Ma keeps Nabh home again because he’s still fatigued, and she says he has such heavy bags under his eyes he could go for a month-long trip to India. No fever, though. He’s well enough to be bored.
And … he’s going to miss the fire drill today. No big whoop, except Mrs. Reyes always gives free time if her students walk in an orderly fashion and stay together during the drill. Nabh and Kyle planned on making a prank video – gluing quarters to the floor and recording people trying to pick them up. He wonders if Kyle will do the prank by himself and get all the likes.
School is down the street from Nabh’s apartment. He hears the 7:55 bell ring while he’s curled on the couch with Krishna watching Unspeakable on YouTube. Nathan Graham is Nabh’s hero; he barely notices when Ma kisses him goodbye.
After a late breakfast – Nabh’s classmates have already started writing – Ajoba does the dishes and sweeps the floor, moving stiffly, hunched over with age. The skin on his hands is thin, bleeding in a couple of spots from washing. Nabh feels so guilty. Ajoba is old. He’s supposed to sip tea on the balcony, not clean and cook for his nine-year-old grandson.
Then Ajoba smiles at Nabh. “If you can’t go to school, you can at least further your education by reading.” His sparkling eyes are deep-set, surrounded by brown, wrinkly skin that drapes around them like the dhoti he wears when he does his asana.
Nabh needs no convincing. Ajoba clips a leash on Krishna, and they slowly walk to the library: an old man, a sick boy, and a rescue dog who marks his spot every few steps.
They push through the library doors at ten o’clock. His classmates are doing reading now, just like Nabh’s about to. Cosmic Symmetry, Ma would call it. Krishna pulls Ajoba to the front desk, where the librarian keeps a jar of Milk-Bones. Nabh disappears in the stacks.
After checking out their books, Ajoba suggests they read in the park. It’s a warm morning, sun glowing, dew on the green grass long evaporated. A couple of minutes in, and Ajoba is snoring, drool glistening in the corner of his mouth, book rising and falling on his chest. Krishna’s on his back, tongue lolling out, eyes rolled up so only the whites show.
“Ew.” Nabh giggles.
An empty school bus stops at the intersection before turning right toward school, two blocks away. The hiss of the airbrakes reminds Nabh of steam pushing out of Ajoba’s teakettle. He turns the page of his Percy Jackson book, startling when Ajoba starts talking in a sleep-husky voice.
“The shapes you see in clouds are possessions people leave behind when they die.” His eyes are opaque and inscrutable as he stares at the sky. “Ghosts of possessions.” Nabh puts his book down and inspects the sparse clouds. A rabbit, ears raised high. A leaping dolphin. An orange tree. No possessions.
“Not every shape, of course. But some.” Ajoba holds out a little packet of dried amla.
Nabh chews on the tart, salted gooseberries while he decides if Ajoba is teasing. This is, after all, the man who smashed a spider with a frying pan last night and pretended to cook it for Nabh’s dinner, both of them laughing so hard they couldn’t breathe while Ma threw her hands in the air, a smile breaking through the exhaustion on her face.
The bell rings for the end of morning kindergarten, and Nabh imagines the little kids climbing the steps of the awaiting bus, small hands grasping the handlebars to help hoist them up. The day is going by so much more quickly than it does when he’s actually in school. Pretty soon, the bell will ring for the upper grades to have lunch.
“Lunch,” growls Nabh’s stomach. He’s definitely feeling better because he’s really hungry for the first time in days. And he gets to eat sweets because he’s sick! Maybe today he can get a chocolate milkshake from Bomb Burger.
Before Nabh can ask, Ajoba clears his throat. “When my ma expired from breast cancer, I was a little older than you. Her bed was by the window, and I saw in the clouds her bangles, my lattu spinning as if it were on the table, a heart.”
Now Nabh thinks he also sees a heart, but it breaks in two, the pieces separating, elongating until they’re nothing more than wisps of clouds. A tear falls from Ajoba’s eyes and runs down his temple. Definitely not teasing.
Nabh feels something clench deep inside. He’s never seen Ajoba cry. If Ma died, what would Nabh see in the sky?
That clench gets heavy, a pressure in his chest, and he gasps. Krishna rolls over, his furry face inches from Nabh’s, concern in his eyes.
“It’s okay, beta.” Ajoba chuckles. “An old man looks backward while a young man looks forward.”
Nabh doesn’t understand what Ajoba means, but he’s relieved to hear Ajoba laugh. They watch the clouds for a while, calling out different shapes. Like Snoopy, Ajoba sees elaborate images, the Mahabharata War, and the Taj Mahal. Nabh is more like Charlie Brown. A horsey and a ducky.
An alarm goes off in the distance. The fire drill. In a few minutes, Kyle will probably be supergluing quarters to the ground. But suddenly, over the alarm, pop pop pop, like stepping on sheets of bubble wrap. At first, Nabh thinks it’s Kyle, doing a different prank. But the alarm and the popping feel wrong somehow. Something is wrong.
Nabh’s heart is pounding hard. He and Ajoba sit up. Just as they look toward the school, the sky over it erupts with bursts of clouds: a basketball, a flip-flop, a coffee mug, Legos, a recorder, an open book, a jump rope, a hula hoop, a lipstick, a tie, a pair of Nikes. And, over the alarm and bubble wrap, sirens screaming louder and louder.
Albert Abdul-Barr Wang conducted this conversational interview via email during June and July of 2025. Allison Field Bell was kind enough to discuss her multiple practices in writing and photography, just as Finishing Line Press released her latest chapbook, Without Woman or Body, on June 20, 2025.
ALBERT ABDUL-BARR WANG: Hello there, Allie. Nice to meet you, and glad that we are able to talk with each other. I remember when we met first in Professor Laurel Caryn’s alternative photography course at the University of Utah. That was quite the adventure back then. So what drew you as an author and creative writing Ph.D. candidate towards photography? How do you contextualize your photographic and visual art practice within your writing practice?
ALLISON FIELD BELL: Photography was actually my first creative love. In high school, I was very focused on science and math—all set to excel in some STEM field. And then I took a film/darkroom photography class, and well, it was kind of epiphanic for me. Maybe not at the time (I was still committed to being a marine biologist in high school), but looking back, I really fell deep into the well of creating. I was specifically compelled by the role my body played in the creation process. I know it’s terrible, but I loved plucking an image from the developing tray with my bare hands.
I attempted to study photography in college, too, but I was interested in documentary photography and photojournalism. And a professor of mine reluctantly admitted that to do that, I needed to embrace digital image-making. I was not interested in staring at a screen in order to create (ironic, considering this is precisely what writing entails for me these days). So anyway, as an undergraduate, I kept finding myself in writing classes. Not with any clear desire to “be a writer.” But I wanted to create. So, I see photography and writing as very similar impulses for me. And I consider my photographic practice a kind of gateway to creative writing.
