by Neil Clark | Aug 3, 2020 | micro
Legacy
My ancestors were star smugglers. Becoming a mule was their only way out of the darkness.
They would hide the stars in their bellies and wear thick clothes to conceal their glowing midriffs.
Every night, I thank them. For the sacrifice they made. For what they left for us in our sky.
Cakewalk
I added lunar dust to my cake mixture.
In the oven, a Moon baked.
As it rose, my cooking utensils floated around the house and a tide rose through the sink.
When you got home, I took you by the hand, and we slow-danced against the kitchen ceiling.
“Happy birthday,” I said.
Shimmer
A cosmic storm hit last night.
Now, we find a mound of stardust shimmering on the side of the road.
I dab it with my pinkie and put it in my mouth.
“How does it taste?” you say.
Before I can answer, I dissolve into the sky and become the reflection on your face.
Shattered Illusion
When I was a child, I thought the stars were just light bulbs in the sky.
I thought they could rain down on us, and we would need to take shelter as they popped on rooftops.
Then I learned the truth: that I’d never be able to touch them, or dance in the falling light, or make star angels in the shards come the aftermath.
It hurt me like hot glass.
Emptier and Emptier
You told me you’d been feeling emptier and emptier since you returned from space. Then I held your hand, and your skin crumpled. I rested my head on your chest, and it sank right in. We went for a walk the next day, and you blew away like a balloon, disappearing into the sky forever.
Blanket
I made you a blanket that doubled up as the night sky. Gave you strict instructions never machine-wash it.
My first night away from you, it rained soap. The horizon spun and dripped. The Moon and stars jangled up there like loose coins.
That was when I learned you were a disobedient child.
Love Fool
You called me from space and told me to transfer all our savings to an account in a different galaxy.
“They sell stars here,” you said. “I’ll buy us a constellation.”
After I did it, I never heard from you again.
I don’t care about the money.
I do hate how the night sky we used gaze into together so lovingly, now makes me feel like a fool.
Words/Stars
You told me there are so many stars out there, you could assign a word to each one, and you would run out of words before you run out of stars.
I did it. I assigned a different word to every star I could. Exhausted the lexicon of several different languages.
I ran out of words just before you died.
Now when I look at the sky, I use the constellations to make poems.
My way of staying in touch.
Church
I reached a church at the end of the universe.
There, I met another astronaut. It was me, from five minutes in the future.
Five minutes later, another me arrived.
Soon, there was a congregation of us, waiting patiently for answers.
Still, we multiply. Still, we wait.
by Sutton Strother | Jul 26, 2020 | micro
Bed
A gift from Kayla’s father, who put her head through a wall when she said David Bowie was holier than Jesus Christ. He buys a twin; he doesn’t know (can never know) she’s sharing it with me.
When the box arrives, we assemble the bed together and tell each other our love will make the smallness bearable. It goes clumsily, like everything we do at nineteen.
It’s me and not the sheets Kayla spreads across the mattress first. After, she giggles heat into the crater of my navel. This isn’t what my Daddy had in mind.
I don’t say anything. She jiggles my breast because she thinks I don’t get the joke, but I can’t stop seeing her head crashing through these walls, blood slicking over the beige.
Refrigerator
Inside a cheesecake is cooling, her late mother’s recipe. It’s the first thing I ever baked that didn’t come from a box or a tube.
We’re stoned long past midnight, crawling naked across the linoleum for a first taste. The fridge bathes Kayla in soft orange light as she scoops a handful from the center of the cake and shovels it into my laughing mouth.
We made this.Wonder in her voice, same wonder that recited the instructions, written in a dead woman’s even hand, from the yellowed index card.
The cheesecake’s consistency is uneven. Tiny pockets of unincorporated cream cheese burst tart against my tongue, but it’s rich and sweet and, hell, it’s cheesecake, and isn’t that enough? I kiss her, feeding her the taste of it, then move to taste her, too.
Armchair
A thrift store find. High-backed, green crushed velvet, at least thirty years old. If it was a dog, you’d swear it had mange, but at our housewarming party she pronounces it the most elegant thing she’s ever owned.
Summer faeries surround us and call us friend, sporting haircuts and tattoos that would’ve terrified us in high school. We are kissed and cuddled while by the playlist we wasted hours fussing over fills our home with music. Soon, the bottle of Two Buck Chuck in Kayla’s hand is nearly empty and my own brain is a waterfall teeming, crashing, bubbling underneath.
When everyone’s gone, Kayla strips and stretches across the seat of her chair, legs draped over one arm. She doesn’t say a word, but I know when I’m being summoned, and what for.
Halfway through, her phone rings; she answers. Her hand twists through my hair, urging me on even as she says Hello. Wet and too meek, her little sister’s voice trickles through the speaker. I can’t make out the words, but I know who they’re about.
