Stuart Dybek: Blurring Forms
Stuart Dybek is a quiet master of the American short story. He doesn't cry out for attention, and he doesn't seem to need it, yet his stories demand re-reading in a way that few authors do.
Dinty W. Moore: Writing Essays with Brevity
Dinty Moore discusses how his many professions formed him as an author, the role of "divine dissatisfaction" in art, and what's creative about creative nonfiction.
Kona Morris: Written Word Adventures
Who wouldn’t love a writer who references glam rock band Queen in the same breath as Baudelaire? It’s not a surprise, though, coming from Kona Morris.
Six Questions with the Maestro of Six-Word Stories
One of the biggest challenges any writer faces is to write it short. Larry Smith, the founder of the phenomenon known as the Six-Word Memoir Project, tells how these tiniest of stories became such a big thing.
Talking Funny with Tom Hazuka
Accomplished writer, editor, singer-song writer, and teacher Tom Hazuka is also the man behind the humor collection Flash Fiction Funny. Learn what Hazuka thinks is funny (or not).
Luis Jaramillo: One Story, Many ‘Flash’ Chapters
Luis Jaramillo wrote The Doctor’s Wife in response to a friend’s request for a poem. Jaramillo compromised by writing a prose poem. “Bee Sting,” a chapter in his book, was the result—and the genesis for Jaramillo’s story about three generations of a family in the Pacific Northwest.
Meg Pokrass Turns Poems into Stories
There are few authors out there as daring and honest and real as Meg Pokrass. She possesses that rare gift of a writer, knowing how to poetically tell a tale while not flinching from the uncomfortable truths she discovers along the way.
Frances Lefkowitz: The Energy and Surprise of Flash Fiction
In just a few spare sentences, Frances Lefkowitz can tell a life's story—of an aging ballplayer or of a mother's love.
Thaisa Frank: Flash as Seizure of Language
Thaisa Frank is an instinctual writer in the best of ways. Her stories often read as if they take place in a dream world, yet without any forced contrivances or showy surrealism, as if she's simply tracing a path from one mystery to the next.
Memoir as Collage: The Morphing, Absurd Self
Paul Strohm has taken a different approach to memoir. Instead of writing the confessional tell-all in a conventional narrative, he spins the tale of his life through 100 100-word stories.
Molly Giles: The Art of Chasing Fireflies
Flash fiction goes by all sorts of names—everything from "short shorts" to "micro-fiction" to "postcard fiction"—but Molly Giles has come up with our favorite term so far: "fireflies." Her fireflies light up the hushes of a night sky, capturing those quick bursts of drama with a vivid lyricism that the form is designed for.
The Art of Flashing
The editors of Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine tell us how short-shorts can be complex, how small stories can be big, and why they chose a 360-word limit for their flashes.
Jessica Eve Rattner: Telling Stories with Photos
Documentary photography is Jessica Rattner’s passion. “You have to be a good storyteller,” says Rattner of her art. She says she has always been drawn to individuals invisible to most others. “They see me and I see them,” she says. “We’re all on a spectrum. We’re not all that different from one another. And that’s what fascinates me and has for a long time.”
Redefining Facebook: Lou Beach and His 420 Characters
Lou Beach's 420-character stories are at once graceful and arresting. They read like snippets of a noir novel, yet they're often funny. They might not be exactly 100 words, but we'll make an exception.
Maud Casey Tends to the Gaps of Her Story Materials
Maud Casey didn't take a delicate approach to her first 100-word story. In fact, she says she crashed around, confident that such a contained form could take the bashing. As with several of our featured authors, Casey had never written a 100-word story before—and hadn't written a story this short, in fact. She's pondered economy in fiction, though, and knows how the material of a story tends to find its form—because of, not despite, of the crashing around.
Joel Brouwer: 100-Word Story as Prose Poem
The line between a prose poem and a story is often a thin one, perhaps not discernible at all. Poet Joel Brouwer's 100-word prose poems in Centuries, a National Book Critics Circle Notable Book in 2003, reside on that thin line. Whether Brouwer's centuries are poems or stories really doesn't matter, though. As Andrei Codrescu put it, they "work as missiles, pastries, or treasure chests." We sat down with Brouwer (virtually) to find out more.
Myra Sklarew: A Poet Discovers the 100-Word Story
Myra Sklarew, former president of Yaddo Artists Community and professor emerita at American University, only recently encountered the 100-word story. She's always looking to condense her poems, though, "to get to the white heat of experience," so entering into such a compact story world suits her sensibilities.
