Flash Fiction Chronicles

by Michelle Reale

Michelle Reale: I am so pleased to have you as the featured writer! I love your writing, and, as well, love the fact that you are so supportive of other writers, too. You maintain a blog, are the editor of a flash-fiction anthology, happily married, and the mother of three beautiful children AND a new puppy with the sweetest, velvety ears and soulful eyes that I have ever seen. Tell me how you balance writing/creativity with so many other responsibilities.
Nicole Scarpato Monaghan: Thanks, Michelle, for your kind words. I am a lucky girl, for sure, with many blessings. I so deeply love my husband and three children and ah, yes, the puppy, Valentine, her soulful eyes and velvety ears have “puppied” their way deep into my heart in just weeks.

As to the balancing of things, I have not figured that out yet. I often feel that when I’m doing one thing, I should perhaps be doing another. There is too much, always, in both my head and heart. I tend to be stressed and hard on myself internally. I think I somehow come off, both in person and in my online “presence” as together. I’m not. I’d like to think that I prioritize being an excellent mother and wife above all else, but the writing is infinitely important to me, and I’ve made much time for it these last few years, which of course, leaves less time to keep up on everything else. It took many years, but I’ve come to believe that my doing what I love will serve my family in the end. I want my children to value art, regardless of how the world might act as though it’s less important than, say, money or fashion or youth or physical beauty or on and on. I want them to peruse  fearlessly whatever they love. If I weren’t doing that, I couldn’t expect them to. I think every week and day and minute there’s a tiny decision to be made about what one should be focusing on. Balls drop all the time. Every time I write something new and feel good about it, at least I’ve got a smile on my face while I’m on the floor picking up balls.

MR: You are a wonderful flash fiction writer. How did you come to love and write in the form?

NSM:Thank you! What a wonderful compliment. I think a few years back when I was rediscovering my writer-self, I found myself addicted to reading the very short stories in online journals and feeling an appreciation for them as a pure and fearless art form. It was, and maybe still is, a bit of a selfish thing. I belonged to it somehow, felt home, like Ah, people write these raw and aggressive pieces and they resonate with me and, wait, I think I can write them too. I wrote many, many stories in my childhood and throughout my teenage years even, and they tended to be longish ones with endless introductions (“set-ups”) and descriptions and several layers of story throughout the narratives. But these small ones, they’re special. They stick you right where it hurts and leave you concave on the last line.

I still enjoy the whole gamut of forms, such as essays (probably my second favorite), poetry, longer short stories, but I feel the absolute sexiest writing and reading flash. That seems a silly thing to say, but it’s the truth. I like the pull and intimacy of it, how we’re thrust into something unsettling and human, something that needs uncovering right now. I am thrilled by its unflinching focus, the emotional intensity, the words needing to do so much so quickly, the unavoidable vulnerability and nakedness of it. When it gets down to it, that’s why I like it best: I feel hot and sexy writing (and reading) flash. I have no idea what this says about me.

Because the domestic scenes interest me in a very intense and personal way, I am drawn to your pieces that lift the curtain on family dramas. Tell me about your pieces that blast the notion of the happy family—talk about their genesis.

I think that my pieces which deal with uncovering troubled family dynamics are ones where I’m very much “mashing up” a multitude of realities I’ve witnessed or imagined rather than experienced. I was fortunate to have a very happy and secure childhood with loving parents and two older brothers who I adored so the family ones are not on any level autobiographical. As far as blasting the notion of happy families, I think I do actively attempt, with every piece, to reveal some underlying complication, tension, or wound in a character or two, so perhaps I create situations, often family ones, to account for such wounds. Even in the most functional and happiest of families, there are as many disappointments, frustrations, misunderstandings, and tiny hurts as there are days in a year. A good story, in my opinion, will reveal those tiny things.

MR: In your flash piece “New Age” a mother confronts the realities of her pregnant sixteen year old. There is a saying that we write about our preoccupations. Is this true, in this case?

NSM:This piece, which was my first published flash, began with an image that felt to me like it needed to become a story. I was putting away my girls’ (then approximately ages nine and seven) dress-up clothes in a trunk and I imagined a mother, instead, tossing them into the trash. These sentences wrote themselves into my head: “I threw out the bent wand, the mangled pompoms, the sparkly belts. I tossed the beaded purse, like I was taking a free-throw shot, and it went in.” I really liked the language and imagery and wanted to see where it might go story-wise. I think of this piece as a language/image inspired piece rather than a content one. Once I had that image on the page, I was interested in figuring out what grave thing might cause a mother to dispose of her daughter’s dress-up clothes besides just the child having grown out of them. I wrote to the sentence with no idea where I’d end up. The pregnancy surprised me but I liked that the mother had the brave acceptance and the stoic ability to say goodbye to her daughter’s childhood and liked juxtaposing that with the father’s very different reaction

I have had a preoccupation with pregnancy at varying times in my life, having had three of them. I have always felt deep compassion for women who experience teenage pregnancy, infertility, miscarriage, and abortion—all of the emotionally-fraught pregnancy related problems–so I might have had a need to write sympathetically about a character who experiences one of these things, and how it impacts the people who love her. I was also, in the writing, identifying with the mother, imagining the utter pain I might feel if one of my own daughters experienced teenage pregnancy and miscarriage, and how I might attempt to cope.

MR: Your piece “Spell” gets into the head of a young girl in a spelling bee, on the surface a pretty innocuous activity—one would think. The girl internalizes everything around her and the reader gets to see her “process” her world. Take us through the process of writing this story.