AABW: As a fellow photographer and visual artist, I have similar inclinations as you do. In fact, in an overview of your published works through various literary magazines from Flash Frog to The Cincinnati Review, your writing encompasses a gamut of forms ranging from flash fiction to essays to poetry. What drives you towards each particular approach? Recently, flash fiction has been a primary focus. How did you engage with that genre within your writing practice? How would you define your approach and philosophy of flash writing?
AFB: I think genre for me has always consisted of rather porous boundaries. I have certain rules that I adhere to for nonfiction—specifically, a clear allegiance to the truth—but beyond that, I am pretty flexible. I often write through the same event in different genres, trying to find the best way to do it. And also because I believe strongly that we write our obsessions and that the impulse to follow an obsession until it exhausts itself is exactly the right impulse.
With regard to flash, I really started a consistent practice of writing these smaller pieces as a way to balance out my novel-writing. Though, really, it’s unfair to call them small, as they often contain whole huge worlds. Still, though, I feel like, for me, fewer words to complete a draft of something is different work. And maybe that’s just my writing sensibility. But I do think writing a novel is long and arduous and incredibly emotionally demanding, and so I sought out relief from that. Flash feels lighter. Like I can play on the page, and if something fails, well, likely I didn’t spend ten years writing it (which is how long it took me to write my first novel).
I also can’t not mention SmokeLong Quarterly here. I owe so much of my flash knowledge and inspiration to Christopher, Helen, and everyone at SmokeLong and in the workshop community. I write most of my flash these days from specific prompts, and I get so much excellent feedback from SmokeLong Workshops. It’s not just about feedback, though; the SmokeLong community is also incredibly supportive and kind. I feel driven to keep writing flash partially because I so value being part of that community. So often, writing can be isolating, but I think it’s actually really importantly collaborative. I’ve also found other workshops to, at times, be unproductively competitive. This has never been the case in a SmokeLong workshop. I actually call these flash writers my SmokeLong family, and that feels really right and true.
AABW: That’s very true indeed. Balancing the time alone with time spent with others in the literary community can be challenging. Also, what books and artists have you been reading or looking at recently?
AFB: Well, to be honest, I’ve been on a narrative hiatus for a bit. I just finished my PhD qualifying exams, and the experience kind of ruined reading for me for a minute. I’m slowly getting back into a groove, though. I just read through a lot of Mary Gaitskill’s work in preparation for an interview with her. And I’m once again enchanted by her as I was as an undergraduate. Her writing is so candid, so without artifice, and yet there’s so much depth and complexity. She writes the kind of stories that really linger.
AABW: Now I would like to steer our conversation into another direction, which I deem imperative. As the political climate within the United States becomes more oppressive during the post-truth and Trumpian eras through the rollback of female rights, such as the revoked access to abortions, as well as the demonization and detention of immigrants within the public sphere, do you see your writing as a response to our milieu? If so, how do you combine your writing observations of incidents based within your personal life within the greater context of the sociopolitical conditions that are ongoing today?
AFB: Such good questions, and the kinds of things that I have been thinking through for a long time now. I don’t know if I have a great answer. I do feel called to write, but I don’t think there’s much power in that. I think, in fact, any time I feel powerful in creating art, I have to immediately stop and remind myself of the truer experience of art-making, which is really, for me, centered around vulnerability. Vulnerability is also powerful, but not in the way that we imagine. Often, the feeling is like walking around too open to the external world, so willing to take in and absorb what exists beyond the self. To be influenced by what surrounds us. This is what I believe writers can offer. In many ways, we are more like sponges than mirrors.
This inevitably results in a greater context of sociopolitical conditions, but it’s so important not to have an agenda about that. Sometimes I want to write about a lost love, not because I’m interested in interrogating the patriarchal parameters that defined our relationship (I am interested in that, of course), but because my heart hurts. I guess that sounds like writing can equal catharsis, and it can sometimes. But I also often feel like writing is somewhat painful too. A pleasurable and yes, important, kind of pain.
AABW: Like you, I have lived in both Utah and California, where I am located currently. So, as a Californian transplant in the heart of Utah/Salt Lake City, how do you see your works as inspired and/or reflective and/or critical of the Western landscape and its concomitant cultures, such as the cowboy/Wild West tropes or Mormonism? What do you think are the key facets that you like to explore? Have your experiences in California impacted the way you view your current life in Utah?
AFB: I am very much a creature of the western US landscape, yes. I have spent most of my adult life in the Southwest or the Mountain West, and my whole childhood in Northern California. This inevitably influences my writing and my thinking about myself as an artist. My relationship to water is a huge part of that. Water is kind of the great miracle we always fail to fully appreciate.
As far as Western culture goes, I’d say that so much of my way of being in the world has to do with an awareness of landscape. And wild places. Animals and plants. I find myself increasingly aware and curious of shifting plant life, of the saturation of green living things against a backdrop that is often seemingly stark and unforgiving. I love the desert and the ocean equally. Mountains and snowmelt rivers, and the glorious coast of northern California. All of this land and water is forever a part of my body and thus my work as well.
I suppose one Western theme I am overwhelmingly complicit in is car culture. I hate what cars have done to our environment, and simultaneously, I love the freedom of movement a car affords in the West. In high school, I drove myself to the Pacific at least three times a week. I think it is the thing that allowed me to survive high school, actually. The drive out to the beach. The salt air and the wet sand. The sea curling and cresting against my angsty teenage body.
I’m always influenced by the places I live. Whether that’s the Middle East or Greece, California or Salt Lake City. For the most part, I find it easier to write about these places when I’m not actually living in them. I guess this speaks to the question about Salt Lake City: I’m not sure I’ll quite know what I want to say about living in Utah until I’ve moved away. I feel like I carry geographies with me. Place really shapes the way I see the world, and I’m happy to let it.
AABW: That’s so true indeed. Geography often does weigh upon us in such a meaningful way. So do you see your literary oeuvre as being feminist in any sense of the word? If so, how would you define your own take on feminism? How do you incorporate the framework of the female body within your writings? A solid example would be your recent piece “I take off my clothes for him” in the May 1, 2025, issue of Milk Candy Review. How do you look at desire and its ethical ramifications (or not) within the context of the female body?
AFB: I identify as a feminist, yes. As a feminist writer, well, that feels more complicated. I’m positive I don’t want to ever let my feminism guide my impulse to tell a good and true story—I feel that then we get into writing with a political agenda. I do have a political agenda, in my teaching especially, but I try to leave that behind in my creative endeavors. Mostly because, just like an outline, a political agenda tends to overdetermine a work, and I want to trust my intuition to make narrative choices, not my intellect.
