An Interview with Michael Keen
Interviewed by James Ketih Smith and Charlie Zacks
James Keith Smith: Last year, when you came down to Tacoma for a reading, the first thing you asked me if there were any good karaoke bars. How many nights a week do you typically sing karaoke?
Michael Keen: I just moved to Portland, so I’m doing it less frequently as I’m getting adjusted. I’m doing it probably two nights per week right now. At the end of my time in Seattle, I was doing it four or five nights a week. I think most people would say that’s excessive lol.
JKS: From what you’ve said, it sounds like this essay just poured out of you. The bulk of it was written in one weekend. I read in an interview that you try and write 333 words each day. Is that still your writing practice?
MK: My goal is to get at least 333 words per day, yeah. That adds up to ten thousand words per month, which is sixty thousand every six months. I like the idea of churning out a full-length book every six months. And I’ve been pretty good about that. Only one of those books has been published, but so it goes. And, yes, the initial draft of the essay was written over the course of a weekend. I aim for 333 words per day, but if I’m excited about a project, I often write much more than that. I was excited about the essay so I wrote it quickly.
JKS: You have an MFA from Syracuse and studied with George Saunders. I can imagine that shaped your writing in many ways. But it was awhile after the MFA that you started publishing. What’s the biggest thing you got out of that experience?
MK: Oh boy lol. My feelings about MFA programs are pretty complicated. I’m really glad I went to one, but I was drinking a lot, and my time there was nuts. I did write a huge amount, though, and I read some amazing books. And I made some lifelong friends while I was there. From a writing perspective, the highlight of my time there was going to George’s office hours one time, and having a long talk with him about my writing. He asked me what my aims were for my writing. Not from a publishing perspective, but more from an aesthetic perspective. How did I want my writing to make readers feel? That was one of the questions he asked, and, strange as it may seem, it wasn’t one I’d ever really asked myself.
JKS: Can you talk a little bit about the clown that graces the cover of you essay?
MK: That’s my friend, Izzy. I haven’t been friends with them for that long, but they’re great. I met them because they encountered my book out in the wild, and they liked it. They ended up interviewing me for a podcast, and we did karaoke together not long after that. I invited them to my birthday party, and they came dressed up as a clown. It’s a side-gig of theirs. I took the photo of them at my party, and thought it would be fitting as a cover for the book.
Charlie Zacks: I take it that karaoke for you has little to do with the actual musical quality of the singing and is more about the mere presence and ritual of the performance. I’ve sung in several bands, choirs, operas, musicals, etc and singing was a huge part of my childhood and early adulthood. I am wondering if you’ve ever considered taking singing more seriously as a practice in its own right?
MK: I’ve considered joining/starting a band, but two big liabilities are that A) I’m not a good singer B) I don’t know how to play any instruments. So that’s a no from me, dawg.
CZ: Throughout your essay, you analogize your relationship with karaoke to your past cocaine addiction. I used to sob after every show with my old band. Why do you think we want to destroy ourselves in front of others?
MK: Well, destroying ourselves sounds negative, but it doesn’t have to be. I think the main thing is that it feels good (even if it's scary) to not feel any distance from the people around us. Loneliness is a big thing for me, and I feel most alive when I feel connected to others. Being vulnerable—whether it’s through karaoke, or being in love, or being high on drugs, or whatever—lets other people in. And I think most people want to let other people in.
CZ: You write ‘I just want someone to love me. I don’t care who you are or where you’re from.” I think this gets at the heart of this piece. An feeling of open desire. Shots in the dark. Showing up at midnight at a random karaoke bar looking for something to call connection. Is that a fair approximation?
MK: That line is kind of a joke. I mean, I like the sentiment. But the section you quoted is directly lifted from the Backstreet Boys’ song, “As Long As You Love Me.” It’s part of the chorus. “I don’t care who you are, where you’re from, what you did, as long as you love me.” I do stuff like that a few times in the essay, actually. The essay is so heavy that I thought it would be good to throw in some references to songs I’ve sung. The title of the essay, for instance, is the chorus to the Semisonic song, “Closing Time,” where the singer says “I know who I want to take me home” over and over again.
