Many thanks to my friend and amazing author, Myfanwy Collins, for inviting me to participate in this Writing Process Blog Tour. (If you haven’t see it, here is her terrific post.) 1) What are you working on? Two things: I’m pulling together a new collection which may turn out to be a novella of connected
Asked by the editors of Blue Fifth Review to comment on the writing of this piece, I said, “La lecture huile sur toile is such a beautiful and ghostly painting. It evoked in me a terrible sense of loneliness. From that feeling, I created this gauzy scene with two characters: A naked woman walking in
Thanks to Jim Harrington, for inviting me to contribute a short piece at Flash Fiction Chronicles about why I write flash fiction. I don’t see myself as just a flash writer, but it is what I mostly write. For me, it is the art that most closely approximates the way I see the world and
I wrote several versions of this story, but this version, told in seven subtitled micros, is my favorite. Published years ago in Mississippi Review online, the story now appears in Together We Can Bury It. I’ve talked about segmented structure before, how the story and characterization are advanced and built-upon in short, sharp bursts and
The supper: Mashed potatoes with bits of beef and gravy mixed in. Large tumblers of cold milk. Your father’s bald head bent over his food, filling his cheeks like a squirrel. Birthmark shaped like the state of Maine on his forehead. Nobody talks, except for “pass the. . .” Your mother, looking weary, bags, actual
“You’re the girl, aren’t you?” the woman says. I’m sidled up to the bar at the Knights of Columbus Hall. It’s 11:00 in the morning on New Year’s Eve and we’ve just buried my dad. I ask the bartender to splash some more rum into my drink. I call him “barkeep” like we’re in a
I’ve been reading the Spring, 2014 Flash Fiction issue of New World Writing and swooning over some of the lines. It is said that in flash, you have to make every word count, every sentence, and it’s true. There’s no room for the ordinary. Here are some of my favorites: How many Monarchs are there?
When Jane was greedy, her mother would say she had a little pink pig inside her. All you do is want and take, sweetie, she said. They moved into a new house when Jane started high school. A bigger one they could all fit into, in a better neighborhood, but Jane liked the old house
The woman’s lover died quickly and unexpectedly on his front porch. He’d been drinking whiskey and now the sun was low and shown on his dead face. His dog licked his chest, right above the spot where his heart had seized up, until his wife came and found him. She put her hand to her
I’m very grateful for the kind reviews I’ve received so far for my recently re-issued flash/short story collection on Goodreads, NANOfiction, Fictionaut, and elsewhere. Here is a sampling: “Most of what I know about flash fiction I learned from reading Kathy Fish’s work. She’s a consummate master of the short form, and I’m so glad