Feminism for me is inherently intersectional. As a first-year college student at UC Santa Cruz, I took an Intro to Feminisms class with Bettina Aptheker, and it changed my life. Feminism is about social justice and environmental justice. It’s about equity. And yes, for me, it is deeply grounded in the body. My own experience of feminism has to do with my specific female body and how it moves me through the world.
Desire is slippery. I like thinking about it intellectually, but I don’t think that actually does much to reveal all its complications. Desire is really a wordless, embodied thing, but still, I love to try to articulate my own desire through words. An oxymoronic compulsion, I suppose.
I think the piece “I take off my clothes for him” is a great example of the dynamism of desire. For me, this piece works because of refrain and language. By itself, the story is quite simple and maybe not even that interesting: a young woman sneaks into a hotel hot tub to skinny dip with the twin of a man she dated, and later the two of them sleep together. The refrain does an odd thing where it both accumulates meaning and loses meaning. Much like desire, it slips into a kind of liminal space where it merges the senses (both sight and sound through rhythm), and in a way, therefore, the phrase forces itself into the body.
AABW: Now let’s turn to a close reading of some of your work, which is so compelling in a remarkable way. One of your quotes mentions that “[let] the language of your flash lead you to its content…. Read your flash out loud as you write it, and let it unfold through your body…” How do you see an oral reading of the words you put down relate to the visual aspect of those words on either paper or their digital counterpart? Do you view yourself as a type of modern-day bard similar to ancient epic poets such as Homer or Virgil? In what sense do you see your relationship with the oral tradition of writing as a method of preserving knowledge from one generation to the next, if that is your intention?
AFB: I would say that for me, the reading-aloud component of my writing process has less to do with oral traditions and more to do with needing to absorb what I write through multiple senses, as I mentioned above. I recently made a new dear friend (who is writing an incredible novel right now), and we talked about how we write more with our bodies than our brains. I think this is what I mean here—that the body is a key component of the writing process. Maybe revision is a good activity for the brain. I’m not sure. But I know that writing itself is very much of the body, which is strange because as I write, I often forget I even have a body. I’ll have a leg cramp for half an hour and not notice. It’s contradictory but true.
As for the oral tradition of storytelling, I’m trying very hard to be the kind of writer who is comfortable sharing my work aloud with others. I get terrible stage fright, and I’m often incredibly critical of myself—my words, my facial expressions as I read, etc. I actually have a lot of social anxiety, despite being an extrovert. I have worked really hard to be comfortable in social settings. The point is, I’ve been forcing myself to read more in public settings, to really embrace sharing my work aloud. It’s not an easy process for me.
More importantly, I think my storytelling instincts very much come from an oral tradition. My maternal grandmother—a woman I never met who died in her forties from breast cancer—was a great storyteller. My mother carried on her tradition and passed along her stories to me. I think this is how I became fascinated with narrative. I remember my mother, too, telling ghost stories around a campfire and that thrill of snuggling into my sleeping bag afterward, reliving her words in my head.
I guess this does relate to preserving knowledge. I do sometimes think of what legacy I might leave my niece and nephews as someone who may not have her own children. I feel like maybe what I can leave behind are stories. Other times, when I’m feeling more cynical, I wonder how much any of that even matters. Will books even matter in twenty, forty years? I try to avoid this way of thinking because it doesn’t lead anywhere.
I do think the important part of oral storytelling is community. There is a relationship between the teller and the listener. This is something I very much value and think about as I read or even tell a casual story. I consider how it’s being received. Lately, I have wanted to hear people laugh. It’s so important right now to preserve laughter, to relish in our ability to laugh.
Simultaneously, I know that this part of my brain—the one that thinks about the audience—has to be completely silent as I write. I cannot think for a second about how my work might be received as I create it. That results in paralysis.
AABW: Indeed, I can see the paradoxical nature of being a writer as caught between a wall of despair and inspiration at times. In addition, the act of writing, as I attest, is never executed within a vacuum and is part of a larger framework of the writer’s personal and public life. What hobbies do you have at the moment? Do you see your writing and photography as complementary to your endeavors?
AFB: I love this idea, and it’s something I tell my students constantly: expand your definition of what “writing” includes. Sometimes writing is going for a walk in the woods. Sometimes it’s taking a bath with a cup of tea. Sometimes it’s eating a good meal with a dear friend.
I imagine this is true for photography too, though I’ve been a bit tapped out of that world for some time (those damn PhD exams again). It’s so important to just live and not worry about capturing something on the page or with a camera. The older I get, the more I trust myself to absorb what I need to absorb in any given moment. Otherwise—if you’re constantly thinking about how to shape something—you can’t really be present. And I’m quite interested in being present.
As for hobbies, one recent activity I have embarked on is actually rock climbing. Mostly in a gym, as I am still a baby climber, and I find outside climbing as terrifying as it is exhilarating. My partner is a really spectacular climber, and he’s inspired me to try. I’m 38, and I never imagined I’d be trying some brand-new intense physical activity at this point in my life. But that’s like writing, too, I think: it’s important to be open to the world, to try new things, to fail at them. This is all to say that I am not a very good rock climber. I am not a natural by any stretch of the imagination, but I love the challenge. It feels like writing: the way you have to be in your body, and no matter how much technique you learn, you can’t really be thinking as you do it. You have to let all the technique and brain power exist in the background and trust that it will surface intuitively when needed. This is certainly not translating to my climbing efforts right now, but I do see that happening in my writing.
AABW: Just as tragically, lately, the rate of reading books within the United States has been pretty low. Do you see the rise of popularity of flash fiction and flash essays as a response to the decreased leisure time in the life of the average American/worker? How do you distill the complexity of information and images into an extremely succinct series of sentences and phrases? Do you view the idea of flash writing as a critique of the capitalist notion of time, which is rooted in the increased attachment of the worker to labor that is not involved in reflection or personal reading?
AFB: I think you bring up a good point here, but I’m so resistant to seeing flash as a response to, well, essentially short attention spans. I’m sure there’s some truth there, but I also understand flash to be a form that has existed for centuries across cultures. And oral storytelling in the most informal sense could also be considered flash. Still, your point remains: there seems to be an increased interest in flash narratives across contemporary publishing.
For me, flash is less a reader-inspired form and more a writer’s response to the fractured world we’re faced with. I love the journal Fractured Lit for many reasons (the editor Tommy Dean is an incredible literary citizen who has always been such a generous champion of my work). But the title of the journal is so perfect. I don’t necessarily see flash as these distilled, succinct collections of words, but rather as a kind of fracturing of some wholeness. We can call that wholeness the human experience, but it’s always more specific than that.