CZ: What is next for you? In real life or in the literary world.
MK: I have no idea. Recovery (and the recovery community) is a really big part of my life. I go to a lot of meetings. And I work as a hospice social worker. I’ve done that for several years now, and I enjoy it. I’ll keep on plugging away with writing, I’m sure. I’m a lifer in that regard. Virtually nothing I write gets published, and that gets me down sometimes. But all I can do is write what I like, and keep on submitting. I can’t control how it pans out.
And Interview with Jason M. Thornberry
Interviewed by Michael Keen
MK: Other than books, what are some of the biggest influences on your writing? I work in hospice, for instance. And hospice, as a general milieu, has really impacted my writing. What are the factors and influences that have impacted yours?
JT: My life before I became a serious writer was music. I played the drums and devoted myself. You have to dedicate yourself to something if you want to get good at it. So, I studied jazz. Over twelve years, I played around 500 concerts in every setting imaginable, from parties to amphitheaters. And for my last band, I lived like a monk, in a studio apartment with my bandmates. I worked a job that paid the rent and little else. I barely ate. I had nothing to fall back on because I didn’t care about anything else. Just music. I read voraciously, a habit I picked up from my grandmother in Oregon. And I’ve always been a bit of an obsessive. When I discover an artist (music, literature, film), I inhale their work, surrounding myself with it. Just ask my wife. She tells me I get on these kicks (David Lynch, Sergio Leone, The Fall, Hawkwind, Russian Lit, Rilke) and they’re all I think about or talk about.
My disability informs my writing, too. In 1999, I survived a catastrophic injury, and I spent a decade piecing my life back together, learning how to live in the world. My injury ended music for me, amputating that part of my life. It also created divisions between me and some of my family, as well as the people I thought were my friends. I wrote about the experience in a memoir, and I’ve published quite a bit of it in journals. As a kid, I’d wanted to become a novelist. Then music came along. After my injury, I started writing again. My disability informs my writing because it illuminates the world. It’s the lens through which I see things now, like a pair of glasses you can’t take off. Someday, the memoir will find a home.
MK: There’s a dreamlike and surreal quality to a lot of your pieces. (“When my mother, a cockroach with the head of a pig, gave birth to me, she asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.”) At moments like these, are you guided by the imagery?
JT: No. That story (The Landlord) was originally a piece I wrote for The Stranger, a free Seattle newspaper. In 2014, my wife and I were getting priced out of our apartment and having a hard time finding a new place we could afford. We spent an entire summer looking, attending open houses, and meeting dozens of landlords. I described them in the piece as “weirdly dressed, introverted freaks, like escapees from some human pain-tolerance experimentation facility.” Food stains on their clothing, tufts of hair growing from the sides of their necks, puffs of shaving cream lodged in their ears, orange teeth, boogers. They seemed like they’d just crawled out of a cave. Some came across as aristocrats when we called them up. Then we’d actually meet them. They’d be sweating profusely in their ill-fitting food-stained clothes, muttering to themselves, fidgeting, avoiding eye contact. When they shook our hands, their hands were like wet claws. Like shaking hands with a dead lobster. It was awful. And we were bowing and scraping before these people because we needed their help. So, I sat down and wrote about them and I instantly felt better. Writing as therapy.
I sent the Landlord story to The Stranger’s editor, Christopher Frizzelle. Christopher liked it. But he reminded me that they don’t publish fiction. He asked me if I wanted to write about my experience dealing with life as a renter amid the burgeoning gentrification of Seattle instead. And my article (Seattle Landlords Are the Weirdest People) wound up on the cover. It was published during my second week as an undergrad, and I showed it to my professors. Look! I’m a published writer! I was forty-three, a disabled “non-traditional” student and a guy who’d spent the last fourteen years begging people to read his work. I was thrilled beyond words.