Kayla growls and bucks against my face. Fuck him.
I pull back, risk a glance. Her eyes are closed, but the tears push loose anyway.
Should I stop? If I were sober, I’d leave the room without asking, and if pressed I’d insist there was honor in it.
Don’t you dare.
Five feet away, my iPod queues up a song about a love that will last despite hands that might age and bodies that will change. I pretend to understand.
Back Porch
Screened-in, built for a southern summer Sunday, and half the reason we’d settled on this place, despite the neighborhood’s reputation. All we wanted from it was a morning like this one. Iced tea. Wicker chairs. A hummingbird feeder. Her hand working into my shorts. Small puzzle pieces of domesticity.
My mother calls this playing house. We pay the rent and try our best.
I will myself to focus on her fingers, the press of her tongue to my collarbone, but the back yard, stretch back so far you could fit another house on the lot, calls me out of the moment with its overgrowth. I’ve never mown the lawn – any lawn – before. My parents always paid some neighborhood kid to do it. We haven’t even bought a mower yet. Do we need one? Is this our job, or will the landlord see to it? What would happen if we just let it grow?
My eyes unfocus as my pleasure mounts, until the green expanse becomes a Magic Eye picture I can’t make sense of. I half-expect the image won’t resolve until she makes me come.
If it had resolved, or maybe if I’d known how to look, I could have seen so much.
At night there will be gunshots in the street, and we’ll laugh away our terror. Her bike will be stolen within the month. A week later, someone will bust the headlights out of my car and take the bulbs. In our next home, the ceiling will collapse four times, and in the home after that, our neighbor will die. No one will find his body until the building fills with horseflies and a stench that won’t have dissipated by the time I (on my own, too foolish for regret) leave the place behind.
Instead, I dig nails into the back of her arm and forget all about the image, the yard, the sun, the tea, the birds, and believe that home is the place where her body meets my own.
by Nuala O'Connor | Jul 23, 2020 | flash fiction
I was the one who took the photograph of the princess with her toes in the mouth of a man who was not her husband. I didn’t mean to take it. I was sent to pap them and I did not want to be there, not one bit. It had been a long day and a hard one.
I leaned against the fence of the property, camera balanced on the rail because I was tired, and the sticky-dust feeling of tragedy coated my skin and was under my nails and on my tongue. I’d spent the afternoon hovering by the pond below Crickle Falls Resort, based on reports of a drowning. Sure enough, two tiny bodies were pulled from the water late in the afternoon. Two little girls – sisters – who had strayed from their holiday cabin and ended up in the pond who-knows-how, their deaths the work of a few idle moments. And they were just about the most beautiful kids I’d ever seen – their Mom was Chinese, the Dad Norwegian, I heard later. They looked like they were sleeping, lying there on the mudbank, cuddled together. I took not one single shot. I turned away and came home, and when I called him, Jerry was mad at me. Then he said there were rumours that the princess was here, of all places.
I said, “Count me right out, Jerry.”
And he said, “Lisa, take this, it could be big. Besides, you owe me.”
I cursed him and kissed my own two girls fiercely, before driving out to the perimeter of the house the princess was allegedly renting. The sun was about to slip behind the mountain and the air was warm and crickety, and I remembered that the princess had two little girls too, and I chewed over this fact and wondered if they used doilies and teapots at home, and where they were right now, and who was looking out for them, and I reckoned they were safe in some castle in England or someplace. I wondered, too, about the kind of mother who goes to a foreign country, for leisure, without her children, but with a man who is not their father, and I knew that that would never be me, even if I wanted such a thing. I thought about the Mom and Dad of the drowned girls and shook my head and tried to fathom their sorrow, the true morass of it, but failed. And then I saw the princess, golden and smiling by the pool in a white swimsuit. She lay back on a lounger and the man was stretched out below her and he lifted one of her feet and put it right into his mouth.
Click click click.
The world felt like a very sad and stupid place that day. Later, at home, when I looked at the princess on my screen, it occurred to me that her life might actually be happy, in spite of everything, and she was likely relieved to be on vacation and out of the way of reality. And I thought, This photograph could get this woman into a heap of trouble. I waited a bit and considered going to bed and I thought of the princess’s far-away girls, and the two dead girls, and my own precious girls. And though now I really wish that I hadn’t, I pressed send.
by Jennifer Wortman | Jul 20, 2020 | micro
After three days, my husband comes home with the moon pillow, still in its plastic. I don’t know how he paid for it. Maybe he didn’t.
“For you,” he says. Nothing else. He’s stopped explaining his disappearances and I’ve stopped asking. I already know more than I want.
My current pillow is so old it’s turned yellow like a book page and almost as flat. The last time my husband vanished, he brought me pajamas that feel like summer on my skin. He always knows what to bring me.
