Darlin’ Neal is author of the story collections Elegant Punk and Rattlesnakes & The Moon, both published by Press 53. She is the 2011 winner of DH Lawrence Fellowship from the Taos Summer Writers Conference, their highest honor. Her short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies. Her first collection, Rattlesnakes & The Moon, was nominated for numerous awards including The Story Prize and The Pen Faulkner Award. Her short stories and nonfiction have been nominated a dozen times for the Pushcart Prize. She serves as faculty advisor for The University of Central Florida’s award winning undergraduate literary magazine The Cypress Dome, and for The Writers In The Sun Reading Series for which she brings in writers of national caliber each semester. She is Fiction Editor of Florida Review.

Flash Fiction Chronicles: Let me first say you have some amazing stories here. It’s quite a moving collection. Your dark side appeals to me, your world view.  So speaking first of the overall work, you’ve created a sphere of soulful, vulnerable characters whose lives are filled with looming danger. It’s the threat, the restraint you show in the stories, I really like. There is authenticity here too and poetry threaded through the tragedies and impending tragedies, yet there is something here too that is hopeful, not a lot of hope, but hope.

“Once Upon a Time on Bourbon Street” and “Upstairs Boy” are just two of the stories that stick with me. These children, lost in the world, move on and through all that threatens them, not necessarily to a better life, but they keep moving, surviving, making due and that is real.

What has goaded you into writing about these people, young people mostly, who suffer and survive on the edge?

Darlin’ Neal: It is the world of the children I grew up in, a world at once magical and protected by my mother, and filled with dangers because of the poverty around us. I was the oldest sister with four younger brothers. When I left home I was 17 and I mourned for my brothers. I worried so what would happen to them. The two youngest have spent a lot of time in prison.

My stories are fiction, but these conditions inform them and the way drugs are taking so many people away right now with the heroin problems, with the horrors of meth.

There was one time in particular in my life where I myself was so hungry I couldn’t think, where I had holes in the bottoms of my shoes. It was a fairly brief time when we’d gone back to Mississippi. I felt quite clearly the way we can become lost. I felt that fear, for me it would have been losing out on my education. I am the only one in my family who went to college, one of only two who finished high school and there is such a danger in that. Anyway somehow I held on always to the core of myself. The danger for all these children is losing that core, that center where there is magic and love and openness to wonder.

FFC: Extrapolation! This is one of the surprises about writing, that we as writers do not need to experience everything we write about, but that we must be able to extrapolate and expand from what we do know.

Much of the world you write about comes from this process of pulling from what you have learned about life and this brings me to what your writing has, “universality.”  Good writing offers “truths” that resonate. “Unseen danger” struck me as being a core truth throughout your work. Can you talk about your process? How you take something you’ve experienced and transform it into something we can all relate to? For example the idea of being locked in a trunk—trunk as babysitter—in “Upstairs Boy.”

DN: This is something that comes up in teaching undergrads a lot. You’ll hear someone say, “I never experienced anything like that so I can’t relate to it.” But they can. To me that’s what’s sacred about writing: the creation of empathy. Reading literature is that bridge into shared experience, that immersion inside another’s moment.

As a writer I put myself not only in that trunk but inside of Carter’s visceral experience. He was not only my lens but my visceral filter. You don’t have to have ever been in a trunk, to have had a mother who prostituted herself to survive, who went to prison, to know what that feels like in a lived moment. You can experience by going into a sensory moment with someone you’ve come to know in a story. Imaginative narrative holds so much more power to create empathy, so much more power than an expository essay in this way because we are allowed a sense of lived experience as opposed to looking at someone from the outside and trying to put them in a box of judgment or pity.

FFC: You’ve beautifully defined how we engage with the page as a reader, why we read, the experience of being “with” someone, “be” someone outside of our own lives. How do you as a writer prepare yourself to bring that to your readers? What comes first, the idea, the character, an image, a detail? And where—and how—do you take it from there?

DN: For me what comes first is always a character or an image and very often dialogue. If an image: who is seeing this? From there I listen and stare, listen and stare and become focused on the entry and maintaining that patience.

