Sherrie Flick: I Have Not Considered Consequences

Welcome again to the new interview series at 100 Word Story to promote forthcoming and recently published books by our contributors. Authors answer five questions, each in 100 words or fewer. If you’re a contributor with a new book and you’d like to be included in this series, please reach out to us at hundredwordstory [at] gmail.com.

This week, we’re delighted to feature an interview with another Autumn House Press author. Contributor Sherrie Flick’s I Have Not Considered Consequences, published in April 2025, is her third story collection. Sherrie Flick is also author of a novel and an essay collection, and she served as co-editor for the Norton anthology Flash Fiction America and series editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018 (Braddock Avenue Books). Her most recent 100 Word Story piece “Rabbit” was published in December 2025.

 

What is one of your favorite sentences in this book?

Here’s one of my favorites from I Have Not Considered Consequences. It’s from the story “Breaking”: “Because it’s 1991 and the world has just surprisingly, sledgehammeringly opened up into fissures that haven’t quite settled into place yet, the bear looks guilty.” My editor argued against “sledgehammeringly,” said it wasn’t a word, and I argued back that it was the exact word the sentence needed. I guess this sentence is dear to me because I fought for it. It also suggests both a large, historic world and the micro, eccentric world of the bear, who is a focus throughout the collection.

 

Tell us about the process of writing this book.

This story collection arose from super weird pandemic lockdown times. I had a real, no questions asked muse visit me: the bear. He showed up in stories I wrote, with no real goal, in my journal. He isn’t a specific bear, but more a bearness that hovered over me for 13 stories worth of time, and then sauntered away, done. Fascinating. I typed up the stories and it was a total surprise to realize they could work as a thread through a collection. With the bears in place I wrote a bunch of non-bear stories to fill it all in.

 

What was particularly fun about writing this book?

Since I was actually supposed to be revising my essay collection I had no expectations for these stories as I drafted them. It was procrastination, pure and easy. The bear stories seemed ridiculous, and then they seemed fun. I came at it with a playful spirit that pushed back against the closed-up unknown space of the pandemic. Plus: I’d never before had a muse! Artist friends have had them, and I was always a little jealous of that ease: Ah, a muse. You don’t get to pick what/who it is, how, or why. It’s just: Here we go. Start writing.

 

 

Who might you have been if you hadn’t become a writer?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I guess I’m at a point in my career where I feel like I have some hindsight. If I hadn’t gotten accepted into a graduate program in the mid-90s, I would have continued working at the career I had at hand: baking. In that other world, where I don’t pull up stakes and move sight unseen to the Great Plains, I stay in San Francisco and open a cool homestyle bakery. It becomes the heart of the neighborhood it’s nestled into. I lure in artist friend workers and have a great life.

 

What are you working on these days?

I’m finishing up a nonfiction craft book that I’m co-writing with Ladette Randolph and Heather Lundine. It walks the reader through the many steps needed to get to a first working manuscript draft. It looks to teach a unique drafting and self-editing process. That book should come out in 2027. I’m also working on a book-length, linked-micro story collection that pays homage to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio in its setting and its aesthetic. All of the stories will be drafted on lined 3×5 Post-It Notes. In fact, my recent 100 Word Story publication, “Rabbit,” is part of this new project.