“Why’s it a moon pillow?” I ask.
“Because there’s moondust inside.”
How is that even possible? I don’t say. I also don’t say, I thought you were dead. I always think he’s dead. It doesn’t matter what I think.
I pull the moon pillow from the plastic. It’s attractively puffy, the opposite of my husband’s deflating face. I strip my old pillow, stuff the moon pillow in the case. Like magic, the pillow shrinks to fit its confines, then expands them.
I expect something special when I lay down my head, but it’s just a pillow, propping my neck too high. I miss my gross flat cushion. But then the back of my head gets a twinkling feeling that spreads. Pretty soon I’m outer space, dark and sparkling, my edges unseen.
“What do you think?” my husband asks.
I don’t want my words to knock the good feeling loose.
“That good, huh?” he says. He knows me so well. Like in the bible. To know someone is to live inside them and also absorb them so they live inside you.
My husband lies down beside me and disappears again, in a different way. The sides of his face are cool, dry caves. His eyes, tunnels. No ring on his twig finger: it fell off or he sold it.
Still, he’s enormous. I can’t find the end of him.
I scoot over, share my darkness, every speck.
I throw him the moon.
by Kendra Fortmeyer | Jul 16, 2020 | flash fiction
These are the things you may not do:
- You may not hide in or under your bed without speaking for weeks, time stretching cobweb-damp as the bright world rushes by outside.
- You may not be unseemly in public.
- You may not develop a drug problem.
- You may not drive thirteen hundred miles and beg to be taken back while the neighbor, curious, stops watering the lawn and lets the hose droop to his feet, drowning his wife’s prize orchid.
- You may not make demands.
- You may not self-mutilate.
- You may not cry when you see couples pushing their shared carts of groceries down the frozen foods aisle.
- You may not stop showering.
- You may not let this affect your performance at work.
- You may not make a scene at your roommate’s sister’s wedding, even when the groom gets choked up giving a toast about how Kelli brings light to his life every moment and you think not for long, buck-o, and swallow your champagne so hard it burns, hours later, in your chest.
- You may not “be friends.”
- You may not mail your ex piles of his toenail clippings that you swept out of the bathroom, even though you “meant it to be funny.”
- You may not let this immutably alter your definition of yourself.
- You may not think about this in terms of winning and losing, but also
- You cannot win, and
- You have nothing left to lose.
You may:
- Cry, either
- a. yourself to sleep
- b. on the phone to your mother.
- You may rate every flavor of Ben & Jerry’s, for Science, or
- Stop eating entirely (but only for a week – do not be “dramatic”).
- You may get a drastic hair cut in an attempt to define the “new you,” and you may
- Become vegan in pursuit of the same.
- You may sit in bars across from girlfriends and say, “Men are stupid,” because it is easier to say, and to hear than “I am unloved, and unlovable.”
- You may watch Dirty Dancing, and eat cake alone, and cry. (And then call your sister to tell her you that you are eating cake alone and crying, and try to say, bitterly, that you are having “the time of your life” and start laughing instead.)
- You may start to feel good about yourself again.
- You may go to the gym and get super hot.
- You may:
- a. Try dating other men.
- b. Try dating women.
- c. Have rebound sex.
- d. Have rebound-rebound sex.
- e. After a reasonable amount of time, meet someone else who is a Someone, and not just an Else.
- You may eventually talk about your ex again, in a normal tone of voice, without your lips weighing down at the edges. Talk about him lightly. Say vague and untrue things like, “It was mostly mutual,” and “It just didn’t work out.” Say vague and true things like, “It was really for the best.”
- You may invite him to your wedding, though it isn’t required (and you are certainly allowed to feel relief when he’s going to be in New York that weekend, and can’t make it).
- You may put him on your Christmas card list. And when you get his card, tell him his children are adorable, and mean it.
- You may get together one day and let your children and his children, young and unsuspecting, play together in the yard. Pour coffee from the yellow enameled pot with the rooster on it; look at his hands as they cup the mug. They are fat hands now, not like you remembered. There is a scattering of black hair across the knuckles. On his left, a wedding ring that you didn’t pick out. It is unattractive, but you may be okay with it, because his taste is not your problem anymore.
- You may, when he says, “You look great,” thank him, and when he says, “You haven’t changed a bit,” correct him.
- You may smile when he says, “I really miss what we had.” And when he apologizes, you may forgive him.
- You may, with your grass-stained children tumbling past your ankles, with the smell of tea cake in the air, with the sun slanting low in the west, raise your hand in answer as he backs out of the driveway in his minivan, nearly hitting the mailbox and looks back at you, abashed. You may laugh. You may watch him, for one lingering moment, as he turns to listen to the child in the backseat; you may wonder at his profile, at the strange mixture of the boy you once loved and the totally irrelevant man he has become.