For me, for example, I have written many flash—fiction and nonfiction—that speak to my experience of domestic violence, both emotional and physical abuse. Two examples are: “No Promises,” published in Chestnut Review, and “Carve,” originally published in The Bridport Prize Anthology 2023 and then reprinted in Best Small Fictions 2024. Maybe it’s this particular subject matter that dictates the form? Although I do have a longer braided essay that speaks to this experience as well (“The Body, The Onion: A Balagan” published by Shenandoah).
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t know about flash as a critique of capitalism, though I love anything that serves to critique a system that is so inherently unjust. I know that for me and my understanding of selfhood, flash makes sense as one avenue through which I can feel my way through the fracturedness that has resulted from experience. I guess it’s partially cathartic for me, but also—if I zoom out and put on my literary critique cap—it’s important for the reader as well. Domestic violence is one obvious example of a common experience that is also so hyper-specific. This makes it important to share, I think. Relatable to a reader. A story that can maybe help a reader process her own experience.
But again, that’s not really why I write any given form. I feel compelled to write flash, and as much as I may try to analyze it, I also believe in leaving a little mystery, in following the impulse, in my intuition.
AABW: I really relate to your intellectual and emotional connection to the genre of flash fiction, which is pretty hard to master effectively. What do you see as your methodology of writing? Do you see yourself as performing research or taking notes as the basis for your words and speech? How do you translate your own personal incidents into the narratives that you select to develop further into your concepts? Do you see your photography as the basis for exploring ideas for future pieces? Finally, would you like to mention anything else for our readers before we head out?
AFB: To add on to what I’ve already said about my writing process, I’d say that, for me, all writing is deeply personal. Which is not to say that I only write about myself. But it’s not to not say that either. Maybe I’m a total narcissist. Maybe a person kind of has to be to be an artist? I don’t know, and I don’t want to make any broad claims like that. What I want to say is that, even in my most fictional character, there is still some elemental piece to them that is me. A place to locate myself and my understanding of the world. It may be an emotional core or an intellectual one, but it’s certainly there.
I know the term autofiction is controversial and even potentially unnecessary, but I love it because I think it makes me understand narrative as a spectrum. Maybe nonfiction is on one side and fiction is on the other. And while at any given moment in a story you could be closer to one side or the other, every narrative exists on that ever-shifting continuum.
I often advise my students to take breaks from academia because part of me does believe that life experiences are important. I don’t think you need some dramatic trauma to be a good writer, but I do think that moving around the world and seeing different geographies and perspectives is helpful not just to write through diverse experiences but also to understand your own beingness.
***
Albert Abdul-Barr Wang is an indigenous Taiwanese-American, Los Angeles-based experimental writer, conceptual painter, photographer, sculptor, video, and installation artist. He received an MFA in studio art from the ArtCenter College of Design (2025), a BFA in Photography & Digital Imaging at the University of Utah (2023), and a BA in Creative Writing/English Literature at Vanderbilt University (1997).
Allison Field Bell is a multi-genre writer from California. She is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and English Literature at the University of Utah, and she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New Mexico State University. Her debut poetry collection, All That Blue, is forthcoming in March 2026 from Finishing Line Press, and her flash fiction chapbook, Stitch, is forthcoming in the summer of 2026 from Chestnut Review Books. She is also the author of two other chapbooks now available: Edge of the Sea (nonfiction, Cutbank Books) and Without Woman or Body (poetry, Finishing Line Press). Find her at allisonfieldbell.com
Her friend phones to say she’s arrived safely at her elder sister’s apartment, which, unlike her younger sister’s, is far enough from Tehran. The bombs drop somewhere between “safely” and “far”, she laughs and says, “Wherever we go, they follow!”
True Story (3)
He heard an ambulance and thought it was the end of the world, “as one does when hearing a siren.” It turned out, his coworkers were throwing a surprise birthday party in the courtyard, which his office overlooks, and the siren, “get this”, was just a balloon. What he finds amusing is his colleagues’ reactions to his face: “I don’t know what I looked like, but their faces were a scene!” He cries and laughs every time he tells this story when someone asks about the 12-day war in Iran after they ask his name.
True Story (4) She knows she should leave her home, that it is no longer safe. Her friend has a villa north of Iran, which has been spared from the bombs so far. She won’t be alone; her sister will come too. But her cats are here, her piano, and the bed, oh, it looks so comfy. Maybe after she takes a nap.
True Story (5)
She has to remind herself that children died in this war, prisoners were executed without trial, and innocents were imprisoned for noncrimes such as not wearing hijab, to let go of the thought of her recently deceased father’s shirts, which she forgot to pack and bring with her to the shelter.
True Story (6) She could be from the United States. At this point, she has lived here longer than she has at her country of origin, has celebrated more Christmases than Nowrouzes, and on Trivia Nights, she gets more points on questions about the U.S. than Iran. Since adolescence, her diary has been in English, and apart from the phone calls between her and her mother, which are in Farsi, she speaks every moment in English. Her dreams are either in English or without language. When the war begins, and her daily phone calls to her mother stop, she starts thinking in her native tongue, sometimes writing broken Ghazals, or following her mother’s recipe in preparing Sholeh Zard. She realizes, the language of her grief has remained Farsi.
True Story (7)
On day one, when the internet connection fails almost entirely in their country, the mother and daughter survive the distance by texting through the only application that works. The internet connection is too slow for exchanging any voice mails or images, so they rely on the poetry they can muster to describe a flower or a bird spotted, to keep up each other’s spirits. Day two, through her cousin, who is among the very few people who, at random hours, have access to the internet, the daughter sends her mother the code for buying an international call. On day three, when the cousin no longer has access to the internet, the mother asks the daughter’s friend to give her a direct call and let her know that, though she paid for the plan, it doesn’t work. Neither of them knows how the friend’s call goes through, but the daughter learns, in that minute-long conversation, that her mother is ok. Though it is awkward, every time they reassure each other, through other people, that they are fine and that they love each other. Nine days pass in silence or asynchronous texting. On the tenth day, all failed messages go through at once. They repeat the same stories they have texted and already know. Day after day, they can’t help but call each other as they did before and end every call with “I love you.”
True Story (8)
She’s never had nightmares until recently, and all of them are about war. When she wakes up, she is happy that it was only a dream, then the dream fog goes away, and for the rest of the night, she soothes herself by reading the news, thinking all things must end, even war news, so she keeps refreshing the page.
True story (9)
In an article about the psychological toll of the twelve-day war on Iranians, she learns about psychosomatic pain, which explains why, for a week, she’s been in bed with symptoms of sinusitis in a heat wave with no AC, but it does not explain the thing about her feet. Every night when she goes to bed, only one step away from falling asleep, her feet start moving. It isn’t painful. Though it is annoying, there is something jolly about the movement. She has heard about phantom pain, which is what one feels still in the absence of a body part, as though grieving the loss. Her diagnosis, she decides, like herself, is an in between; related to loss but not of something she owned.