FFC: From Misty Blue Waters, to Angelina to Maggie to Lizzie in “Once Upon a Time on Bourbon Street,” you’ve created characters striving toward the reality they want.  These young people are living on the edge and yet they have a certain resilience. Your process seems to come from pondering and being patient. In what way have these characters surprised you? What future do you see for them? How do they reflect your outlook on life?

DN: I follow my characters, especially in the early drafting. I enjoy the process of exploring through them so it’s always an adventure of surprises. There’s a little bit I see and know when I start out but it’s like pulling a curtain aside and entering into the life, seeing farther and farther in, understanding more and more layers of the moment. These characters you mention, they are survivors, which is a something I see only now that you mention them in a group to me. They are fighters. I wish for them that they find safety somewhere, that they learn to take care.

FFC: We care about them too because you’ve made us care.  Thank you, Darlin’ for discussing Elegant Punk with us.

by Gay Degani

“My wish list includes open concept, stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, undercounter sink, glass tile backsplash, walk-in pantry, real hardwood floors.  I want four bedrooms, three-and a half baths, en suite master bedroom with two walk-in closets. Three-car garage, walk-out finished basement for a man-cave and media room.  Large deck for BBQs on an acre of fenced land.  All for $150,000. We’re 23-years-old and have been working for a year and deserve to have everything we want….”

I admit it.  I watch too much HGTV, especially a crazy little show called “House Hunters.”  I don’t know what it is, but I am fascinated the expectations people have when shopping for their dream house…and what they believe is possible on a limited budget.  What it reminds me of, I suppose, is myself and my original expectations about writing and having a writing career.  How much easier I thought it would be.

On “House Hunters,” the real estate agents do a lot of whispering to the camera about how their clients need to face reality and adjust their expectations. They have a lot to learn about leaky plumbing, lurid paint colors, and the freeway view from the back deck.  Deciding to write includes similar wake-up calls.  Sure, when we see books from the James Patterson Factory on the best seller list week after week, we think, “I can do this.  I write better than that.  These stories are trite.”  And “That’s where I want to be, selling book after book, and raking in the dough.”  But, writing, even not so good writing, has its challenges, its requirements, its reality.We are all naïve to a certain point when we begin a new adventure, whether it’s searching for a new place to live or deciding we want to be a writer.  What we see in the distance is our “dream house” or our “dream career,” and we think—hope—it’s as easy as it looks.

Instead of leaky plumbing, we writers discover we have leaky brains.  What we thought was a great idea while it was bouncing around in our head, drips out on the computer screen one annoying drop at a time. Those childhood memories that felt complete and poignant when we were mowing the lawn and smelling the freshly-cut grass evaporate when your fingers are on the computer keys.  And then there are all the REAL LIFE interruptions rumbling day and night all around you.

But does this mean you can’t write, can’t have a career, can’t learn and grow and gain great satisfaction from putting words on paper?  As anyone will tell you who has looked for the ideal apartment, lusted for a dream house, it takes time, patience, and compromise.  You may not get the exact home you dreamed about, but through your daily presence in a house, becoming acquainted with its quirks,  practicing your handy-man skills, learning about what works and what doesn’t work, talking with experts,  remodeling, finessing, you can turn a house into what you want, you can make it yours.  The same is true of writing.

It’s important to have dreams and desire about what we want to achieve as writers.  It is important to strive and grow.  We transform ourselves as we write because that’s what writing does to us, for us.  It allows us to observe life, ponder its circumstances and its realities, and communicate our understanding to others.  This, like creating a home, takes time and patience.  We make mistakes, we adjust, we learn, we ask questions, we grow.  And maybe, just maybe, our dreams will come true.

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Gay Degani has published on-line and in print including four The Best of Every Day Fiction editions and her own collection, Pomegranate Stories. She is the founder-editor of EDF’s Flash Fiction Chronicles, a staff editor at Smokelong Quarterly, and blogs at Words in Place where a list of her online and print fiction can be found. Her story, “Something about L.A,” won the 11^th Annual Glass Woman Prize.

Markets Added

• Infective Ink (1,500, daily) subs are prompt driven – visit site, view guidelines
• The Hellroaring Review (1,000, biannual) open to all genre – visit site, view guidelines
• Plasma Frequency Magazine ($, 1,000, bi-monthly) publishes speculative fiction
• ThickJam (90-900, none stated) open to all genre – visit site, view guidelines

View complete markets listing.