- And you may quietly close the door behind you and turn back to your own bright life.
by Jennifer Fliss | Jul 13, 2020 | flash fiction
It was the off-season and we were left to the rain that mourned the tourists. Paddleboats masquerading as swans. Swans masquerading as boats. Gone were the slushies and sunblock and hey mom, can we ride these?! Gone were the city stalwarts and country obese that made us brace with their heft. Gone was the summer.
Except yesterday, a man and son came around. Knocked at the Waterfront Activity Center, but no one answered. The boy couldn’t have been more than six. The dad, no more than forty, though his baldness shone brightly even under the clouds.
“Sorry Max,” the dad said, “they’re all closed up.”
“But I want to… ” The boy began a wind up that we were all familiar with. It would end in an alarm, and we would be captive, tied up like this. The father kneeled, placed his forehead to his son’s. Said nothing. Then the father hiked up his son, put him on his shoulders and walked down the beach, leaving one set of footprints in the sepia sand. We could hear the suck of the water, the beach wanting to claim the last of life before winter. But the man wouldn’t be taken in.
We watched as the two figures grew smaller and smaller. We felt relief but also sadness.
One of us might have sung out.
Then the man placed Max down. Hand in hand, they walked back in our direction. As they approached, the boy tugged off his sneakers and tromped towards the water.
“It’s cold!” he hollered back.
“It is,” the father said.
“You promised,” Max said.
“I know,” he said, “but these things happen.” As he said that, the winter ferry boat emerged from behind the cove. It trundled slowly, but created large waves that formed whitecaps that bent into the beach where the boy stood. At first he giggled. But on the fourth wave, he was soaked to the knees and he tried to turn and run back to his father.
He yelled out. Fell. His father had been gazing into the distance and was unaware of the danger. Even shallow waters hold monsters.
We could hear the boy call. For his father. For his mother. But it was only after he swallowed quarts of water that his father responded.
The man ran in, the water roiling but shallow, and pulled his boy up, who sputtered. And cried. And called again for his mother.
“I’m sorry,” the father said into his son’s neck, tasting the salty tang of grief.
We bowed our necks in sympathy. We too knew what it was like to be alone, in this vast watery world.
We pushed each other toward the shore, towards the abridged family, nudging our plastic feathered bodies into each other. Finally one of us beached. And the son saw us, pulled his father. We invited them. We showed them our small piece of lake, of summer, or days that were better and not on the steady parade to winter.
by Chelsea Stickle | Jul 8, 2020 | news
There are collections that are so good that instead of ripping open the packaging they come in and reading until my eye sight’s blurry, I carefully set them aside. Knowing that one day soon, I’ll need them and they’ll be there. Yes, my TBR is out of control. Whether it’s from a dearth of inspiration or a much-needed retreat from the world, flash is always just the right amount of story. Good flash is the knife at your neck that makes you hold your breath until it’s over. Stopping isn’t an option. You must finish the story. In exchange, you leave richer, stronger, and having experienced something unique. Each story is an individual experience that you can’t repeat for the first time. With the monotony of quarantine, that sounded like exactly what I needed. So I started.
Little Feasts by Jules Archer
Little Feasts is full of stories with teeth that sink into you—making you the feast—and you’re glad for it. Stories with women who refuse to accept their circumstances and claw for more. It’s impossible not to root for these characters to fill their stomachs. If you loved Kara Vernor’s Because I Wanted to Write You a Pop Song, then you should definitely check out Jules Archer’s Little Feasts. Pull up a seat, grab an In-N-Out burger and let Little Feasts’ hunger and weirdness call out to your own.
Standout Stories: “Hard to Carry and Fit in a Trunk,” “Skillet” and “Everlasting Full.”
Purchase Link: https://www.thirtywestph.com/shop/littlefeasts
The Missing Girl by Jacqueline Doyle
In the eight stories of The Missing Girl, victims and perpetrators drill in, slowly, slowly, until your equilibrium is off and you’ve been marked in a way you can’t quite explain. Read this chapbook in a gulp and find it hard to swallow after.
Standout Stories: “The Missing Girl,” “Something Like That” and “Nola.”
Purchase Link: https://blacklawrencepress.com/books/the-missing-girl/
The Neverlands by Damhnait Monaghan
The Neverlands might be the chapbook most recommended to me by strangers, teachers, and fellow writers. It tells the story of Nuala and Mammy, alternating in point of view, as they navigate their lives before and after the loss of Nuala’s father. One of the beautiful things about The Neverlands is how the characters go through hell and come out the other side not broken but ready for something new. A little light at the end of the tunnel is just what my quarantine needs.
