Yasmina Din Madden: You Know Nothing
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 contributor Yasmina Din Madden about her debut story collection You Know Nothing, which releases from Curbstone Books later this week. Yasmina is a good friend of mine from grad school. I love her work, and I’m super excited about this book. To get a taste of Yasmina’s writing, check out her 100-word essay “Rewind,” published by 100 Word Story in 2025.
What is one of your favorite sentences in
this book?
“I clap and yell encouragement like a demented cheerleader.” Mostly because the speaker is clapping for and yelling encouragement at a dog, and also because I love the word demented.
If you were to offer a recipe for how to write this book, what would be the ingredients? Steps?
Preheat oven to 500 degrees F
Ingredients:
One thick skin—your own
1 lb rejection
1 gallon perseverance
1.5 quarts starting over
1 part backtracking to 2 parts progress
A dash of joy
A generous dollop of gratitude
Step 2:
Tenderize skin with kitchen mallet
Step 3:
Finely mince rejection
Step 4:
Gently fold in perseverance
Step 5:
Whisk in backtracking until thickened
Step 6:
Season with joy and gratitude, knead all ingredients, and shape into a rectangular baking pan or Pyrex.
Step 7:
Bake at 500 degrees for several years. Be careful of burning.
Who might you have been if you hadn’t become a writer?
Realistically: A librarian or, ummmm, an English prof…
Based on pure fantasy, the following hyphenate: Marine biologist-National Geographic Photographer-Food critic-Michelin chef.
If your book were a landscape, what would it be?
An ocean. Hopefully readers feel some of the things I do when spending time at or in any large natural body of water—be that an ocean or one of the Great Lakes: beauty, wildness, transformation, calm, the unexpected. Also, many of the stories are corporeal in nature—an attempt to write the body—so an oceanscape seems fitting given all of the water imagery associated with corporeal writing.
What are you working on these days?
A novel that follows a group of seventeen-year-old girls in 1994 and later in 2024. It stems from a story in my collection and centers on two crimes that occur in the 90s era of the novel.
This is a sharp and intellectually stimulating analysis that brilliantly deconstructs the ‘micro-literary architecture’ of brevity and the critical importance of narrative compression in the evolution of modern flash fiction. I particularly appreciate the way the feature highlights how the shift from expansive prose to high-impact, mission-aligned linguistic precision serves as a vital bridge between the abstract mechanics of the 100-word constraint and a profound, lived experience of emotional resonance—it’s a powerful reminder that the most resonant creative environments are those that prioritize procedural integrity, ethical complexity, and the strategic interrogation of the stories that shape our shared progress. The insight into how these minimalist frameworks function as both a practical toolkit for the contemporary storyteller and a sophisticated roadmap for the future of the 100 Word Story community is a fantastic and deeply moving observation. Thank you for sharing such a clear and focused perspective on the intersection of brevity, craft, and the seeker’s heart!