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. I have a show at Bob’s Java Jive on Nov. 14, opening for Mike Votato and the Ding Dongs. 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.