Standout Stories: “Habits,” “Whiskey” and “Snow, Falling.”
Purchase Link: https://vpresspoetry.blogspot.com/p/the-neverlands.html
How to Sit by Tyrese Coleman
Tyrese Coleman’s hybrid collection of non-fiction and not-quite-non-fiction is full of trauma, grief, and guilt. There’s clarity and accounting to the prose that makes each story a force to be reckoned with. Whether it’s the author grappling with assault, the viability of her twins or her Ancestry.com DNA results, expect Coleman to take you through her dark places and survive.
Standout Stories: “Sacrifice,” “V-Day” and “How to Mourn.”
Purchase Link: https://masonjarpress.com/chapbooks-1/how-to-sit
I Once Met You But You Were Dead by SJ Sindu
The cover of Sindu’s chapbook has a hibiscus growing out of a pile of bullets, making it one of the few covers that allows you to judge whether the contents are for you or not. There’s beauty and violence, hope and despair. If you think you know where a story is going, guess again. The energetically queer fiction and non-fiction in I Once Met You But You Were Dead feel like they could only come from Sindu. I Once Met You But You Were Dead is the kind of chapbook you’ll finish in one sitting—it’s thirty-seven pages—before wishing it were longer so you could stay with the voices inside.
Standout Stories: “SR-9,” “Playing Princess” and “Daughterson.”
Purchase Link: https://www.splitlippress.com/ioncemetyoubutyouweredead
Gather Us Up and Bring Us Home by Shasta Grant
In Shasta Grant’s debut collection, Gather Us Up and Bring Us Home, the working class characters are full of longing for new situations, new people, anything to get them out of the ruts they’ve found themselves in. The stories pulse off the page yearning for more, leaving a beautiful bruise that ends on the perfect last sentence, for the story and the collection.
Standout Stories: “Good Enough,” “Us Girls” and “Most Likely To.”
Purchase Link: https://www.splitlippress.com/gatherusupandbringushome
The Way of the Wind by Francine Witte
In Francine Witte’s novella-in-flash, a woman copes with the end of a relationship and the echoes from her past that resurface with the loss of her love, Louie. There’s a cleanliness to Witte’s stories. She’s an author in control of her material, someone to go to when you want a flash that’s straight down the middle. Like The Neverlands, this novella won’t leave you plunged in darkness. And maybe that’s what you need now.
Standout Stories: “Our Neighbor Who Lives Quiet as a Tree,” “Lying” and “The Noise From Down the Hall.”
Purchase Link: https://bookshop.adhocfiction.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=199
Not only did these books break up the monotony of quarantine, but they also yanked me out of reality and gave me a reprieve from the news. If that’s something you’re looking for, pick up one of these books and read your way out.
by Meg Pokrass | Jul 6, 2020 | micro
I wanted to live on Love Street when I grew up. To steal paperbacks about salvation sex and hide them under my bed. I told myself that one day the sound of my name would make a man sick and then well.
The dog was my very first love. We were criminal friends. She’d sneak the cat’s food and I’d let her do it. What I planned to do with my life? Escape normalcy. Find a man with a dog and a walk-in closet and make myself sick and then well. Feel better when smoking his calmness.
I grew up to be a grown up who got smoked out by previous lovers after sneaking their dogs into my life. Told myself that I’d someday I’d linger on Love Street and really live there. Become average and well. That for now, just the sound of my name would make a man love an adorable criminal like me. I hid inside my closet like a cat who stole the dog food back. Feeling sick only when thinking about how to grow up.
“We’re hidden inside the sound of our own names,” the doctor said. He’s seen how I can only live on Love Street. Wisdom like this is what doctors hide from us all, at first. How smoking calmness can only make you sick. What we fear most is that when we do grow up, the sound of our names will make the only man we have ever loved well and that he will never love us back.
by Jules Archer | Jun 29, 2020 | flash fiction
To the centipede I tried to kick down my drain but refused to go. I see you there. Being better than eighty-two percent of the men I’ve dated.
You creepy-crawled out of the drain. I screamed like an old-fashioned actress. High-pitched and startling. Then, I toed you back down. Steam blossomed over the bathroom, a ghostly mushroom cloud. I could barely see you. But you returned covered in a nest of dark hair. Most wouldn’t come back. Most would get the hell out. Like Stan Prince circa ’98. That was a bad year.
You know, it was a shower beer kind of night. You probably watched as I poured myself into the tub, half-drunk, bad-breakup-battered. The water spray felt like bullets, and for a second, I wished they were. You saw that. Still, you came. You stayed.
I knelt down and picked you up in the palm of my hand. Your hundred little legs danced a tune in my palm. You were happy. I wasn’t. We could do great things together, you said.
If great included finishing my shower beer, then I was all ears.