But I wasn’t guided by that story’s imagery as much as I wanted to articulate my profound repulsion and disgust. Being a professional tenant, I’ve always contended with landlords, the majority of whom are soulless reptilian ghouls who’d happily kick their grandparents down the stairs to steal the nickels that flew from their pockets. Strangely enough, I have a fabulous landlord now. He’s an incredibly kind and considerate person. I wish we’d met him sixteen years ago.
MK: There are times when you seem to be in a leaner, minimalist mode. Like Raymond Carver, or Hemingway, or Bukowski. But other times you seem to be in a more playful and maximalist mode.
JT: I wrote most of the short fiction in this collection for a single writing class at Chapman University in 2019. The professor, Richard Bausch, was the reason I attended the writing program. Richard’s a kind man, a great writer, and a great teacher. His classes kept me busy. One evening, he instructed our class to return with four completed pieces: a fairy tale, a short story, an anecdote, and a joke. The fairy tale I wrote for that day was The Clever Fool, which is in the chapbook. The short story was about the relationships of people living in a tiny town. The anecdote wasn’t really an anecdote at all, but a weird flash fiction piece about a conversation overheard in the checkout line at a grocery store. And I told a dumb joke about Donald Trump. A cheap shot. Low-hanging fruit. But it made Richard laugh.
I wrote the essays fairly recently. And I downplayed the behavior of the guy in the Nesting Season piece. He tossed his bike and put up his dukes, all because I’d just saved a baby crow. This was 2022. Society was emerging from the pandemic, and some people still struggled to relate to one another. The other essay (Seventeen Seconds) was about how, as a writer, I feel I must be especially present in the world. So many people are mesmerized by their cell phones. They’re always in their hands. So many people are afraid of boredom. But boredom is the imagination’s playground. Without boredom, art would die. Raymond Carver would’ve chucked his phone over the Fremont Bridge. The protagonist of my new novel does.
As for minimalism, I finished a rather minimalist novel in 2023 about a disabled woman living in a tiny apartment with her daughter and working at a dollar store to make ends meet. Initially, I was writing with Verlyn Klinkenborg’s work close at hand and crafting with concision. The way he does. Trying, at least. I’d just audited my friend Peter Moe’s undergraduate class, The Sentence. Peter radicalized me toward cutting every ounce of fat from my work. He’s a fantastic writer, and someone I wish I could have studied with when I was an undergrad.
And I love mixing my sentences. Long freighting sentences. Abrupt sentences. Page-long sentences. One-word sentences. Interrupted dialogue. Fragments. Variety keeps the reader reading, right?
MK: In terms of your own writing process, which modes are you most comfortable in?
JT: All of them. A valuable lesson I learned in my writing program was to experiment with different styles. Don't simply be a literary fiction writer or a poet specializing in alliterative haiku or a David Mamet-obsessed screenwriter or a creative nonfiction writer who writes about rescued puppies and makes people cry. Be all of them.
MK: Animals feature prominently in the book. Crows, cockroaches. Can you talk a bit about your artistic interest in animals and animal-related imagery?
JT: Animals are innocent. They don’t get drunk and call you names on your birthday. They don’t hang up on you when you call them on their birthday. They don’t chase you out of their house on Christmas Eve, screaming at you. They don’t know how to be anything but themselves. My dog’s worst quality? He’s stubborn. He’ll make you give him a snack before he’ll take a bath. And I love to feed the crows in my neighborhood. Crows seem to recognize me wherever I go in Seattle, like they’ve told each other about me. “That tall guy will feed you if you follow him!” Maybe saving that baby crow boosted my crow cred.
MK: One thing that intrigued me was the endings to your pieces. They’re hard to describe in a simple way, which is a testament, I think, to how complex they are. They don’t wrap everything up with a nice little bow. Can you talk a bit about endings? What are you hoping your endings will do?