“Spell” also came about with a few sentences that wrote themselves: “She spells it: anesthesiologist. A n e s t h e s i o l o g i s t. She doesn’t need the definition, but she thinks of it. Makes one numb.”

The sentences sort of implored me to “story” them. I think I might have caught part of a kids’ movie featuring a spelling bee a few days prior. The more I wrote of that story, the more I realized I wanted this character to be something other than what one might expect her to be. Rather than be a hopeful contestant who perhaps lands second place, she’d be a winner who doesn’t feel satisfied. My parents were very doting and always praised me for my accomplishments, so I never thought of this girl as myself, but reading your question I realize that I have put myself into her. I was the kind of little girl to internalize absolutely everything, feeling everything too deeply, I think, for my own good. It is a very weighty thing to absorb so much. I think I was weighed down by my own perceptions of the world and myself in it. I am portraying myself as very serious and sad. If you hang out with me, I will be more fun than this. I promise. I like to laugh and drink wine. Sometimes I’m funny too.

MR: Your flash fiction is very succinct and often with killer titles and last lines which I am particularly interested in. For instance, your title “What Goes Above Our Heads Sometimes Does Not.” How did the title come about? How important are titles to you?

Thank you! I think titles are infinitely important. I’ve learned quite a bit from Randall Brown in this regard. I’ve long admired his titles, and what he’s said about titles, that they are best not when they’re simply “what the story is about” but rather when they inform it and add something entirely new to it. I definitely attempt to do that with every one of my titles.

With that piece, my grandmother had recently passed away. My kids, who hadn’t been super close to her, were greatly affected by her death, it being the first one they’d ever experienced. I told them we’d release balloons in her honor, feeling that would be a very tangible way for them to express their grief. Immediately when I heard myself say this, my writing voice spoke in my head the first line, a knowing and perhaps cynical young girl’s voice: “We floated balloons to our dead uncle for closure.” I had no idea whatsoever where this one was going but liked all that line implied about the character who would speak it. When I sat down to flesh it out, it became the voice of a girl who had lost a family member and who was perceptive beyond her years. It was my hope to create a situation which would be interesting and intense and complex and sad. I was pleased with the tininess of this piece. I never lost an uncle as a child, my father didn’t have a brother, there was no infidelity in my parents’ marriage, and I don’t have an older (or younger) sister (so wish I did!), but that perceptiveness in the young girl is probably straight from my own memory of childhood. The title came very quickly. I wanted it to both reflect that initial image of the balloons rising up above the family and also give the reader additional information, namely, that something which would typically be assumed not absorbed by a child, even the tiniest of gestures between parents was, in fact, understood.

MR: Your blog is a place I love to hang out at. What is the importance of keeping a blog, to you? You are so open and honest in your postings, and your “voice” is totally devoid of the sarcastic snark that has come to characterize writers’ blogs today.

NSM: Wow, thank you! I find that I like to hang out there too, Michelle, and I feel comfy and very much myself. At times it feels vulnerable to be as honest as I am on the blog. I’m human, so I sometimes want to recoil after putting myself so utterly “out there.” But when I don’t do that, I find the writing stale and uninteresting. It seems the more of myself I risk, the more I am rewarded by readers who enjoy and appreciate that I have said what perhaps they are unable to. I really have come to a place of putting the honesty of the writing over insecurities, privacies, or risk of criticism or not being liked or being whispered about. Let them whisper. I’ll be over here doing my thang, and at age 37, I accept that not everyone will like or “get” me, and that’s ok. The blog’s become very important to me. People poo-poo blogs, but I think they can be a wonderful “home-base” for a writer, a place to come back to again and again. I very much like having all things literary having to do with me in one place there.

MR:Talk about being the editor of your upcoming  collection Stripped-–the premise behind anonymity and gender is an intriguing one!

NSM:Thank you! Your story is an amazing and haunting one, which I’m so grateful to have.

It’s a collection of forty-seven stories by both established and emerging flash writers. Authors’ names won’t be matched to pieces but authors’ bios will be included in the back of the book. The idea is for the reader to read blindly and to wonder about the gender of the author. Solicited authors were asked to either embody the gender roles of the gender opposite their own or embrace their own gender identity in writing previously unpublished stories for the collection. It’s not as simple as women authors writing from the male perspective or vice versa. We’ve mixed things up. One year after publication, authors’ names will be matched to stories on my blog and people will, I hope, say “No way, he (she) wrote that one!”

I believe the stripping away of the authors’ names will have readers engaging in a new way. It’s been a joy and honor to solicit, read, and select for this collection. I am humbled by the talent of the Stripped contributors.
I think we have to remember to rediscover literature again and again in new ways. I really like that his project is a long-term experiment. I hope it will become a testament to the joy of literary wonder. Many professors have already said they’d use it in their MFA in Creative Writing and Literature courses as a jumping point for lively discussion. I like to imagine graduate writing and literature students hunched over with their noses in it, excited and curious and inspired. I think it will be far-reaching and fun. A sexy thrill. And flashy.

MR: Finally, what is in your writing future? What writing goals have you set for yourself?

Because the writing feels to me like breathing, something I do rather naturally and that I sort of “have” to do (to feel alive and good), I don’t necessarily set specific goals in the traditional sense. However, in my heart, writing goals beat and pump. I very much want to have some of my stories collected in a volume and hope, after I’ve submitted the Stripped manuscript to the publisher, to spend time on a manuscript of my own collected work for publication. I’m not prolific, only having been submitting work for a few years now, but I believe there is enough to string together meaningfully. There is a strong desire to see some of the little things I’ve written, sent out and had published together, cohesive, and bound. This is the only thing I know how to do (write) so I want to do it often and see it very tangibly in the world. I admire writers who simply write for their own pleasure and don’t have a need to publish books and see their names on gorgeous covers with their words inside (assuming those writers really exist). I’m not one of them.