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Jim Harrington discovered flash fiction in 2007, and he’s read, written, studied, and agonized over the form since. His Six Questions For. . . blog provides editors and publishers a place to “tell it like it is.” He’s also the Markets Editor for Flash Fiction Chronicles’ Flash Markets Page. You can read his stories on his blog. He can be contacted at jpharrin [at] gmail [dot] com.

by Beth Lee-Browning

What started as a clever ad campaign for V8 vegetable juice somehow became a phrase synonymous with “Wow, if only I had known, I’d have made a different choice.”  Sometimes we don’t feel the accompanying thunk on the head until days, weeks, or maybe even years later and often times because we weren’t aware that there was a choice.

Our society is obsessed with “making it big” and we’ve left little to no room for the pursuit of dreams among the talented but undiscovered artists, athletes, chefs, and designers that surround us. We convince ourselves that our day jobs are all that we are and all that we can be.  We buy into the notion that if we can’t “make it big,” there’s no point in trying and we forget that as children we once knew how to dream.  We “grow up” and we do the responsible thing, we put our dreams on the “back burner” and promise ourselves that someday we’ll find our way back to them.

Often if we’re brave enough to admit our true desires we’re met with responses such as, “Why would you want to do ‘that’?” and with good intentions we’re reminded that “there’s no money in it,” “shouldn’t you focus on your career?” and “it’ll take away from family time.”  I think the most dampening of all is the one spoken without looking up from behind the newspaper, “oh really, uh huh, yeah that’s nice.”

I was raised during a time and age in which pursuing a practical curriculum of studies followed by an equally practical and hopefully financially rewarding career may not have been expected, but it was encouraged.  I attended college as a part of one of the first generations in which a career for a woman was not perceived to be limited to teacher, nurse, or wife.  Like most seventeen year olds I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and in 1979 anything in the Business College was the degree of choice for those of us without an obvious gift or burning passion.

Unfortunately when I graduated  or more specifically after one more summer of life guarding jobs were far and few between, truth to be told, I hadn’t looked very hard.  Between believing I had landed the perfect husband-to-be and in spite of what I thought my aspirations “should be,” I was relieved to think that my degree was something I wasn’t going to need.   My thoughts hadn’t moved beyond enjoying one last carefree summer and finding a job to pass the time while I waited for his December commencement ceremony.  I was certain the summer would end with the question “will you marry me?” and not with the words “I’m sorry, I’ve met someone else…”

Heartbroken and irrational I somehow managed to convince myself that selling disability insurance door to door in rural Nebraska was a good opportunity and a way to move on.  During those brief months, I experienced everything from being invited into a stranger’s home for roast beef and mashed potatoes, to being chased off of a porch with the wave of a shotgun, and ending up covered in mud while the only other woman on the team gunned it while I tried to push her car out of the bottom of a farmhouse drive in the pouring rain.

I’ll never forget her, I was twenty-something, she was forty-something and I think we were equally confused.  We laughed until we cried and swore we would write a book about our experiences.  We actually sat down at the typewriter (I’m dating myself) and started composing on more than one occasion, but one reason after another got in the way and before long we convinced each other that it just wasn’t “practical” and we went our separate ways.

It was the last time I talked or thought about writing anything other than a business presentation, a cover letter, or an email until I heard about a place called “Sometime Isle.”  I heard about this “island” while attending a book signing and luncheon at a small café in Dorset Minnesota.  I found myself surrounded by ardent fans of the author’s series about life on the plains.  They alternated between hanging on her every word and peppering her with questions about what would happen next to their favorite characters – their friends.

I didn’t connect with the personalities she described from her stories and I was relieved when she moved from her books to her personal experiences because that meant the lecture was drawing to a close.  Suddenly I found myself listening and not daydreaming.  She spoke of career, marriage, and motherhood; she revealed the dreams that had been tucked away with prayers that ended in “Sometime I’ll…”  She provided inspiration with her story of taking a risk, attending a writers conference on a whim, and becoming a published author after she turned fifty.

I surprised myself when I felt my hand raise in response to her question, “Do any of you have a secret dream, have you ever said to yourself, ‘sometime I’ll write a book, sometime I’ll paint a landscape, sometime I’ll take a cooking class, sometime I’ll….” I recalled the book I’d started twenty five years before as well as the painting, drawing, and piano lessons I’d started and stopped in between, the dozens of times I had used that phrase.  She dared each of us to consider taking one small step toward moving off of Sometime Isle.