JT: I hope my endings challenge the reader by testing their beliefs. I hope my readers see themselves and people they know in my stories. Even a story that traffics in absurdism does so to pull the curtain away from things we do every day as people. Though I write about everything, or try to, my governing genre is realism. And that’s especially true when I write something that appears farcical or outlandish.
As a society, we’re desperately afraid of the unknown. And the unavoidable. The latest fad is anti-aging. Why would anyone want to live forever, preserving themselves as a Botox mannequin with exaggerated bee-stung lips and hair the color of shoe polish? I’m fifty-five, and I don’t care. Hopefully, I’ll get old. Like I’m supposed to. Many of my favorite writers explore the ramifications of randomness, mortality, and the unknown: Joyce, Beckett, Steinbeck, Charles Portis, John Gardner, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Garielle Lutz, Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Charles Johnson, Tobias Wolff, Flannery O’Connor, William H Gass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Marlon James, Chekhov.
MK: You mention poets (e.g., William Carlos Williams) and poetry at various points in the book. I’m always interested in prose writers that are drawn to poetry. Do you write poetry yourself? Or do you read poetry?
JT: Both. Poetry informs my writing. Along with William Carlos Williams, I love James Wright, June Jordan, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gregory Orr, Robert Frost, Carolyn Forché. I love the way poetry distills language to its essence. But even after 400 years, no one can touch Shakespeare and his sonnets.
MK: What are some books you’ve read in the past few years that have blown your socks off? What are some of the books that you always return to?
JT: I always return to Dostoevsky and Toni Morrison, my two favorite writers. For several years, I read Paul Auster’s Music of Chance and Don DeLillo’s Libra continually. I got into Auster after reading his New York Trilogy. I enjoyed the romanticism he brought to New York City and the way it seeps into his other work, even stories that aren’t about New York have a backward glance at the city and its culture.
DeLillo has a way of rendering entire scenes with the edges smoothed away. He achieves this at the sentence level, so that what’s implied comes to you naturally. DeLillo gives readers the benefit of being intelligent enough to draw their own conclusions. His style goes deeper than show-don’t-tell via the cinematic structure of his work. I read once that Norman Mailer said he could always overcome writer’s block by picking up Anna Karenina at random and reading a page. And I’ve tried that with Tolstoy, but also with John Williams’s Stoner. And DeLillo.
I’m hooked on Hilary Mantel and Claire Keegan right now. And books about music.
MK: What are you working on at the moment?
JT: I wrapped up a novel on New Year’s Eve, and I’m laying the foundation for a new project. Notecards and scribbles and text messages to myself. Odds and ends about characters and action. I’ll spend 2026 working on that book while my agent tries to find a home for this latest novel. Meantime, I’m really excited about The Finish Line. Bringing these stories together makes them feel brand new, especially The Landlord, which has never seen the light of day until now.
An Interview with Ed Komenda
Interviewed by Jason Thornberry
JT: Why do you write—and how did you get your start as a writer?