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Nicole Scarpato Monaghan is editor of Stripped, a Collection of Anonymous Flash Fiction due out from PS Books in spring, 2012. She has been honored with several writing awards from both the 61st and 62nd Annual Philadelphia Writers’ Conferences for her literary short stories, flash fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry including three first prizes in 2010. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in Bartleby Snopes, Storyglossia, Foundling Review, PANK, Used Furniture Review, and many other venues. Visit her at www.writenic.wordpress.com, where her literary posts have become regular contributions to the Philadelphia Stories Weblog. She lives with her husband, three children, and Redbone Coonhound puppy outside of Philadelphia.

Read Nicole’s stories What Goes on Above Our Heads Sometimes Does Not and Spell.   Hang out at Nicole’s blog!

by Robert P. Kaye

Conventional wisdom attributes artistic achievement to the possession of innate talent, as if Mozart, the Beatles, and Picasso shared some mutant gene enabling them to produce works of a caliber we mortals cannot hope to approach with our own paltry doodling. Believing this takes the pressure off those of us not blessed with native genius. It lets us non-prodigies off the hook.

I’m one of those legions of undergrad English majors who wrote in school, but lost the thread while chasing gainful employment. I continued to scribble fitfully, suspecting I suffered from a talent deficit.

Eventually, I picked up a book on the science behind creativity and discovered that the Beatles were old pros by the time they appeared on Ed Sullivan, honing their skills by playing gigs in Hamburg strip clubs eight hours a day, seven days a week for a month at a time. Mozart’s father, the ultimate showbiz dad, had little Amadeus playing from the time he could sit. Examples of precocious genius are typically revealed to be the result of vast quantities of practice.

Research on creativity, as recapped by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, indicates that it takes roughly 10,000 hours to master a skill. Cello? 10,000. Hockey? 10K. Writing? Go ahead, take a guess. All those without mutant genes are required to pay their dues—and that turns out to be everybody. The conventional wisdom’s idea of “talent” becomes virtually meaningless.

Realizing that ability is a matter of practice somehow puts the goal in reach, or it did for me. But writing three hours a day for ten years, or its equivalent, is a daunting prospect, especially when staring at a blank page probably doesn’t count. Through a series of incremental steps I developed a writing practice that works for me and maybe the basics will be of use to others. Here it is in five not-so-easy pieces.

Make writing a habit. Writing is only possible for me if I don’t have to decide “if” or “when.” This means making it part of a daily routine like brushing my teeth. The first step involved getting up early to journal or write or stare at that blank page. Psychology shows that doing something 21 days in a row tends to cement a habit (again with the numbers). Starting was the hardest part. Thanks to Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones for this.

Things go better with flow. Ten thousand hours better not feel the equivalent of watching paint dry. Flow is the experience of total engagement which causes an hour to feel like ten minutes, according to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the psychologist famous for researching the concept. One technique for achieving flow is bait and switch, starting with a journal entry (for instance) to get rolling then switching to fiction. After some practice, flow becomes second nature, time flies past like nothing and you’re late for work. A side benefit is that flow seems to be a key ingredient in general happiness.

Revise endlessly. I’ve recently had several stories published that have been ‘in work’ for a decade or more, reclaimed repeatedly from my On Hold or Dead Junk subdirectories. Revisions go better with feedback and moral support, so seek out or organize a writing group, preferably with more advanced writers and/or join an online writing community (I recommend Zoetrope). Read work out loud for a different perspective. For me, the most important ingredient in a good revision is time in the drawer, where my subconscious (a much better writer) can do its thing.

Submit work, even when yet another form rejection threatens to drive you to violence. Publishing isn’t everything—maybe they’ll issue your work posthumously and you’ll be famous. Won’t that be fun? Having a story see ink (or electrons) is one of the best legal thrills and there is no better source of motivation. Submit a lot and often— success at publishing has much in common with being a spammer. Sure, rejection hurts, but we’re all the heroes of our own stories, and heroes must suffer. Best of all, submitting means you have to finish something first.

Learn to trust that you will be a better writer tomorrow. Perhaps the greatest thing about the 10,000 hours concept is that YOU IMPROVE. Ability is a continuum, not a destination. This explains why all my old stuff tends to read like crap to me now, but also why I have a shot at working the current crop of stories into something good.

I expect that all the accomplished writers out there will find these things obvious, but I wish I’d known them when I was sixteen or even thirty. Loopholes may exist in the 10,000 hour rule, and if you find one, I would appreciate an immediate email. If not, buckle up, because it’s a long, bumpy ride.

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Robert P. Kaye has published a couple dozen stories and counting (again with the numbers) in magazines like Monkeybicycle, Per Contra, Staccato Fiction, Green Mountains Review, decomP, Cicada, Danse Macabre and elsewhere, with nominations for Pushcart, Best of the Web and Story South prizes. His novel Taking Candy from the Devil, about coffee, Bigfoot and trebuchets, is published online. Links to all appear at www.RobertPKaye.com together with a blog about literature’s bipolar relationship with technology.

by Rumjhum Biswas

Most of us know Oonah V Joslin as the managing editor of Every Day Poets. She also has a straightforward bio somewhere in the Writewords website - Oonah was born in Ballymena, N. Ireland. After 28 years of teaching she returned to her first love – writing. That was 3 years ago. Oonah writes mostly Flash Fiction and Poetry. She is thrice winner of Micro Horror‘s Hallween Competition, Honoree in The Binnacle Poetry Contest 2009, and has work in the print anthologies of several magazines including The Very Best of Every Day Fiction 2008 and 2009, The Shine Journal and Toe Tags. Oonah is Managing Editor at Every Day Poets and a reader for Bewildering Stories. She blogs at http://www.oonahs.blogspot.com and updates links to her latest online work there and on Facebook. A complete list of her published work is available in Facebook Notes and at The Vaults here http://oovj.wordpress.com/.