With one arm, you beckoned that I come closer. That arm was bedecked in a glitzy bangle. The other arm, to your right and thirty arms back, laid inert. It sported a masculine wristwatch. Shower centipedes are not conformed to the laws of gender-specific fashion.
“Are you my little love bug?” I whispered. I giggled because it was nuts. There I was, naked, my hair like soupy udon noodle waves, talking to a bug. I’ve done worst things. Here’s looking at you, Dennis Booth and the ten-inch dildo we dubbed Ripper.
“I am,” you replied. “Now let’s go teach men to get this bad love off your chest.”
Fuck yeah.
I dressed, grabbed my shower beer, and we were gone into the night.
It’s fun to pretend we took a race car but really we were on my Huffy 10 speed. The bike was an extra-special birthday gift after I caught my mother swapping spit with Uncle Patrick. I never sold it. That memory meant I had some kind of power. I mean, if power back-in-the-day meant wielding braces and training bras and crippling secrets, then power it was.
I stepped up, to porches, to patios, to rickety trailer park screen doors. I knocked. I thought I was going to be sick. Then, all my exes answered, fear and doubt in their eyes, worried I came to rage. You perched on my shoulder. A one-hundred-armed angel in my ear. To propel me forward, to confess to men I gave blue balls, to men who gave me black eyes, to men I’ve pretended to love and men who’ve played with my heart like a teething necklace.
There, I raised the shower beer. All night long, I toasted truth to boys with green eyes and men with bikini girl bicep tattoos. My tongue went numb. The words tumbled like dice. I didn’t make sense; I made sense. I watched their bodies wilt, and felt my own lengthen.
Finally finished, done, kaput, wiped out like that song with the manic babbling voice, I
stumbled away to the curb. My chest as empty as a shower beer. I sat in the ditch and watched the spokes of the Huffy glitter in the moonlight. But what was moonlight without a beer? I hefted the can in my palm. It was still full, but I felt lighter for its weight. Like a train wreck with no crash. Under a gold-gilded streetlight, I closed my eyes, whispered, thank you. And then you were there. Beckoning me to follow. The comfort of your one hundred little legs further on up the road.
by K Chiucarello | Jun 24, 2020 | interview
K Chiucarello: First, I want to say congratulations on your recent Paris Review publication. It is such an astounding essay. I was awestruck with the two lists you made, one in which you needed to make to stay alive and the other of what you wanted to accomplish in the future, these usually tangible things that very suddenly were taken away in the pandemic. Something I admire in this piece, and in any piece that manages to take the pandemic and turn it into a unique yet universal essay, is that while loss and grief are central to the narrative, sharing and writing to stay alive are just as central. I was wondering if you could speak to sharing your experience, particularly your experience as a Black woman, and having it resonate, consumed, and shared by so many folks that may be outside of your own identity. How do you protect yourself and your own story when others can now formulate it to their own?
Megan Giddings: While reading this question, I did have a visceral, would you ask a white writer this question? And not in a let’s start this interview with a fight, but what you described initially is what the white dominant culture in the United States asks people all over the world to do frequently. To see a white protagonist as a person to relate to, to care for, to think about the world.
I don’t think reading is the only solution to the inequities and segregation in the United States. But books, television, movies, music, they’re often the first step for many people toward building an empathetic imagination because the places we live, the places we learn, are still regularly pretty segregated.
It’s impossible for me to protect myself now as a much more public writer. But whenever someone essentially asks me for permission to write outside their race or culture, I ask them these questions now (I’m focused on Black here because that’s usually what people want to do): How well do you know Black people? Why should you get to take up space in this conversation? What are you doing to make space and opportunities for Black writers who are still very much marginalized and will probably make far less money and get far less attention for telling their stories than you might get? The first question is one that I think most non-Black people think they can answer with a list. And that shows that already they’re not ready. It doesn’t matter if you knew a Black person, I’m asking you about intimacy, about trust, about reading and engaging and feeling with us. If you can say well, I dated a Black guy in college, well maybe that Black guy should be writing this and you should be writing about being a white woman who is trying to learn how to be a better person.
KC: Thank you for that answer. If I could clarify my question when I say ‘formulate’. When I write from my own identity, sometimes I feel I want to write a piece and give voice to my very specific identity, a queer, non-binary experience. When folks who are straight or cis- relate to and share or retweet my stories, especially if my identity is written all over that piece, I sometimes feel my experience was up for consumption (as you spoke to in your answer), and that that was not the intended audience even though perhaps those folks learned more about an identity outside of their own by reading it. It makes me feel protective of my voice, yet I simultaneously want others to consider my specific experience. Of course, as writers, we can never control fully who reads our work nor should we want limited exposure. But I suppose I was curious if you struggle seeing your specific experience shared universally.
