SmokeLong Quarterly

Your descriptions are excellent. I particularly like “walls the color of fashionable baby-caca…” For you, what is the key to writing great imagery?

I don’t know that there is a key. At least if there is one, I can’t claim access to it. All I can say is that one keeps writing until blessed by some kind of imagery-mannah from heaven.

“They were doing art.” I love this line. If this couple were literally a work of art, what type of art would they be?

Graffiti!

You have an incredibly strong voice and story-telling ability. When you first started out, however, were there any particular aspects of fiction writing that kicked your butt? How did you overcome them?

Perhaps it is because of a cultural inheritance—a tendency to flamboyance, a purple prose. I guess I kept making mistakes till I got an eye for what worked.

Tell us about the novel that was a finalist in the Faulkner Awards.

It is/was the fifth novel in my novel-writing career—the rest have been trashed. A story about a manufacturer of recreational drugs who had to let go of what was rightfully his before he could enter the ‘gates of paradise’. Anyway, being a finalist meant that I was motivated to visit New Orleans and see my writer friend Pia Ehrhardt; that, and the city—even post-Katrina, was an amazing experience.

While reading through the annual Kathy Fish Fellowship applications, I was struck by the number of writers who were using flash as, to paraphrase, a means to an end. Most people weren’t writing flash because they loved the form, because it took them places other types of fiction didn’t. Instead, they were using it as a gateway into longer works—short stories, short story collections, novels. As a champion of flash, I found this discouraging. Is flash fiction less satisfying, in terms of either writing or reading, than longer works? Or is it that the markets still haven’t accepted flash as a legitimate form? Why do you write flash, and where do you see it taking you?

Flash is a form unto itself! The demands of flash are different to other forms. For me, flash is like undressing in public. It seems to me that a good piece of flash fiction reveals both the writer and the world within which the writer lives together with a certain difficult to define something that is its hallmark. I write flash or micro-fiction because it seems to have a close relationship with meditation. While I am working on a piece, everything else around me dissolves… I don’t think of narrative drive, character arc, relevant detail… I keep searching till the piece seems to arrive.

I don’t see it taking me anywhere. However, in retrospect, it has been one of the ways in which I arrived at a strong bonded writing community. If that is a ‘somewhere’ then it was worth every second