In reality there is a lot more to Oonah, a glimpse of which can be seen in Parallel Oonahverse. Here, Oonah is at her own pace and space, putting in things that interest her and are a part of her life, including cooking; yes her blog also includes her recipes – scroll under Categories on the left hand bar and you’ll end up in Foodyverse! Finally, when you get to interact with Oonah, apart from poetry, fiction and food, and also her photography, you find an incredibly warm yet refreshingly forthright person. Here in this interview, you get to taste some of that!

Rumjhum Biswas: Can you tell us about your writing process, as in a day in Oonah’s flash writing life?

Oonah V Joslin: When I first started writing Flash it was just for fun and if it wasn’t still fun I wouldn’t be doing it now. I know some people don’t like that attitude but if you don’t enjoy something, don’t do it – life’s too short. I don’t have daily deadlines. I have a weekly challenge that I do in an online forum. Sometimes I do two if I have time or if an idea snaps in my brain. I also have monthly goals that I set myself – a story for MicroHorror for instance. But recently, I find I don’t have the time to search around the Internet looking for places to send stuff. I like to work from a prompt and so mags like tweatthemeat and 5 x 5 Fiction or Doorknobs & Bodypaint really suit me. I tend to send to magazines that like my work because it’s more productive in the long run. I know it’s the line of least resistance too. I also attend a writer’s group in Newcastle whenever I can  – every few weeks on a Thursday. I have taken a lot of inspiration from that and the people there are very helpful but I’m not an easy person to encourage. I tend not to believe praise.

RB:  Flash seems to be clearly your favourite form (right now). What according to you are the advantages and also disadvantages in this form?

OJ: Right now, and probably always as far as prose is concerned. It’s more like a calling for me. Even my novella A Genie in a Jam was written as Flash – 17 separate stories. It developed into a cohesive plot about half way through but that was not my original intention. It began as Flash. It remained Flash until DJ met the love of his life. Then I needed a plot that resolved that situation but luckily I found I’d already inadvertently set it up.

For me the advantages of Flash as a writer are that it gets you writing. Setting out to write a novel would be way too daunting for me. Begin with a Flash and it can take you anywhere. It has taken me farther than I could ever have supposed. I am not one of those who use flash to hone my skills as a novelist. My chief skill was always précis. Writing at length is more difficult for me.

Disadvantages? I suppose it depends on what you want out of writing. It’s difficult to get anyone interested in a single author collection – at least so I’m told. I haven’t actually tried.

For the reader – Flash is ideal for people to read on Kindle, on trains etc or just for those who like to dip into a book. Not everyone likes tomes and pot boilers. And these little stories can stay with you in a very powerful and unique way. “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the popular film – began life as a story written on a Christmas card just for friends. Who knows? Perhaps Hollywood awaits.

RB: You also write poetry and I understand you are working on a novel. How do you pace your writing? Do you switch when the mood strikes or do you follow a system, jotting down ideas to work on after you’re done with whatever form you are working on at that time?

OJ: I chiefly write poetry. I have about seven chapters of that novel done and I haven’t written any more of it for years. I’m too busy with flash and poetry and EDP. Poetry is my first love. A poem (or a series of poems) will always displace all other projects in my mind. I do switch when the mood strikes me. To my shame, I’m a very untidy creature in all my ways. I try to be organised but it just never works. Creativity and mess seem to go together with me. I have a messy mind. Suddenly something comes into my head and away I go, off at a tangent – the Flash I was writing turns into a poem. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it makes a mess. Sometimes it does both. A lot gets abandoned.

RB: Where do you most feel comfortable when you are writing? Do you have a favourite spot? Or a favourite thing or pet you like having around you when you work?

OJ: I just sit at the computer. I need quiet. No music. No distractions. I like a cup of tea beside me but often it goes cold. I get caught up when I’m writing and forget the time. If something’s not working I just go and do some housework or cooking instead or go for a swim or do some editing. I don’t sit there, blank and fretting. That serves no purpose.

(Alas my wee cat died this year but she had a tremendous obit in MicroHorror and so many messages on Face Book that I wondered whether anyone would miss me half so much? Anyway she could’ve told you – don’t mess with mummy when she’s writing!)

RB: What do you do when a great idea strikes you and you are away from your writing place?

OJ: I try to note it down – a line or phrase – Write the one about the rosehips. I’ve been known to get up at 4am to write something down. I have memorised an entire poem in bed too so I’d wake with it in my head. That works sometimes. I take a notepad to the pool so I can jot some idea when I get to the changing rooms. I quite often think of writing when I’m swimming or walking. Sometimes alas, I lose those moments. I think all writers do. Sometimes I lose the entire notepad.

RB: You are a superb cook. How do these two creative activities meld inside your mind? Are you still a writer when you’re in your kitchen and vice versa – as in coming up with a dish idea when you’re writing?