True Story (10)
It was a habit of the mother to buy something for her daughter every time they went on their yearly family trip outside the country, to give her when she’s married. Even though the daughter objects, the mother says she simply wants to gift her something the way her own mother did, “tradition,” says the mother, “a polished word for dowry,” says the daughter. During the war, from her shelter, the mother thinks about the last family trip, two years ago, where she met her daughter in a third-party country. She thinks about her daughter, who tomorrow will have lived outside the country for five years, still without a green card or a permit to leave. She also thinks about the collected souvenirs that are gathering dust.
It was the year we went to Iceland. Not everyone, mind you. A few were happy with what was going on at home. Who needed a passport when you could have a gun?
We went to Iceland because it was ice and fire, and we felt like both. It was cheap and closer than anyone knew. You were allowed a lunch and the clothes on your back. We liked the simplicity. It felt like possibility.
We wore heavy boots on the plane. We stored extra underwear in the pockets of our rain jacket, and we used our rain jacket as a pillow. We arrived at 4 A.M., but it was not dark, not really.
The pictures were amazing. We all liked the pictures. The pictures made those of us who had not gone to Iceland, want to go to Iceland. Our home, after all, was not what it used to be.
We saw the lights. We saw the last glaciers. We learned to pronounce, for an afternoon, the name of a volcano. We soaked in blue water and smeared mud on our cheeks and paid terrifically for beer. We pulled over for a picture and waded into a field of lupine. The birds sang all night.
It was the year we got shot and shot and shot. Not everyone, mind you.
We learned about the sagas, how Iceland exists because it fought savagely to preserve its literature. We ate rancid shark. We toured the world’s first parliament. Many places, we observed, were named björk. We got meticulous about umlauts.
We took over Iceland and remade it in our image. Parents and children arrived. It felt safe there. Safe!
The adults in cities got shot around the same time as the adults in the suburbs and rural areas. The elderly were next. They were shot slowly and efficiently. The babies were shot all at once.
They’d gotten everyone by now. Everyone they were afraid of, anyway. Anyone not like them.
Soon we encountered people we knew in Iceland. The old roommate at a gas station. An ex-boss at a geyser. Evidence of a larger organizing force, if you were so inclined. We were inclined to different degrees.
The last of us went to Iceland. We’d been meaning to go, and prices were still low. We took the same pictures we always took. Iceland had become more like Disney than anything resembling risk, but unreliable access to gas stations and alcohol outside the capital let us feel powerless enough. We could still, thank god, get lost.
Some women became pregnant with guns and were forced to give birth. Each gun was baptized and given a Christian name.
Iceland grew saturated. We contemplated simply taking it for our own, but we all had the pictures already. There was no need.
We were all shot a second and third time. We were told that we had never been more free. Bullets accumulated inside us. Our hearts grew leaden.
We raised the guns and sent them to the best schools. We told them they were the future.
We stopped going to Iceland. We remembered it fondly: the platinum light, the midnight birdsong, the boundlessness. We remembered the extremes and were satisfied to have borne their witness. Iceland became a bedtime story we told our children.
We were made of steel then. All of us, mind you. And what are we made of now?
The word victim is designed to slide right between your ribs. It’s a slender blade of a word, and it excels at gutting you, at hollowing you out. What it’s not designed to do is break you. It assumes you’re already broken.
The morning of the verdict, we stand across the street from the courthouse. We link hands, our fingers slipping thin through air, and cry. We don’t wail or scream; our weeping is silent, our tears dark like oil as they trail streaks down our faces.
No one sees. No one looks our way as they exit the building. First come a few curious locals, trickling out one by one. We think of drops of water. We think of blood, the wounds we wished we had been strong enough to tear in your flesh. (But what can little girls’ hands do? They know soft pink nail polish; they know sugar-dipped strawberries and Kim Possible Band-Aids. At least, they did.) Most of the locals are dull-eyed, bored, already scrolling on their phones as they walk. The press exits quickly, too, many of them with knowing smiles. The defendant was exonerated, of course. How could such an upstanding member of the community fare any differently? Several character witnesses were brought to the stand, speaking about how kind you have always been: how warm your heart, how effortless your smile.
(We were not called. Our tongues are gone.)
The jury is eager to be free, rolling their heads around on their necks as they walk, swinging their arms. One of them rolls his eyes as he whips out his phone and starts making calls. One juror is red-eyed—we think again of blood, the viscous sullen flow of it, the river we would give anything to dip our hands in—and shaking. Finally, here she is. Older than any of us were, then. (Is this why she survived?) Her long coat is open to the gentle wind, and we know, all of us and her too, that it should not be spring. It should be the depths of winter, snow spitting its bitterness from a blind white sky. Her hair is uncombed, dark with grease. Her face looks like it’s been ripped off and pinned to a wall and then wrapped back around her skull again. Her mouth is a small pink scar. Her eyes, glittering, are the only parts of her that show any life. They hold light, like flaring moons.
We can see right through to the pit of her heart: a scraped-open seed, a kernel now turning over to rot. All those emotions that she brought to the trial—the anger that has been sharpening inside her all these months, the confidence she draped over herself like a disguise, even the anticipation of joy at your conviction—have burnt away. All those feelings turned black and sour, now rotting in a landfill somewhere.
We release one another’s hands and stretch them out towards her, all four or five or seven of us. (We lose track; we mix and muddle with each other, our experiences so much the same, our memories eaten like our bodies were.)
“We believe you,” we tell her. “We believe you.” And even though our words are composed only of leaves rattling in the wind, and the crack of branches under the feet of deer, and the drone of traffic from the highway, she blinks like she understands.
Then she walks more quickly away from the courthouse. She knows who is still inside. After we lost our bodies, after our souls drifted into smoke and dust, we never dared come close to you again. The terror was too great, pulsing red through what was left of our minds. But something in this woman’s eyes—their moonflash, their glint—gives us courage. After all, we have nothing left to lose.
She didn’t see us, and you won’t, either. You saw our flesh, soft and temporary, but you’ll never see our bones. They’re gnawed down to a lunar white; even the mites and beetles have gone. Moss covers us now, growing like blankets around what’s left. Wolves’ toothmarks linger, unknowable symbols carved in our marrow like hieroglyphs. Below us, the earth murmurs, wheeling on its axis. Above us, the constellations shift.
Any moment now, when you exit the courthouse, we’ll follow you. We’ll leave this woman who refuses the title that tries to knife between her ribs. The woman who still walks home, who still lives, despite everything.
