as a timed free-write with a friend. I’d been stuck on this idea of “egg aliens” forever and when I put myself under pressure, I was able to let go of that terrible “writerly” need for control and uncover what I was truly invested in. The surreal element was meant to put pressure on the real, to make explicit the ways in which the couple talks past one another.

When I think about your writing, it seems like a theme for you is the way people connect. People are talking on phones and accidentally on purpose hanging up on each other.  In your Word Riot story, a man kills a cow in his desperation to connect with it.   Maybe this is too personal or if I’m totally over-reading, but why do you think this interests you so much?

Oh, yes. I’m utterly obsessed with the ways in which people try and fail to connect with each other. As a painfully awkward kid, I was constantly on the outside looking in, studying “easy” social interactions that felt so fraught and alien to me. Relationships are fascinating because by design they require storytelling. It took me a long time to learn how to construct my public self, and I like to write stories that explore tears in identity, specifically what we do when the things we name and the people we create act outside of our conception of them.

What are some flash stories you’ve recently read and love?

For a long time, Donald Barthelme’s dark, funny surrealism was my flash fiction bible. I’m currently in the middle of two short story collections: Joy Williams’ Visiting Privilege and Aimee Bender’s Girl in the Flammable Skirt. They don’t primarily write microfiction, but I’ve been inspired by the way they condense narrative time and play with magical realism.