Why do you write flash? What makes it different for you?

I like it for a number of reasons, and I think the big one is it has a lot of rules. It’s not a matter of telling a story in under a thousand words, it has, seems to me, what Yeats called the fascination of the difficult. Creative non-fiction writers employ some flash forms too, and those are really exciting essays to read. The Normal School is full of them: counterpoint, episodic, monomyths, prose-poems.  Flash is close to poetry, and I am attracted to poetry. Poetry is like New York City: you can never know enough. Finally, as a writer who has a full-time day job, flash allows time for obsessive completion of a single work. I am trying to get a sabbatical to work on a novel, but until then, flash fits my time dimensions.

What’s your writerly lifejacket: character or plot?

I think at the draft stage a work can be focused on one or the other, but when a writer sits down at the workbench and puts the screws to it, character and plot have to be coerced to high-five.

Writing style: Quick and messy or slow and precise?

Drafts: quick and messy, no holds barred, delight in disaster, go there, free-wheeling.

Editing: slow and precise, syntax agony, lean on classics, read aloud and workshop sans merci.

What element or part of your “real life” do you think most influences your writing?

My faith and my partner.

If you could recommend a few flash stories or writers, who/what would it be?

Oh boy. I read a lot of flash, I workshop regularly with a gifted crew of flash writers, on top of reading for the Wigleaf Top 50. I think there are some artists that I really enjoy deconstructing to understand. I’ll recommend one writer and one fashion designer.  Brian Evenson writes longer fiction, but he’s a short form genius, too.  Check out his story “Smear” in Best American Science Fiction Fantasy (editor Charles Yu). It was originally published in the Conjunctions “Other Aliens” issue. It’s short and episodic, but also follows a clear narrative arc: exposition, escalation, climax, denouement. Amazing. He also has a story in Best Horror of the Year Vol 9 (ed. Ellen Datlow) called “No Matter Which Way We Turned.” It was an ekphrastic originally written for People Holding. It, too, follows a clear narrative arc. Both of those stories are 10s in my book. A fashion designer whom I find to be a good metaphor for flash is the late Alexander McQueen.  Look at this video called “The Bridegroom Stripped Bare: Transformer.” All the Arts spring from universal forms. All the Arts have straws stuck in the same wellspring and flash shares out refreshing sips.

What story of yours do you wish got more recognition?

That’s easy: each of the fifteen currently “in progress” at Submittable! That aside, I believe work selected by editor Sheldon Lee Compton at his small, remarkable journal called The Airgonaut is some of my strongest. “Puppah Fish,” “Mothers + Sons,” “White Plastic Chair,” and “How to Meet Marc Chagall” are in The Airgonaut’s archives. They are a multiple choice story, a counterpoint, a monomyth, and an episodic, respectively. I am a huge fan of Mr. Compton’s writing, too.