SmokeLong Quarterly

In your story, “matching plaid chairs, burnt orange couch” is immediately evocative of the 1970s; it doesn’t feel to me that other decades have such an easily identifiable palette. How do you approach scene setting as a fiction writer?

You’re astute! It is the 1970s but I wanted to give just a sense of the era through specific details, which is the beauty of flash—less is often more.

However, while the setting is grounded in the past, the emotion is grounded in the present, an urgent now. I think the setting in opposition to the emotion gives a frisson to this micro.

If you don’t mind sharing, what kind of salesperson is Pop in the story? I always find the backstory of characters interesting, but flash in particular rarely has room for it.

That’s a complicated question! In real life, my Pop was a commission-only sales rep and a substitute teacher in the New York City public schools. When I was ten, he started his own small business. He imported/wholesaled and was his own main sales rep for housewares—pots, pans, tea kettles.

His olive oil can is in the Julia Child exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. It has his company mark on the bottom. I visit it every time we go to that museum.

My upbringing had the highs and lows of a salesman on commission marked on it. I didn’t think in this story I had to go into this detail, just being a salesperson ending a “good” week was enough.

There is both longing and nostalgia in your story. What can you share about your relationship to the past?

It’s complicated, too. In 1967, when I was four-and-a-half, my mother had an aneurysm that left her brain-damaged. She is paraplegic and institutionalized. My Pop ended up raising me and my three younger siblings on his own.

I’m not a sentimental person; I don’t want to go back to the struggle/tumult of my childhood. What I want is a moment with my Pop again. He’s been gone about eleven years, and I can’t slice an onion without thinking of him.

You’ve published widely and in different forms. What speaks to you about flash fiction?

This micro is part of a series that I’m currently writing—that I’ve titled “I Should Have Slept With Them All”—and I am able to tackle longing, wanting, desire in these stories only because the container is tightly bound. I don’t think I would dare to write these if I aimed to write them long. With a micro, I can be fearless. I am aiming to write at least fifty in the series.