OJ: Superb? That would take discipline and I’d have to follow a recipe. I’m told my food is “top notch” but I have had my share of disasters, fallen cakes and scorched potatoes and I use convenience foods like anyone else – nothing like a tin of beans you know! I’m just as messy in the kitchen as I am in the office and just as irregular of habit. But yes I tend to think poetry/ food/ flash and I’ve combined them – A Genie in a Jam? I do make jam! And when poets Catherine Edmund’s and Amanda Baker came to lunch, we had a bread making session and picked herbs. The kitchen is my comfort zone. Somehow I always end up in the kitchen just as I always end up teaching. If it moves, teach it. If it doesn’t move, cook it.

RB: Who were/are your favourite authors?

OJ: Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke – the three kings  C.S. Lewis, JRR Tolkien.

Michael Bywater, Bill Bryson – these are non-fiction writers. I prefer reading non-fiction. I love biographies and history. I just finished reading a fascinating book on  local history; how my nearest town came into being, it’s history to the present day.

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is my favourite book. I’m never sure how to classify that one. It doesn’t seem like a novel to me.

Jeannette Winterson is a poetic and intelligent writer. I don’t read novels as a rule but if the language is beautiful I can be persuaded.

There are more poets than I could mention but Browning, Hopkins, John Clare, Wilfred Owen, Simon Armitage, Leonard Cohen and if anyone doubts that, read The Book of Mercy, my friend Pippa Little – but you know, I read new poets every day as an editor and some of our poets at EDP are excellent and have become firm favourites of mine already, whose work I look forward to seeing in submissions.

RB: What genre in flash do you enjoy writing most?

OJ: I have written more horror than anything else – 44 stories in MicroHorror alone. I suppose that must speak for itself. But I don’t read horror – too scary! I like cross genre, quirky stuff like “On with the Motley” and “On Angel’s Wings”. Fantasy and Sci-Fi would be my preference both for reading and writing. I have a low threshold for sex or violence. I don’t want to read that stuff.

RB: What according to you makes up a great piece of flash fiction?

OJ: The art of précis. Knowing what to cut out is all important with both Flash and Poetry and it is that above all I think that attracted me to Flash – that it can have the density of poetry. These are short forms and so, like a good sauce, the secret lies in reduction. Last October Gay put up three versions of one of my stories to show how I go about that. I did another example recently on a forum and one person was so good as to say he liked all three but couldn’t decide which was best. I counted that as a very strong evidence of success because it means the shortest version lost nothing in the telling. It was merely distilled.

RB: In your opinion what is the worst thing a flash fiction writer can do and kill the story?

OJ: I confess I have a pet hate. My heart sinks when I see any sentence that is constructed:

Looking out the window, he saw Mrs Smith watering the garden.

Picking up the telephone, she said hello.

This seems to be very prevalent in much contemporary writing and it grates with me every time. Much better:

He looked out the window. Mrs Smith was watering the garden.

She picked up. ‘Hello.’

And, these are shorter too. Short sentences are key rather than convoluted clauses and a lot of gerunds.

RB: You are the managing editor at Every Day Poets and also read for Bewildering Stories. What compelling thing do you look for in a piece, whether poetry or flash, that can make you sit up and say, I want to publish this? How often does such a moment occur in your editing life?

OJ: I like a piece to be beautifully written. I like the subtle use of metaphor, thematic strands, alliterative language, use of rhythm even in prose and rhyme and form as appropriate in poetry. End rhyme can kill a poem stone dead. I like to be transported by the language of a poem but I also like it to be meaningful. If I get to the end and wonder what that was all about it’s no good. Similarly with fiction – it has to grab me and keep me reading.

How often does that happen? Not often but, if there is a grain of beauty, something worthwhile that I see running through a piece, that I think can be enhanced and brought out, then I’m pleased and I usually give the writer a chance to revise. Anyway EDP is a team effort and my opinion, thankfully is not paramount. I think most prose can benefit by being shorter.

RB: What are you cooking up now?

OJ: Surprisingly, I’ve been getting out and about this year. Making appearances. It began last September when I went to Baltimore and met writing pals there. I enjoyed myself. Then I met poet John Stocks and collaborated on a discussion of poetry in Bewildering Stories, (later reprinted in Every Day Poets’ Editor’s View). I did a launch for our Anthology and since then I’ve been performing (reading in my case) at a few venues locally and in Newcastle upon Tyne; Pink Lane Jazz Club in July, Trent House in August and I’ll be at The Cumberland Arms on 28th September. This is a big departure for me. I’d like a medal please. I’ll probably become very medieval and stay home all winter – hibernating to recover from the shock of all this contact with civilisation.

I feel I’ve really neglected my writing this year, though maybe this is just the change I needed. Perhaps I have been too much at my computer over the past several years. I’ve begun work on a series of poems which will take a bit of research. I hope I will get some more Flash published too. I’d really like to get a collection together of either flash or poetry.

At sometime in the future, I’m planning a trip to Minnesota meet my EDP friends in person! I’m sure life is cooking up a few things of its own though. It always has before. I’ll just take that as it comes. I’m happy being me doing what it is I do. Isn’t that a wonderful thing to be able to say. I’m happy. I could wish you all as happy as I am.

Thank you for your kind interest and thank all of you who read what I write.