MG: I don’t really struggle with people reading a piece of writing from I guess what I’ll call a shared empathetic experience. They read it, emotionally connect, and they think about me and themself and our shared emotions. I do struggle when someone reads something by me about me and is like well, I’ve never experienced that, so you’re wrong. Or they do some real C student work and pull a quote out of context to back up their viewpoint of the world while totally missing what I was saying. But until I’m on the final drafts of something, I write to please myself. I write to have fun or to think deeply or to escape. It’s only in heavy revisions where I start thinking about the outside world.
KC: The Offing and The Rumpus are such varied displays of voices and stories, largely because their editorial teams seem to be some of the most diverse around. As editors and readers, the onus should be on publications to create teams that understand how to focus and lift writers whose voices are vastly underrepresented. When you’re reviewing submissions or are in the process of editing others’ work, what are the angles you look out for? Even if the “craft” isn’t fully there, how do you create room and help others make names for themselves so that there is a more nuanced, representative pool of stories out there?
MG: The Offing and The Rumpus have much different systems for reviewing work. At The Offing, the fiction team has no one who is male. We are a team of women, some of us are gender non-conforming people. We have a lot of discussions about who is being centered in a work. We are especially interested lately in features BIPOC who are writing experimentally, who are writing narratives of alternate worlds.
At The Rumpus, one of the things that has been really interesting to me to see is how better and better the readers and some white editors are getting more comfortable saying, I think I’m missing a cultural or political point here. It’s not talking to me. ____, can you take a look at this? I think for a long time, issues of gender, race, and class have been conflated with “craft” issues. I think Matthew Salesses has a book coming out in 2021 about that idea that I’m really excited to read.
In general, if you’re a writer and kicking the door closed behind you, if the only people you’re pushing hard for are your established friends or people you think can boost your work in return, you’re part of the problem. I get that it’s hard to make the time to read for literary magazines. I increasingly am conflicted about giving so much of my time to places that can’t pay me. But I also believe that there are so few Black editors and that the work I can do is still important in helping other writers get opportunities that are still incredibly hard for them. I might be taking a different path if I had money or if I felt like I had more influence, because I am getting very burnt out. Right now, I feel like the most effective place I can be is editing.
KC: I often exhaust myself with trying to weave my own experiences into flash, particularly if it’s a “fictionalized” story around identity. It’s almost like shortening the word length creates an even larger urgency to place so much momentum into a tiny space. How do you balance feeling exhausted and energized when writing through a piece like The Alive Sister, a piece that revolves around generational trauma and identity?
MG: I would say my state of being is being exhausted but somehow persisting. “The Alive Sister” needed to be flash because if it was longer, it would’ve been a rant, not fiction. Keeping it as flash allowed me to still be creative, to think of the ways that I could express my grief, my frustrations, my abilities to even speak to a moment that feels like a wound–Tamir Rice was murdered and his murderer will not be held accountable, his murderer was rehired as a police officer, his police union in Cleveland spent significant time advocating for him to be rehired despite the fact that he shot a 12 year old child and did not allow care to be administered to him–and also because of the constraints of flash, have to think about how can I be at my most clear, my most creative, and still leave room for story.
KC: There’s something about fiction that allows for more curiosity and exploration. I suppose a lot of folks tend to label really fantastical pieces as magical realism these days. Your stories often pit totally realistic emotionally-driven storylines against larger, weirder conceptualized narrative arcs. A Husband Should Be Eaten Not Heard is one of my favorite examples of this. You have Aileen so incredibly dissatisfied in love that she turns to luxurious delicacies for comfort. In the end, I was so entranced and lost in the descriptors that I was questioning if these desserts were even a metaphor at all. The weaving is such a sneaky way of focusing in on objectification versus partnership and individualism. What inspires you to build out a metaphor like that? Is there anything currently that has you obsessed or inspired in terms of drawing emotional links to concrete objects?
MG: I think I’m drawn to fiction, and to writing a mix of metaphor and reality because what I’ve learned from living, from teaching, is that about emotions a lot of people do not like being told what to think. There are some exceptions. But, I like writing for people who like to think sideways, who like to solve puzzles, who take pleasure in thinking and making realizations. I wrote a longer story once that I felt was literally about getting abducted by aliens. It’s about a girl in high school where it makes you socially cool and interesting to have aliens abduct you. A friend of mine taught it in his creative writing class and one student was adamant that it was all a metaphor for losing your virginity in high school. My initial thought was that kid is a sex maniac! But the more I thought about it, the more I considered what it meant for someone to find a completely different avenue into a story and still find something that might have spoken to them. It was moving in its own way to see someone’s point of view was so completely different than my own and they still could get so much out of something I’ve written.