And we’ll slip into your house. We’ll drift like a bad smell through the cracks in your windows. Curl like long fingers around your bedframe. We’ll siphon nightmares into your skull, pour dread into the pits of your skin, feed you images of death until the sun rises. And when you wake, your fingernails will be gray, your stomach knotted with terror. We’ll drag our screams through your bedsheets until your face sags like a collapsed shrine; we’ll spit on the fire behind your eyes. We’ll make your heartbeat stutter at every sound you don’t recognize. We’ll make your voice a fading echo, turn your scent into the bitter tang of fear: a fatal perfume in the coming night.
Let’s say dad didn’t beat you because you back-chatted and wore your skirt too short, and you didn’t sneak out to meet Peter, then peck like a bird at our bedroom window at midnight smelling of cask wine and boy.
Imagine — you hadn’t woken up lamenting you’d ever been born, asking me to brush and plait your hair, telling me you didn’t feel like breakfast. That you’d meet me at the bus stop in a bit, and in the meantime, you’d walk to the black sand beach for some fresh air, you know, for some space. Imagine if I’d waited for the old red school bus, wondering where you were, and when the bus came that morning, I didn’t get on the bus and go to school — instead, I ran to the beach looking for you.
Let’s say you didn’t wade out to the island at low tide to sit among the nodding tussock grass watching Little Blue Penguins fresh from their hidey-holes diving for sardines and pilchards and krill. Let’s say you didn’t get the tide wrong and wade back through the rising, turgid ocean and get swept off your feet, dragged to the deep with the flounder and the gurnard and the bottle-nose dolphins, and that your long hair didn’t struggle itself free from the plait I braided; octopus arms waving as you sank and sank, your eyes wide.
Let’s imagine I went searching for you, and what looked like fossilised driftwood wasn’t you washed up on the black sand beach at dusk. That I didn’t lie beside you on the beach with my hand resting on the mound of your belly, and that my heart didn’t petrify and my green eyes didn’t turn gray. That in my grief, I didn’t tear a lock of your sodden black hair with my teeth, stitching it with red silk thread that night to my coat breast-pocket — that I didn’t stitch my lips together.
Instead, let’s imagine we sat at the kitchen table sipping tea, eating porridge with cream and brown sugar — making plans to stick together no matter what — before hefting our school bags full of cheese sandwiches and algebra and poetry up the hill to the bus stop overlooking the black sand beach — imagine we watched the waves roll in.
Not with shame, but with memory. Each rib a prayer. Each vertebra a vow. They had once dressed her in red silk and called her divine. They used to carve her name into temple stone. Midwives and mourners and those who bled for too long prayed to her in secret. She cradled them all. She was the goddess of quiet endings—of wilted petals, of final breaths drawn gently in old beds.
Then, the men decided they preferred beginnings. Now they shriek when her hip bones click like wind chimes. But she has walked through worse.
The world had forgotten her name. They remembered the monk. They remembered the monkey and his journey. But not the woman made of ivory and hunger.
She came the first time as a wandering village girl. Adorned in red. She was soft-faced, wide-eyed, with fruit cupped in her palms like an offering. The monk looked at her with pity. Before the monk took a bite, the monkey struck her down with his staff. Her body of bones clattered to the ground. She had never felt as fragile as porcelain before that moment.
“This fruit was poisoned,” he told the monk.
She flinched. It was not. It might have been bitter, yes, but so was the truth. They buried her gently. At least they dug a grave. The dirt that evening became her soft cocoon. Beneath the dirt, she waited there and thought of the women who once lit candles in bowls of oil and placed them at her feet.
She came the second time as a mother. Veil over her skull, draped down to her feet. Wrinkled hands that still shook with unwavering love. “Have you seen my daughter?” she asked, voice warbling like wind through reeds. “She wore red. She brought you fruit.”
The monk’s mouth pressed tight. She thought she sensed guilt in his eyes. But perhaps it was just discomfort, the kind that makes villagers shut their doors at the sight of a mother with no child.
The monkey squinted. “You again,” he said, and raised his staff. This time, they didn’t bury her.
She came the third time as an elderly man. She knew then that power only listens to what it fears. She sculpted herself in fear’s image, voice low like gusty storm-wind. Back crooked, cane in hand, beard drawn in charcoal. “I am looking for my wife and my daughter,” she said calmly.
Now, they looked afraid. Of him. Not because they sensed power, but because they respected him now, with his low, raspy voice that came from a masculine throat. The monk bowed his head. “Forgive us,” he whispered. Finally, she saw the guilt.
The monkey circled her again, examining. He hissed. Then he struck her down for a final time. She didn’t feel the shock this time. Her skull rolled to his feet. The monk stared. The villagers gasped, stepped back. They said she was trying to eat him, that she wanted his flesh. But she had tasted godhood before; she had dined on praise and incense. Now, she only craved to be remembered.
They told each other she had always been a monster and that the bones were cursed. The first girl in red was a trick of the forest, a punishment sent to test the monk’s resolve. The veiled mother was a ploy from a distant land. The man was never a real man. A good story spreads faster than the truth. So they wrapped her in another lie.
Now, she rests beneath the trees.
Moss grows between her ribs. A vine curls around her broken jaw. Wind whistles through her chest like a flute, high-pitched and fluent in delicacy. The trees still speak of her name, as she’s carried by the wind into the forgotten corners of the world.
But she is not evil. She is inevitable. She is how every woman is seen when the flower rots, when the fruit sours. She’s the deity people pretend doesn’t exist, her name scrubbed from scrolls. She’s still hungry.
And one morning, quiet as breath, a little girl finds her. Not all of her. Just a single bone, bleached smooth by time, peeking from the roots like a secret. The girl doesn’t scream. She doesn’t run. She brushes the soil away, gentle as a prayer, and holds it up to the light.
Something sacred hums softly, like wind through hollow bones.
Ready for the opportunity to turn reality on its head? We’re bringing back our Elsewhere Prize! We want those stories that make a mystery out of the ordinary, that make the rational out of the mystical. Play with the edge of genre, but make sure your character is still the star of your story. From July 17 to September 14, 2025, we welcome submissions to the Fractured Lit Elsewhere Prize.
“We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.”
For this contest, we want writers to show us the forgotten, the hidden, the otherworldly. We want your stories to take us on journeys and adventures in the worlds only you can create; whether you make the familiar strange or the strange familiar, we know you will take us elsewhere. Be our tour guide through reality and beyond.
For this prize, we are accepting micro and flash fiction, so we’re inviting submissions of stories from 100-1,000 words.
We’re thrilled to partner with Guest Judge Jemimah Wei, who will choose three prize winners from a shortlist. We’re excited to offer the winner of this prize $3,000 and publication, while the second- and third-place winners will receive publication and $300 and $200, respectively. All entries will be considered for publication.
Good luck and happy writing!