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Rumjhum Biswas is a writer based in Chennai, India. She blogs at Writers and Writerisms.

by Jim Harrington

Markets Added

• Daily Love (1,000, daily) publishes anything with a love or romance theme
• Smashed Cat Magazine (1,000, weekly) open to all genre, prefers the gritty and weird
• Yesteryear (1,000, weekly) – publishes fantasy
• micrososms ($, 140 characters, weekly) publishes Twitter poetry

Editor Interviews Added

• Linger Fiction ($, 150-1,000, bi-monthly) publishes fantasy, science-fiction, and horror
• Fear and Trembling ($, 900-1,500, monthly) publishes spiritual horror, supernatural thriller, and suspense
• Residential Aliens ($, 900-1,500, monthly) publishes speculative fiction with a spiritual foundation

Markets Deleted

• Rusty Typer – ceased publication

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Jim Harrington discovered flash fiction in 2007, and he’s read, written, studied, and agonized over the form since. His Six Questions For. . . blog provides editors and publishers a place to “tell it like it is.” He’s also the Markets Editor for Flash Fiction Chronicles’ Flash Markets Page. He can be contacted at jpharrin [at] gmail [dot] com.

by Tania Hershman

A few years ago, I was told off by a fellow short story writer  for not carrying a notebook around with me. I had foolishly assumed that when an idea came, if it was “good enough” I would remember it. I was already then at an age where memory was not as sharp as it could be. And there is so much competing for our attention that ideas don’t stand much of a chance of being retained. So I gave in and bought the notebook. And I started making notes as I wandered through life. (By the way, just having this notebook made me feel like a “real” writer, like it was a career and not just a hobby.)

As I started making notes, I began to notice things; things that I think others don’t generally notice. We don’t often, in “normal” life, have time, as the poet W H Davies said, “to stand and stare”, but when you do take the time, there is so much unseen by those rushing by. The way a homeless man nursing a cup of coffee watches other people in the cafe. The bizarre subtitles on the cable news on the flat screen television which bear little relation to English as I know it. The red suede ankle boots worn by the mother clutching the arm of her daughter dressed for her graduation ceremony.

And the more I noticed, the more I saw and the more ideas I wrote down. It was as if in my mind there was a muscle that had been stiff and now it was flexing. . . and flexing. . . and flexing. . .

I am on to my third notebook now, and I’m finding that as well as jotting down observations, overheard snippets of conversation etc…, I am also writing down first lines of new stories and sometimes more. But what I wanted to talk about here was the quality  – and the quantity – of the noticing. Now I actually feel when I am out in the street that I am being bombarded on all sides by inspiration for stories. It is almost a physical sensation, the deluge. So much so that I have even taken to doing something I previously despised: plugging myself into my iPod and listening to music so as not to notice so much. I am filling notebook  #3 much more rapidly than #1 and #2 – the muscle is well and truly limber!

And here’s where short stories and flash fiction come in. They allow us to make use of all these inspirations, to follow through on all these “what if”‘s. If I were writing only longer works, I’d have my one central idea and I perhaps wouldn’t have a use for all of this other inspiration, wouldn’t want the distraction. But because I write short and very short stories, I have somewhere to “put” the deluge, or at least part of it. I often combine – or bash together – two different ideas, to see what happens, so that uses up more. I find it very satisfying, not just making these notes but then actually making them into stories because I think for me that is some form of closure: I am out in the world, the world throws up questions, images, ideas, and my short stories and flash fiction are my way of attempting to answer the questions, understand the images, understand the world.

And of course I have these notebooks to turn to if I ever run out of ideas. Not that I can imagine that happening. As I notice my increased noticing, I wonder how anyone could ever suffer from writer’s block, could ever run out of inspiration. It is everywhere. When you start looking, all you will see – and hear, smell, and taste – are ideas.

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A former science journalist turned fiction writer, Tania Hershman‘s first book, The White Road and Other Stories, (Salt Modern Fiction, 2008), includes many short stories inspired by science articles. The book was commended, 2009 Orange Award for New Writers, and included in New Scientist’s Best Books of 2008. Tania is Grand Prize Winner of the 2009 Binnacle Ultra-Short Contest, and European winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Broadcasting Association’s Short Story competition. Her stories are published or forthcoming in, among others, Smokelong Quarterly, Elimae, the London Magazine, Riptide, BRAND, Dogzplot, Eyeshot, Electric Velocipede and Nature, and a week of her flash fiction was recently broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Tania is currently writer-in-residence in Bristol University’s Science Faculty and has been awarded an Arts Council England grant to work on a collection of biology-inspired short fiction. She blogs about writing at TaniaWrites.

by Walter Giersbach

I’m afraid I kicked a hornet’s nest when I commented skeptically on a recent story in Every Day Fiction. My thrust was that women should be wary of writing from a male point of view, and vice versa. In the broadest sense, I tried to say, most male writers are hardwired to see flash fiction in terms of action, resolve, vindication and searching (to name a few objectives). Women are generally seeking to interpret relationships and write about closure, security, inter-personal associations and contacts.

I invited vituperation from this thesis and engendered a good discussion.

Is there such a thing as “women’s writing,” and what are the distinguishing characteristics? What are the determining factors of gendered textuality — the relation between the placement and meaning of words and the reader’s interpretation?

The deepest question is, Can a man write like a woman, and vice versa?

Historically, some writers have done an acceptable job of cross-gender authorship. Classics were written by Daniel Defoe (Moll Flanders in The Fortunate Mistress), John Cleland (Fanny Hill in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure), Charles Dickens (Esther Summerson in Bleak House) and Samuel Richardson (Pamela).

A second concern asks whether a person can completely identify with the opposite sex. This presupposes the writer thoroughly knows his or her character — motives, culture, environment, desires and fears, etc. — and is further able to project the unique way the opposite sex responds to situations.