EK: I’ve been drawn to books and stories since I was a kid. Even before I could read, I liked the idea of books and libraries and the quiet, lamp-lit safety and escapism they seemed to provide. When I started reading, books were just that—an escape from the tumultuousness of growing up. The first thing I remember writing was a poem about the planets, assigning each one to the personalities of my aunts and uncles. I typed it on a typewriter I found in my grandma’s basement in Chicago, where I grew up, and presented her the first draft. I remember her reading it and smiling, but I don’t remember writing anything else for a long time. It wasn’t until I got a guitar when I was 12 and started playing in bands around the neighborhood that I started writing lyrics for songs, which were really just shitty poems over music. I remember watching the cartoon Doug, and I don’t remember much of the show today, but what I do remember is learning that a notebook could also be a safe place to work things out through writing. I was always scribbling into notebooks, and that’s true to this day, as I slowly encroach upon 40. When I was a junior in high school, I had this legendary English teacher named Mr. Kroc. He would stand at the front of the class with his foot up on the desk and just eviscerate the essays we turned in the week before. I took it as a challenge to try and impress The Kroc, as we called him, as he was known to chew you a new asshole if you misplaced a comma. One day he assigned us to write an essay about one superpower we would pick and why. I remember sitting in my grandma’s basement, in the backroom where the hot water heater and the band equipment were tucked in the corner, and typing into a laptop. I may have been sipping on a glass of bourbon, because by that point I had learned about the connection between drinking and writing, which is laughable to me today. That night, however, I wrote a short story about a dude who could transform into any animal he wanted, so he transformed into a giant wolf and took out a villain named the Chickenman who had abducted his girlfriend earlier in the story. The essay was to be one page, so I made it single-spaced in a small font so I could pack as many words as I could to tell the story. When Mr. Kroc read the story the next week, the class was captivated. I even managed to make The Kroc laugh with a line about the Chickenman “choking his chicken.” I made one mistake in the paper—a missing comma. When he was done reading, he said, “This is an A. And Komenda wrote it.” That moment changed the entire course of my life. I went away to college and became a journalist for many years and figured out a way to have a life as a writer in between the raindrops of life and work and all the other shit that’s happening all the time. I suppose I write because I’m still that kid scribbling in a notebook, and that wouldn’t change, even if I never published a single word.
JT: For some writers, a story can begin with an overheard conversation on the bus or a sentence scrawled on a wall in a gas station bathroom. What’s the spark that gets a story happening in your mind?
EK: All of the above. It’s all material. And it always starts with life—an image I’ve seen in the world, or a scene I’ve witnessed or been a part of. One of the stories in the collection is called The Night I Met Richard Brautigan. That story came together very quickly, because that was an actual experience I had and for some reason felt compelled to write down in a notebook. The story budded from that one night I sang karaoke with a dude who reminded me of Richard Brautigan. I don’t like to label things when it comes to writing, though I suppose some people would call this type of writing autofiction or whatever. I don’t give a shit about any of that, and I don’t think about that when I’m writing. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all fiction, they’re all stories, and it’s all writing. More abstractly, stories can start with a feeling. The story Quitter, for example, came from a real conversation unfolding in my head about quitting—giving up, finding a new racket, so to speak. I was living in Seattle at the time. I would walk down to this coffee shop where I could get a seat by the window and watch the rain and think and write, and one very early winter morning in particular this idea of quitting and what that means was bubbling up, and I was compelled to pick up a pen and try to capture whatever it was that was occupying my mind and, in a lot of ways, directing how I moved in the world. So I went to my seat by the window and wrote it down. It’s a very short story—or riff, or whatever you want to call it—and I worked on the story for several months on and off until I felt it was good enough to share. When I did, I got a note from the editor of this online lit journal that said, “I was having a real shitty morning/couple of days, and this was just exactly what I needed. I love this so much.” So maybe that gets to the why of why I write. I write to capture my experience of having this extremely rare gift, called consciousness. Sometimes I’m successful, and those sentences resonate with people outside of myself. But it always starts with the experience I’m having in this life and the world.
JT: What occupies your time, apart from writing—and how does what you do outside of writing inform your work?
EK: I have a couple dogs—Sprout and Spud. They’re both Boston terriers, and they demand a strict routine. One slip, and I’m judged. And the opinion of those cartoony pooches is the only opinion I care about. I’ve worked from home for the last decade, so the dogs really pull me out of the laboratory, so to speak, and get me out into the world. That routine informs my writing life in many ways, most of which have nothing to do with actually sitting in front of a piece of paper. I’m also a musician. I still perform around town. So music also gets me out of my writing room and among the people, which is important to me. I try to get out there among other beating hearts. Again, it all comes down to starting from life. I also have a small press called Spaghetti Days Press. I make little books very cheaply, and this allows me to assemble things without thinking too deeply about it. Me and my buddy Ben like to call this kind of work “factory work.” Paper. Glue. A big red stapler. You know, the good shit. Having worked as a bicycle assembler in my youth, there’s a kind of satisfaction that comes with making a pile of stuff, calling it done, and walking away.