I’ve thought about that day often and wondered how someone so different from me could have made such an impact on my life. Since then I’ve taken half a dozen writing classes, started a blog and have more than a few ideas for a book; I even pulled out my sketch pad and am taking a drawing class.  I may never have a book published, but I’ll write one.  I may never make a dime pursuing my passions, but I’m devoting time to them.

Every time I hear myself say “Sometime I’ll…”  I think of her story and remind myself that it’s never too late.

This is a reprint from Beth Lee-Browning’s personal blog, it’s a whole new world,  originally posted March 22, 2012.

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 Beth Lee-Browning lives outside of Philadelphia, is a transplanted Midwesterner, and a mid-life woman who is discovering the joy of living life to its fullest and under her own rules. She chronicles her adventures from the ordinary to the unusual with keen and thought provoking observations, a unique wit, sensitivity and an underlying theme that “everything is going to be all right.”

Read Beth’s blog at it’s a whole new world.

We’re about half way through Short Story Month and today is National Flash Fiction Day. Hard to find stories any shorter than flash! This event is the brainchild of Calum Kerr from the UK and since the day is in honor of flash, Flash Fiction Chronicles asked Calum a few questions.

Calum Kerr is a writer, editor, lecturer and director of National Flash-Fiction Day. His stories have appeared in Bugged, Litro, Flash, Shoestring, The Pygmy Giant, Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Delinquent, Ether Books, and on BBC Radio 4. His pamphlet 31, is available on Kindle on Amazon, and his new collection, Braking Distance, was published by Salt in April. Between 2011-2012 he wrote a flash-fiction every day over at Flash365 .

Flash Fiction Chronicles: Why National Flash Fiction Day?

Calum Kerr: I’m a writer of flash-fiction and when National Poetry Day came along last October, I thought to look for a National Flash-Fiction Day. There wasn’t one, so I suggested the idea to a few other writers on the internet. They thought it was a good idea, and so here it is. I originally planned it just to be a few events held by people I already knew, but it’s grown like crazy and now encompasses half the globe with competitions, anthologies, readings, workshops and more springing up all over the place. It’s almost as though people were ready and waiting for this idea to come along.

FFC: So you are a flash writer, and are you a publisher too?

CK: I’m both, actually. I’ve been writing for decades, but only seriously in the last few years. I started writing flash back in 2010, and since them I have completed a month-long daily flash project and a year-long one as well—flash365.blogspot.com. I am also the editor of Gumbo Press, an online publisher that has, for NFFD, branched out into its first flash pamphlet—“Enough” by Bristol Prize 2010 winner, Valerie O’Riordan.

FFC: How has the internet helped this relatively new genre of fiction grow?

CK:I think it’s made a lot of difference. Publishers—whether of books or magazines—were maybe not keen to publish tiny stories either singly or collected, but online, where the cost of production is so much less, the risk is less. As such, the form has had a chance to grow and become something really established and the more traditional publishers are now starting to follow along.

FFC: What is your definition of “flash?”

CK: Mine comes from the writer’s point of view, rather than the reader’s. So it’s not actually about length (which informs the usual definition). For me, it’s about writing from a prompt with no pre-conceived idea of what the story is going to be; just taking the stimulus and seeing where it leads. After that, there is the crafting to make sure every word is pulling its weight, but for me the “flash” comes in the writing rather than the reading.

For more information about national Flash Fiction Day (NFFD), visit the Natrional Flash Fiction Day blog: http://nationalflashfictionday.blogspot.com/. for more information about everything Calum Kerr does, go to www.calumkerr.co.uk and http://unmitigated-audacity.blogspot.co.uk/.

And if you want to participate in FFC’s own event, please go to our Facebook page and post your favorite story online. Can be off line I suppose, but prefer stories—classics too—that readers can find easily. Our goal this year is to give readers access to 114 excellent stories or more. (Last year we had 113). I will add the stories to a “note” here as the picks come in. That note will remain available as a note on FFC’s Facebook page. Here are the “rules.”