The topic is fraught with cultural and political baggage. Feminist criticism in the 1970s emphasized the impossibility of a man imagining women’s experiences. Critics were also fearful of being preëmpted by males trying to portray certain “feminine” emotions and motives in our culture. Their fear was that women would continue to be marginalized in a patriarchal society. (African-American writers were also scornful of white writers attempting to limn the black experience, and arguments still rage over Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.)

For the writer insisting on “passing” as the opposite gender, or at least interpreting a story from that point of view, there are yardsticks to consider first: Purdue University’s syllabus on feminist literary criticism suggests we need to ask how the male and female roles are defined, what constitutes masculinity and femininity, how the characters embody these traits, and so on. Critically, the writer must eliminate any confusion between the author’s voice in the subject matter and subject’s voice.

Interestingly, there is a “Turing test” based on word-frequency usage by female or male writers. Gender Genie doesn’t predict as much as it provides broad indicators. The interactive site (at http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php) uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed to predict the gender of an author. The service allows you to paste text into a block; indicate whether it is fiction, non-fiction or a blog; and submit for immediate analysis.

I’ll be the first to recognize scientific studies aren’t conclusive. However, researchers at the Illinois Institute of Technology found “significant differences between male- and female-authored documents in the use of pronouns and certain types of noun modifiers. Although the total number of nominals used by male and female authors is virtually identical, females use many more pronouns and males use many more noun specifiers. More generally, even in formal writing, female writing exhibits greater usage of features identified by previous researchers as ‘involved’ while male writing exhibits greater usage of features which have been identified as ‘informational.’”

I’m sympathetic to “cross-gender” writing and have written flash from a woman’s POV when I felt the stories were best told by a woman in the third person, but I recognize the challenges of language and action cause complications. I only ask other flash fiction writers to examine these problems carefully before throwing a curve ball to readers.

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Walt Giersbach’s fiction has appeared in Bewildering Stories, Big Pulp, Corner Club Press, Every Day Fiction, Everyday Weirdness, Gumshoe Review, Lunch Hour Stories, Mouth Full of Bullets, Mystery Authors, OG Short Fiction, Northwoods Journal, Paradigm Journal, Pif Magazine, r.kv.r.y,  Short Fiction World, Southern Fried Weirdness, The Short Humour Site, The World of Myth and Written Word. He was 6^th place winner of the 79^th annual Writer’s Digest writing competition in October 2011.  Two volumes of short stories, Cruising the Green of Second Avenue, have been published by Wild Child. He served for three decades as director of communications for Fortune 500 companies, helped publicize the Connecticut Film Festival, managed publicity and programs for Western Connecticut State University’s Haas Library, and moderates a writing group in New Jersey.

This article is based on a previous one published here in Summer 2009. 

It’s summer and toodling through various writing sites this week, I remembered that August kicks off  ”Submission Season,” the time when college literary types head back to school and brace for the mudslide of submissions coming their way.

I’ve been writing for years, but I haven’t always subbed with any consistency.  In the old days of  “No simultaneous submissions,” I’d send a piece to one venue and then wait three to six months before the postman delivered an SASE with my returned story.  Clipped at the top would be a  slip of  paper addressed to “Author”  followed by the cryptic message, “No thank you.  This piece does not suit our current needs.”  Okay.  So.  I’d rewrite the story (I can always find something to fix, change, deepen, scrap) and send it out to the next lit mag on my list.   And wait another six months.

There were so few places to submit and took so long to hear back, it was tough to stick with the writing, to have the sense of progress.  Self-doubt was like a mist I would walk through to get to the typewriter. While writing groups and writer friends can do a great deal to help someone come into his or her own, it is the relationship with the market that produces professional writing.

The submission process is better now.  With the advent of the internet, online literary and genre magazines, email, and submission software, there are fewer trips to Staples for envelopes, less waiting in line at the post office, and even better, a real possibility for dialogue between author and publisher, even if such a relationship consists of nothing more than several submissions and several rejections in a row.  The time between submitting a piece and a “NO” is usually shorter than it used to be and that alone makes learning the craft much easier for new and emerging writers.

A while back, I decided my goal for the year would be to get 100 rejections. Yes. I know. That’s weird, but if I’d called my goal  “To Get Published,” each rejection would mean failure.  While I had limited power over an editor’s choices, no one could stop me from writing and submitting.  So I played a trick on myself.  I changed the language.  By making “rejection” my goal, I could not fail.  The power shifted to me.

Quality was in my power too.  Even if my goal seemed to be negative, what would be the point of writing lousy stories?   I had to make them the best stories I could.   Then if a piece was rejected,  I’d be one story closer to my goal 100.   If it was accepted, I’d open a bottle of champagne.

The goal of 100 rejections forced me to write more often, with more commitment and awareness of what professional writing looks like.  After writing, editing , polishing, and submitting one story, I have learned to write another story and another and another.  This is a good thing.  I don’t have time to sit around to see if the first 5 or 10 places reject me. I have more rejections to apply for!

So I write a new story and send it to 5 or 10 other magazines.   It encourages me to write with purpose and to submit to the best market for each piece.   And the more I write, the better I get.

Maybe I won’t make my 100 rejects per year.  I haven’t yet, but that’s not my goal.  Not really.  The jig is up.  I’m onto myself.

And while getting published is certainly a wonderful result of all that work, it’s not the goal either.  I’ve been published and it’s very cool.  But writing is really about–oh, dear, I’m going to sound like an American Idol contestant–the journey.  What turns out to matter is learning the craft, becoming aware of what works and what doesn’t, acquiring skills, and allowing imagination and passion to find the page, and maybe someday writing something really good.