JT: Tell me a little about your process from idea to first draft.
EK: It almost always starts with a sentence written in a notebook. Sometimes it’s several sentences. Sometimes, but rarely, it starts with an entire story written longhand. I write everything longhand because when I’m faced with a blinking cursor, it’s too easy to try and change things too soon. So writing longhand helps me be less editorial and critical of the sentences. Once I have the skeleton of something, I’ll type it up. I start working on the sound of it. The sound of prose is important to me. I actually think the rhythm of a piece of writing is more important than the meaning of it. So I read everything out loud, and it’s not a first draft until I can read it out loud and think, Okay, this is starting to sound like something.
JT: I know some writers dread revision, while others find it the place where their work begins to take shape and shine. Describe your revision process and its place in your work.
EK: Yes, revision is very important to me. I was a newspaper reporter and editor for many years, and in that world, it’s all about speed and getting stuff published fast to “feed the beast.” The problem with that approach is there is little time for revision, and oftentimes things get published long before they are ready. When I was in that world, I made it a point to have a separation of church and state. When it came to my writing, I would always give it the time it needed to change shape and grow or shrink or die. The most important part of revision to me is waiting—writing something and putting it in a box or a drawer and leaving it alone for a long time. That time and space away from the piece is only going to make it better. I like to come back to a piece after enough time has passed so I can read it and think, Who the fuck wrote this? And then I know how to fix it. I’m working on a manuscript right now that I wrote over the course of two years and put in a box for another two years. So that’s four years on a book that might take another year or two to finish, which sounds very reasonable to me. You just see things differently when there’s enough distance between you and the piece. The nuts and bolts of my revision process are too boring to go into here. It means a lot of sitting and ruining drafts with a pen and crumbling up paper into balls that pile up in little heaps that are fun to throw in a garbage can.
JT: I noticed a stylistic shift in your work. From the colloquial style of Quitter to the more formal style of Founder’s Parade, how do you arrive at the form you’ll use for each story?
EK: Every story has its own demands. For Quitter, first person best served the story because that’s how that first splash of a story landed on the page, and there was an energy to it that I did not want to compromise. The job of that story became nurturing that voice and sustaining that energy to the very last period. The main character in Founder’s Day is a journalist, and the piece tells the story of his fall from grace. When I started, the voice presented itself in a cold, journalistic style that you might read in a long-form magazine story published in Esquire or GQ. And I quite liked the power the third-person omniscient approach gave me to say things only someone who deeply reported the details of his life could say. The challenge of that story was cutting out everything that got in the way of the narrative. It’s really a tick-tock of this character’s downfall over the span of two days. What really helped was sitting down with James (the editor of Sand and Gravel) and figuring out what could be cut. I like to joke with him that this is the James Keith Smith edit. But really, he helped make the story better and shorter without losing any of its energy.
JT: How do you think your writing has evolved in the years since you first started?
EK: If anything, I hope it’s become more clear since that first poem about the planets. Being a journalist for so long taught me how to be an editor of myself, and I would say what’s changed the most is my ability to edit a story. In the early days, many stories would burn out and fade away because I just had no idea how to fix them. Even if somebody told me how to fix them, I didn’t have the technique to get the draft to where it needed to be. That being said, I would say my writing is still evolving. This book I’m working on now is very different in terms of voice and storytelling, and I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing yet or what final shape will emerge. That’s really what stories are: shapes. I feel a bit lost and floating in the sea of this thing, which is a good sign, because eventually that shape I’m seeking is going to poke through the fog.
JT: If you had to recommend five books to an up-and-coming writer, what would they be?