Guest Judge: Jemimah Wei
In flash I seek the crystallized vision of a writer’s imagination — prose that understands intimately the tides of boldness and restraint, that isn’t afraid to venture into uncharted realities, emotions, and psychologies, yet never loses the thread of their story’s heart. Give me hitherto unmapped routes to familiar emotion, sentences that clarify and surprise, and a sense of the writer’s vision within and beyond the story’s limits.
Jemimah Weiwas born and raised in Singapore and is now based between Singapore and the United States. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, a winner of the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize, and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University. Her highly anticipated debut novel, THE ORIGINAL DAUGHTER, is a Good Morning America Book Club pick, a New York Times Editors’ Pick, and an IndieNext pick. It debuted at #1 on the Straits Times Bestseller list and has been named a best book of Spring 2025 by Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vogue, Apple Books, and more. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Singapore’s National Arts Council, Hemingway House, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Writers in Paradise, Jemimah’s writing has appeared in Joyland, Guernica, and Narrative, amongst others. She is presently a senior prose editor at The Massachusetts Review.
The deadline for entry is September 14, 2025. We will announce the shortlist within twelve to fourteen weeks of the contest’s close.All writers will be notified when the results are final.
OPTIONAL EDITORIAL FEEDBACK: You may choose to receive editorial feedback on your piece. In your cover letter, please let us know which piece you’d like your editor to focus their review on. We will provide a two-page global letter discussing the strengths of the writing and the recommended focus for revision. Our aim is to make our comments actionable and encouraging. These letters are written by editors and staff readers of Fractured Lit. Should your story win, no feedback will be offered, and your fee will be refunded.
Guidelines
Your $20 reading fee allows up to two stories of 1,000 words or fewer each per entry—if submitting two stories, please put them both in a SINGLE document.
We allow multiple submissions—each set of two flash/sudden stories should have a separate submission accompanied by a reading fee.
Writers from historically marginalized groups will be able tosubmit for free until we reach our cap of 25 free submissions. No additional fee waivers will be granted. Note: submission cap has been met.
Please sendflash micro fiction only—1,000 word count maximum per story.
We only consider unpublished work for contests—wedo notreview reprints, including self-published work (even on blogs and social media). Reprints will be automatically disqualified.
Simultaneous submissions are okay—please notify us and withdraw your entry if you find another home for your writing.
All entries will also be considered for publication inFractured Lit.
Double-space your submission and use Times New Roman 12 (or larger if needed).
Please include a brief cover letter with your publication history (if applicable). In the cover letter, please include content warnings as well, to safeguard our reading staff.
We only read work in English, though some code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
We do not read anonymous submissions. However, shortlisted stories are sent anonymously to the judge.
All AI-generated work will be automatically disqualified.
Some Submittable Hot Tips:
Please be sure to whitelist/add this address to your contacts, so notifications do not get filtered as spam/junk: notifications@email.submittable.com
If you realize you sent the wrong version of your piece: It happens. Please DO NOT withdraw the piece and resubmit. Submittable collects a nonrefundable fee each time. Please DO message us from within the submission to request that we open the entry for editing, which will allow you to fix everything from typos in your cover letter to uploading a new draft. The only time we will not allow a change is if the piece is already under review by a reader.
God lived in the cheek-pink etching of a china plate, and He was shaped like fire. He roosted in the glass cabinet year-round, but on special occasions like this, Jenna got to bury Him in mashed potatoes and scrape her fork over the bush.
Today was Easter Sunday. She took little bites from the clouds and watched God reveal Himself to her like a kind of puzzle in reverse. A clean plate was a revelation, and she secretly wished for a new one each time: God as a dragon, God as a druid. God as a witch, a wildfire.
“God is everything,” her mom would say. “But not that.”
Jenna was made of two things: hunger and questions. She could get a good meal out of her mother, but never a straight answer.
They’d made a roast chicken for Easter dinner, and Jenna, all but hanging from the oven handle, had watched it cook. Syrupy carrots, wedges of onion, fresh-picked thyme – an altar for the bird. She knelt in front of the little window, under the honey-gold light of the gas flame.
“Ask your dad for the oyster,” her aunt told her. “That’s the best part.”
Her aunt was lighting the Advent candles with a stick lighter. She was a fluorescent but soft-spoken church lady whom Jenna never knew how to talk to. Jenna nodded and turned back to the chicken to look for oysters.
It seemed impossible, but then again, she’d heard somewhere that chickens came from dinosaurs. She wondered which one she was closer to. She wondered what it meant to eat something.
Right before dinner, she took the chicken oyster like communion. It was not a real oyster, but it was just as much like a cube of soft butter. Rich, fatty, luxurious – it shocked her that they would put the body of Jesus in a cracker.
Eat of my body (said Jesus), said the priest that morning, for I have given it up, something, something.
At dinner, Jenna sawed at her chicken breast until her knife slipped and screeched against the man who looked at God. Moses, her mother had told her. Moses Schmoses, she’d thought. He had his back turned anyway. She scratched curiously with her knife to see if she could do any damage, but this was not like the bleacher-seat hieroglyphs in the school gym that could be carved away with a dull pencil.
Her aunt—tangerine skirt suit, earrings like the shell of some ancient bug, a perfume like the time Jenna had asked to sip her father’s brandy and couldn’t get past the smell—was saying something about being thankful for the chicken, and for Jesus.
Today, God emerged from Jenna’s potatoes as a stovetop. The one like her parents’, with the even ring of flame-feathers going blue to orange.
“Moses cooked a chicken on God,” she said aloud, to see which eyes would watch her. “Eat of my body, for I have roasted it for you.”
Her aunt, mid-bite and wide-eyed, ceased her chewing and squirreled it away in her cheek as if she needed that brain power to process.
“God is not a joke,” her father said. His voice was hard, but Jenna saw how he fought to wrangle the corners of his mouth, and reality cracked open to her, just barely.
“He is not!” her mother echoed. Hers was a voice like china, brittle and breakable. “Not on this day.”
With that, her mother wrenched the fork and knife from Jenna’s clenched hands and piled them with her napkin on top of God. It was a signal that Jenna was to leave the table and hide herself.
God is not a witch, a joke, or a chicken. An oyster is not an oyster.
Jenna could not make heads or tails of it. She stood in the kitchen with her plate in her hands. The oven was off, but its light had been left on, painting a slanted square on the tiles. It offended her.
She took her plate to the stove, and with one hand switched off the oven light, then turned the knob for the front left burner until it clicked and God leapt up in soft, even lines. She watched Him flutter against the cast-iron grates. She did the same for every burner, then again for the oven, whose door she left open. She smelled the sparked gas, sweet and sharp, and remembered learning that the fire had to be lit or the house could explode.
Jenna stared until her eyes went dry and sweat sprouted in the creases of her eyelids. The chicken-oyster oil thickened in her mouth. More sweat bloomed on her upper lip. She felt all the water in her body playing musical chairs, and her heart played thumping music.