Here’s to Submission Season!  I hope I get to open a couple of bottles of bubbly this year too.

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To read Gay Degani’s stories online, visit her Words In Place blog.

Editor’s note: This is the first of a series of articles that highlight the experience of publication.

by Estelle Bruno

On a perfectly normal summer day, I got in my car and onto the Long Island Expressway. My friends from my old hometown live approximately 20 miles away, and I was planning on visiting them. Then all hell broke loose. This story is a true-life accounting of what happened to me. I write poetry, stories, and non-fiction that appear in print journals and online. Writing about what happened on that summer day took some of the heat out of that experience, and with the story’s appearance in the New York Times, I had my first publication in a national newspaper.

My car is almost as old as I am. Well, I’m exaggerating just a bit. I really I liked this car, especially since my mechanic told me it’s the best car ever made. It had been 103,000 miles of dependability. It will last a lifetime, so he told me.

About once a month I head west on the Long Island Expressway. I had been very lucky with my dependable friend. But luck runs out.

I was in the center lane at rush hour when suddenly my 103,000 miles of dependability petered out; yep, it died, right in that center lane.

I was in a panic. But I had a piece of luck. Right behind me was a van. Up to that moment, I always cursed the big vans that always seemed to park next to me in parking lots. No more will I curse them. Yes, this lovely big thing not only pushed me and my car out of the center lane, it even maneuvered us all the way across and over onto the shoulder.

So I was on the shoulder — what next? All of a sudden I remembered the cell phone in my glove compartment. Whew! I let out such a sigh of relief. I had nothing to worry about. Don’t I pay AT&T extra for mobile tow? I sure do. I whipped out my life-saving phone, pushed the on button and followed the directions I had glued on the back of the phone when I first got it. A recorded voice came on and asked me to please enter my fraud protection number. That was easy. The recording came on again. This time it told me I was entering the wrong fraud protection number and ask if I would please enter the correct number. Again, I did exactly as I was told. The same stupid recording with the same stupid message telling me the same stupid thing came on again.

From my throat came a noise that sounded like a low scream. I thought about throwing the phone out the window, but then I would have noth­ing, not even that recording, to yell at.

Forty thousand cars rushed by me, but none stopped. I told myself that I had to get a hold of myself. I closed my eyes and tried to think calmly. Who could I call? Or, I should say, how could I call? My kids all live a hundred miles away. My upstairs neighbor told me if I was ever in need to give him a call. But he works and I don’t know where!

Another thought popped into my head. I picked up that little black monster again and dialed 911. it worked. Didn’t need any fraud pro­tection number to reach them. I won­der why? But I was not going to waste time trying to figure that out while I had a live human on the line.

This nice policewoman took down as much information as I could give her—My car has a breakdown, and I’m close to one myself—which wasn’t much since I wasn’t sure exactly where I was. But I wasn’t worried. They will find me, I kept telling myself.

I waited 15 very hot minutes. No police car. I called 911 again. Same woman answered. I told her no one came. She asked if I had my hazard lights on. Oh, oh. That nice man with the big van who pushed me onto the shoulder told me not to put those lights on or I would wear down my battery. I began to rethink my new position on vans. I pushed my hazard-light button. I told myself that everything would be fine.

Two police cars sped past me in that center lane. Either they didn’t see me and my hazard lights or something more interesting was happening up the road.

I figured I’d better give 911 an­other chance. This time I told the nice lady that if somebody didn’t come and get me out of this hot car, I would have a heart attack and die, and I told her that I knew our conversation was being recorded and I told her that if I did die or get murdered 911 would be in big trouble. She disregarded my hysterics and calmly asked me if I wanted an ambulance. “No! No! No!” I yelled. “I want a cool car to sit in while I wait for someone to tow me.”

The realization finally sank in. No one was coming. These police didn’t care if I sat there till next Tuesday. I gave up, physically exhausted. I turned off the phone.

Then my despair turned to anger. I will have revenge, I told myself. I have a relative who’s a detective. I’ll tell him to find this policewoman and give her a ticket every time she gets in her car. Next on my hit list was the mechanic who gave me this baloney about my wonderful car. What can I do to get him, 1 wondered. I couldn’t ‘ figure that out, so I gave up.

So I sat there, absent-mindedly playing with that phone, just pushing buttons at random, doing nothing in particular and occasionally putting it to my ear when suddenly, miracle of miracles, I heard a voice asking me if I needed to make a call. I got so excited I sat up and yelled at this voice, “Don’t you dare press any buttons, don’t lose me or I will track you down and have you fired!”

I made him so nervous he was willing to promise me anything; he even took down my phone number just in case we were disconnected.

I was finally connected with a towing service, but the problem with this brilliant AT&T setup is that this towing-service person I was speaking to is in California and had not the remotest idea where Long Island is, never mind Suffolk County, New York. It took another 20 minutes for him to find another service person who had heard of Long Island.

We traveled the map together, the three of us, till we finally located me.

Estelle’s piece appeared in the New York Times, SUNDAY, JULY 26, 1998

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Estelle Bruno’s stories, poems and humor articles have appeared in Istanbul Literary Review,  THE MOM EGG, Poesia, Re:Verse Poems anthology, Newsday, The New York Times, Long Island Quarterly and other venues. Her mini-memoir “Slices of Life” appeared recently on Pure Slush (Australia). She has read her work at KGB Bar in NYC, The Bowery Poetry Club, Cornelia Street and elsewhere.  Estelle is a member of PEN and mother of three grown children.  She lives in New York.