EK: I had a friend say a long time ago, “Read everything. Don’t worry about how a book is helping you. They all count.” That’s the caveat to this short list of books: read everything. The worst thing a writer can be is somebody who doesn’t read a lot of stuff all the time.
Rick Bass has an early book called Oil Notes, which is basically the notebook of a guy whose job it is to find oil in remote parts of the Southeast U.S. It sounds boring, but this book is anything but that. In one chapter, he’s telling you how to find oil, and in another he’s telling you about falling in love and making BLTs and pancakes and the beauty of ugly dogs and the appeal of cold winters and how his writing isn’t where he wants it to be and how he might change that and why he does it in the first place. It’s really a book about a person trying to figure out the best way to live in a world where everything is happening all at once. It’s about digging into the deepest parts of yourself to find the valuable stuff buried within. I find myself returning to it time and time again whenever I’m looking for a jolt. Then there are the short story collections Dead Boys and Sweet Nothing by my buddy Richard Lange. Denis Johnson once said of his work, “Sounds like Elmore Leonard writing from the guts of Hell.” Richard’s stories should be on the shelves of anybody who wants to write stories that are beautifully rendered, truthful, and devastating. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides is a novel I read every couple years to live with that collective “we” voice, which doesn’t really exist in the world. It’s a book you should really pair with the film of the same name by Sofia Coppola to see how she translated Jeff’s words and story to the screen. Lots of stuff to learn in that book. Lastly, I’m always picking through Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago, although you should read everything Stuart has written. This book contains stories long and short, including “Bottlecaps,” which I think might be the best flash story ever written—and it was published long before anybody labeled stories by that hideous name. Stuart is a poet who is known mostly for his short stories, and many of his stories began as prose poems. He puts all his trust into the power of an image, and it seems he really strives to make the experience of reading one of his stories like floating down a river of images. To me, his stuff reads like the best coffeehouse jazz—think Coltrane’s A Love Supreme or Monk’s Thelonious Himself. Just go get his books and learn something.
An Interview with Travis Flatt
Interviewed by Ed Komenda
EK: How do stories typically start for you? Do they begin with an image or a single line? I'm curious what it is that gets you to sit down and write that first sentence.
TF: More often an image. Images come to me frequently; I jot them down in my phone's notes app. That's not really necessary. I remember the good ones, the ones that excite me. Less often, I sit down to freewrite, and a couple of interesting sentences just happen, appear from the aether. If I'm writing from a prompt, I'll sit back and turn it over in my mind until an image forms. I think images are a crucial part of flash fiction. If someone asks me what a story's about, like my dad, when I tell him I have a story coming out, I might describe it as an image rather than give a sentence synopsis. I'll say something like, "A highwayman asks the woman he robs to dance with him." That's "A Flower, a Pistol, and a Musicbox." That's based on a true story, by the way.
EK: When and why did you start writing stories in earnest? What's the Travis Flatt origin story?
TF: I worked in various aspects of theater through my twenties. That began to slow down because of health trouble in my thirties, which was frustrating, and I started to get bitter, kind of cranky. This entire time, I’d been beta-reading my twin brother’s short stories—he’s been writing since we were in high school, did an MFA at Old Dominion, edited for Barely South—and I’ve always been a big reader. In this unhappy theater headspace, with all this creative energy I couldn’t consistently expend on acting/directing, I kept saying, “I’ll try writing.” In 2020, I began reading story collections cover to cover, like Where I’m Calling From, Tenth of December, The Collected Stories of Kafka, or Flannery O’Connor, etc., then aping them in bad stories of my own. By mid-2021, I grew the confidence to submit some stories. My brother explained Duotrope and Submittable. I think I first published in 2022 in a journal that no longer exists.
EK: My favorite story in the collection is The Newly Divorced Guy's Homestyle Fish Stew. The way the story shifts from what seems to be a man coping with cooking to a man seeking a very particular form of revenge surprised me in the way great stories tend to do. What do you think makes a story good? And how do you know when you've reached the ending?