She’d been a witch for Halloween the year prior, after she’d learned that witches were burned. She asked her mother to cover her in soot and to paint her makeup like peeled skin. Her mother refused and said only that she would rather die.
Jenna took the napkin from her plate. She dangled it over the front burner until it lit. Her parents let out a cackle in the dining room. She let her fingers singe and held them there longer.
God is not a druid or a china plate.
She bolted her hand away and into her mouth, but she knew she had gotten close. She left God burning and returned to the dining room.
Her family waited for an apology to pretend to forgive, and Jenna had one prepared.
“God is not a plate,” she said.
She chucked it down with force, and did not look to see where the etching fissured, because she lunged over it to seize two Advent candles before her mother could take her arms.
Bringing their flames to her cheeks, she felt her eyes make tears and her skin make sweat, as if to fight against the very thing that would turn her into God.
Melissa Llanes Brownlee’s Bitter Over Sweet was the 2023 winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards. This accomplishment was huge for Melissa, but also for the Flash community. As she says in this interview, and has mentioned privately amongst friends, she wants the world to know that flash is a form to be reckoned with. So, even if you’ve gobbled up (as I have) every story as it was published in various magazines and journals, in this book those once familiar, stand-alone stories are transformed into a totally different reading experience; leaping past the micro-forms they were born into—similar to how Tita escapes her small life in Hawai’i—and blossoming into their full potential: complex, layered, polyphonic, and absolutely stunning.
Dawn Tasaka Steffler: I absolutely love the title and cover of your book! How did this title come about? And did you have input regarding the cover art?
Melissa Llanes Brownlee: Thanks! My original title was The Lives of Tita. But as my collection expanded, I thought that Bitter over Sweet suited the idea of poverty and paradise, which figures prominently in my book. As for the cover, I had hired an artist, but they were unable to complete the commission, so I sent my ideas of bright colors with Hawaii’s flora and fauna, native and invasive, to my publisher, and they delivered this gorgeous cover. I couldn’t be happier.
DTS: How is it working with Santa Fe Writers Project?
MLB: It’s been eye-opening. As you know, I have two previous books, Hard Skin and Kahi and Lua, both with independent publishers. Each experience was so different, but with SFWP, I feel like I am working with a publisher who is all in on supporting me and helping me, from having the best version of my book to social media promotions, reviews, and getting my book in front of prize committees. I have been beyond grateful for this amazing opportunity.
DTS: What was the writing of this collection like? Did the intention come first of writing a series of stories centered on a particular character? Or did the stories happen organically, and lead you to the realization that you had a collection on your hands?
MLB: Honestly, I just kept circling the same themes, writing the same kinds of stories, over and over, and they naturally lent themselves to a collection with a solid narrative through line. There was no intent behind it. I think that some people can have a goal and write to that goal. I just write and see what comes from it.
DTS: This is a related question: has Tita always been a singular entity in your mind, and if so, who showed up first, older Tita or younger Tita? Or, did they show up as several characters and you gradually winnowed them down to one?
MLB: For me, Tita is just an everygirl. She always has been. Every native girl is both Tita-the sister, and Tita-the negative, derogative, diminutive. Tita is not even a Hawaiian word; it’s Hawaiian Pidgin Creole, so for me, it captures the nature of being Hawaiian but not Hawaiian, the liminal spaces of growing up in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, before the renaissance of our native language.
DTS: You tackle some heavy themes in this book: poverty, domestic abuse, resilience, and hope. Are any of your characters inspired by real people?
MLB: I have lived it. My family has lived it. My friends. The people in my community on the Big Island. The students I went to Kamehameha Schools with. Even though this is fiction, there’s truth in almost every story I have written about living in Hawai’i.
DTS: Tita escapes a dead-end life in Hawaii and ends up in Japan at the end of the book, similar to your own history. And I can’t help but wonder, how has living in Japan influenced the writing of this book? Does living somewhere different afford you some sort of geographic, cultural, or emotional distance? Does it make you miss Hawaii more? Or do you think you understand Hawaii better from afar? Do you think you will ever move back?
MLB: When we decided to go to college (we left Hawai’i in 1999), my husband and I had no idea where our future would be. There was always the idea that we might return, but I think that was always a fantasy. There was and is nothing on the Big Island that we could do to support ourselves in the fields we had chosen. We miss Hawai’i, but it’s the Hawai’i of our youth, our hanabata days, so to speak. I started writing about Hawai’i when I attended Boise State, so I do think that distance did help to see that I was filled with an abundance of stories that I could tell and share, showing people what Hawai’i was really like. Japan just kind of happened because I came here for my MFA program, and when we left grad school, we thought, Why not teach English here?, and we’ve been here ever since. I often wonder what would happen to my writing if I lived in Hawai’i. Would it still be rich, evocative, rooted in truth? I don’t know. Hawai’i is both the same but also different. The landscape for young kanaka maoli is so different now, but the shackles of institutional racism still exist to this day, and this is coming from someone who was able to attend one of the best schools in Hawai’i for Hawaiians.
DTS: In my personal opinion, you are the Queen of Micros. I’d love to know more about how you choose the moments you write about. Is it a matter of intensity, compactness, or maybe it’s a moment of heat you keep obsessing about? Do you have a file of story ideas? Or do your stories just happen organically, without much pre-planning?
MLB: Thank you! All of the above? I don’t plan. I do obsess, but I think that’s most writers. I honestly write small because that’s how much time I usually have to write, or that’s the amount of time that my brain wants to spend writing.
DTS: I think I remember you told me once you don’t revise much. What’s the fastest you’ve ever gone, from drafting to publication?
MLB: Less than one day. Sometimes you write something and you just know… this is the one for this place. It doesn’t happen often because I have been trying over the last few years to send my work to places that usually take much longer to respond because I believe in flash, and I especially believe in microfiction, and I want our writing to be more mainstream.
DTS: What’s next for you? I saw in one of your Talk Story posts that you’re working on a novel?
MLB: I have a Tita becomes Pele novel in the works, but writing that long feels so challenging.
DTS: Is there a question I haven’t asked here that you wish I had?
MLB: Yes! What is your favorite ice cream flavor? And the answer is mint chocolate chip. Always.
Dawn Tasaka Steffler is an Asian-American writer from Hawaii who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a Smokelong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow, winner of the 2023 Bath Flash Fiction Award, finalist for the 2025 Lascaux Review Prize in Flash Fiction, and selected for Best Small Fictions 2025, and an Anthology of Rural Stories by Writers of Color, 2025 (EastOver Press). Her stories appear in Pithead Chapel, Moon City Review, The Forge, Sundog Lit, and more. Find her online at dawntasakasteffler.com and on BlueSky, Instagram, and Facebook @dawnsteffler.
Recent Comments