Some of my relationship to objects is because I think there’s so much room to illustrate point of view, tone, and character through the way objects are described. One person’s cool pair of sweatpants is another person’s she’s dressing like she’s on her period vibe. I think descriptions of scenery or items are usually the parts of stories that I often skim because so little emphasis is put on how much they can be used to add not just realism to a story.
KC: I’ve read in past interviews that you threw yourself into flash because someone handed you an Amelia Gray piece. I can hear overlap in your tonalities, the way you’ve mastered this even-keeled yet spiraling, unspooling way of telling your fiction. How did you fine-tune that approach to formatting? Where do you begin sculpting pieces?
MG: Everything I write starts with me asking myself a question. I might hear or read something or consider something, and then I keep thinking about it. And from there, I ask myself well, why are you so curious about this? And the answer doesn’t matter. Usually, the best things I’ve written, I can’t explain why I was so curious until after the story is written. For flash, I edit a lot to take out any over explanations. I want things to be distilled. I don’t want to repeat myself unless it’s 1,000% necessary. I go through and look at the rhythm of lines, I try to find a balance between character and action. I don’t like in my own flash when things stay static. If I wanted to be still and paused, I would write a novel. I think of writing something very short as a kind of trust fall, it’s all lift, momentum, and hopefully, the reader is hovering, anxiously, to catch me.
KC: I’m so excited to see what floats to the top of our submission pile and to read pieces that you were drawn to for the flash fiction contest at Fractured Lit. As a reader, there’s just nothing more exciting than landing on a piece that is a gut-punch, after endlessly culling through submissions. I also find excitement when reading pieces from writers who are just emerging and may not have many credentials to their name. What do you look for when reviewing submissions for contests in terms of writers and content? What are the stories you’re looking for right at this moment from the flash world?
MG: Even before the pandemic, a story that is more of a monologue or a person sitting alone in a room thinking had to be very well-written for me to want to finish it. Now, I feel even more disinterested in stories like that. I would be very interested in a story that in a 1,000 words makes me feel like I’d traveled somewhere. I want to feel seaspray, I want to smell lavender under a warm sun, to be among people and not be like, oh fuck you, don’t you cough near me, you no-mask goon. I know a lot of this interview has been focused on big issues, but a good small story well-told that doesn’t bold or underline its big issues is still deeply valuable to me as a reader.
KC: What would your advice be to flash writers who are just starting out and trying to figure the best outlets to submit to?
MG: I would tell them to check the following books out of the library Know the Mother by Desiree Cooper, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes by Venita Blackburn, Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction, Gutshot by Amelia Gray, read some of the Wigleaf Top 50 for free online, and mark all the stories they like, and then look up where those stories were published. I think getting a sense that flash fiction isn’t just one or two obvious magazines but is spread out (a lot of magazines that aren’t flash-only venues publish flash, a lot of flash-only venues don’t pay) and there are many things to consider could give someone who is doing this seriously a lot to consider before they start sending out. That’s me taking more of an educator approach. I would also say you could do what I did, a friend told me to read a magazine, I liked it (RIP >kill author), sent them a story, they liked it, and that’s how I got started. I still ended up doing what I described above–any time I read a flash I really liked, I would try to find out where else the author had published and make a list that way.
KC: Any routines you leaned on while creating discipline and structure around your own writing practice?
MG: The most regular routine I have is writing down dreams. I think this is the one that has stuck with me the most because it lets me write strange, nonlinear things without judgment. It’s much easier to get into the regular words or feel less self-conscious if every day you transcribe from a sentence to paragraphs the things rolling around your brain. In the past, I’ve done things where I’ll take three consecutive days (over holidays, time taken off work) and made myself write a first draft of a story each day. I don’t believe that someone has to write every day, but I do think that making regular space in your life for writing and reading will remind yourself that what you’re doing is important to you.
KC: As a queer, I am obligated by law to finish this interview on this specific question. What’s your sign? And do you put stock in it?
MG: I am a Capricorn (sun), Cancer (moon), and Leo (rising). I put more stock into these three elements together because I think they say so much about my professional life, my emotional life, and the way that people respond to me. I didn’t put a lot of stock in astrology when I thought about it as only a Capricorn (the I-love-my-briefcase! of signs), but thinking of it as a layered and fun way to consider myself made me feel much more engaged.
Megan Giddings has degrees from the University of Michigan, Miami University, and Indiana University. She is a fiction editor at The Offing and a features editor at The Rumpus. In 2018, she was a recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial fund grant for feminist fiction. Her stories are forthcoming or that have been recently published in Black Warrior Review, Arts & Letters, Gulf Coast, and The Iowa Review. Her novel, Lakewood, was published by Amistad in April 2020. She’s represented by Dan Conaway of Writers House. Megan lives in the Midwest.
Recent Comments