TF: The simple answer is if the writing excites me at the sentence level, makes me say “wow” or laugh. The better answer is depth, if it feels like a complete world, one with complex imagery and thematic content. It either fully absorbs me as a reader or intimidates me as a writer. This is cliché as hell, but I don’t think my stories ever feel finished to me. It was a problem I had with theater. I always feel like there’s a deeper, better place I could go, could have gone, with a story or performance, and quit before I got there, this fantasy version I didn’t quite reach. With performances, I ran out of time in rehearsal. With stories, I toyed with every sentence and couldn’t think of a better way of wording it.
EK: Who are the writers you admire and some of the books you've found helpful along the way?
TF: Borges and Kafka. I don’t necessarily think I write anything like them, but I love them. I read them over and over again. Borges’s imagination just astounds me; the man was from a different planet. Kafka was a master of depth, and he also has a clean style that I admire. My brother, Lucas Flatt—he’s a hilarious writer, and a great teacher, that’s what he does for a living: he’s a freshman comp and a creative writing professor. It’s odd, because at the conversational level, I don’t think he comes off as smarter than me, but his writing is more complex and sophisticated, the vocabulary and syntax, etc. His jokes are more high-brow. As for flash fiction, I admire (and have been influenced by) pretty much anyone who’s been published in the popular—or new—flash journals over the last several years. There are way too many to name. It’s a generic, cop-out answer, but I read the flash journals daily, and it motivates me. You have to know what’s going on, what’s popular, what the different journals like, etc. I get jealous, of course. If you can’t admit that, I find that a little small and dishonest.
EK: The stories in your collection are all very short. I suppose they are what the kids call flash. What draws you to the short form?
TF: Several things, really. Short attention span is a big factor. It’s what I like to read. In a collection of traditional (or whatever) short stories, longer stories, I gravitate to the shortest ones. I’m a very slow reader. Reading a twenty-page story takes me, like, forty-five minutes. As a writer, I feel like I have more control over the depth and completeness of a shorter story like a flash. I can do—or get closer to—everything I want to achieve. Writing long stories intimidates me. I only write, like, one a year. When I write any story, I don’t always know how it’s going to end, but I have a general idea. I can’t seem to do that with a longer story; I can’t seem to hold all of it in my head. I just start off and wander toward an unknown destination, and I find that process unpleasant. And, if I’m being brutally honest, I think there are more publication opportunities for flash fiction stories. More journals want them. I have a biased perspective on that, though—I know the flash fiction world much better. I don’t know the longer story scene very well. My brother writes longer stories, and they’re awesome. He publishes them, but it seems like he has to work harder to find homes for them. I know for sure that’s not an ability thing. For one thing, he taught me a fair portion of what I know.
EK: What's your dog(s)' name? I have two Boston Terriers — Sprout and Spud. They are straight up cartoon characters. What do you like about dogs? Do you see them as partners in your writing life?
TF: Okay, so I’ll be honest here—I know I make jokes about dogs in my author’s bio, but I don’t currently have one. Our Sheltie recently passed, which, of course, was devastating. That’s eased a bit after a few years. My wife and I, being goobers, send each other cute dog TikToks all the time. Thankfully, we do have an actual dog living with us; she’s just not technically ours. My mother-in-law, who’s building a house in our city, has a toy poodle. That’s not a breed I’m used to; my dad was a vet, and I’m snobby about breeds; I had exclusively herding dogs growing up. But the poodle, Molly, is a delight, just a bit less rugged-acting than the dogs I’m used to. When my stepson (and, I guess, my mother-in-law) move(s) out, which, if things go to plan, will be in 2026. My stepson’s graduating. We’re thinking of getting a dog this upcoming year, my wife and I. I think dogs are a huge commitment and are a companion in everything one does.