POST YOUR FAVORITE SHORT STORIES at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Flash-Fiction-Chronicles/111807932198001

by Erin Entrada Kelly

One of the best functions of flash fiction is the ability for writers to create a momentary peephole into a greater story. In fiction, as in life, it’s the small things that matter, and there are fewer art forms more ideally structured to offer life in small doses than flash.

But where to begin? We’re all full of big ideas. For many writers, a big idea can easily burgeon into an epic; sometimes it grows to such a point that the story seems too daunting to put on paper. Yet the compulsion to tell the story—and tell it quickly—still exists.

If you crowd all the furniture of the house into the living room, your reader will have trouble making much out of anything when they look through the peephole, but the answer isn’t to clear all the dressers and tables and chairs out of the house. It’s to limit your peephole to a single room.

The novelist writes of a divorcing couple’s journey from marital bonds to severed ties. Forget the peephole, they’re inviting you into the house with a wide open door so you can explore as you please. The short-storyteller writes of a divorcing couple’s day of reckoning—the moment when one breaks the news to the other, or when they finally sign the papers, or when they sit down with the kids. You may not have access to the house, but you’re sitting on the couch.

One of the joys of flash-fiction writing is the ability to delve even further, to adjust the scope until the big-picture gets smaller and smaller and fits inside a peephole of one-thousand words or less. The flash-fiction storyteller writes not of the couple’s romantic saga or their final days, but of the moment when the wife realizes she doesn’t love her husband anymore. That moment is the single room—and in the hands of a skilled storyteller, that room is enough to tell us more about the rest of the house.

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Erin Entrada Kelly is staff editor for Flash Fiction Chronicles. Her fiction has been published widely in places like Keyhole Magazine, Monkeybicycle and the Kyoto Journal. She was short-listed for the Eric Hoffer National Fiction Prize and the Philippines Free Press Literary Award for Short Fiction. Her debut novel is forthcoming from HarperCollins’ Greenwillow Books. She currently works as a freelance fiction editor and is represented by the Jenks Agency. Read more at www.erinentradakelly.com. Find her on Twitter here.

This is part of a continuing series.

by Beth Lee- Browning

For the past six weeks I’ve woken up on Saturday morning, made a pot of coffee, written in my journal, and raced to my laptop to write about the previous week’s lesson. That was not the case this week; I started and stopped more times than I can count. I suppose it’s ironic that week seven of Walking in This World  by Julia Cameron is entitled Discovering a Sense of Momentum and she introduces it by saying “Creativity thrives on small, do-able actions. This week dismantles procrastination as a major creative block.” Apparently I needed to do a bit more dismantling.

I flipped through my notes for the umpteenth time and I found myself coming back to the task Easy Does it but Do it. It dawned on me that while I had completed the task, I hadn’t experienced the lesson.  I read the words and thought I understood what Julia was saying as she explained that ideas, like emotions can cause anxiety and make you to feel as if you are going to explode if they are kept bottled up. She described it as a “creative logjam” resulting from too many, not too few, ideas and spoke about the concept of taking small positive actions to keep the creative momentum flowing forward. “The truer the dream, the more creative pressure it has, and the more important it is to begin with small actions to keep them from getting frozen up. Don’t just talk. Do.”

I had to admit to myself that I had just gone through the motions when I followed the instructions to list five areas in my home that could benefit from some straightening up and in doing so I completely missed that the point was not to make a list and think about it, but to actually do it.

I looked at the laundry basket of clothes waiting to be put away and decided to take Julia’s advice, “If your head is awhirl and you ‘cannot think straight,’ then start by straightening something up. Fold your laundry. Sort your drawers….often, when we are engaged in such small, homely tasks, a sense of being ‘at home’ will steal over us. When we take the time to husband the details of our lives, we may encounter a sense of grace.”

One thing led to another and a few hours later, I had a clean house, an organized writing space, a clear head, and a fresh perspective. I was surprised to find that I was ready to write.

In the midst of it all I had a minor meltdown, but perhaps the author is right and it wasn’t a meltdown as much as it was a break through. “When we have creative breakthroughs, they may look and even be experienced as break downs. Our normal, ordinary way of seeing ourselves and the world suddenly goes on tilt, and as it does, a new way of seeing and looking at things comes toward us.”

These days my world feels turned upside down and when I look in the mirror I’m not entirely sure who is looking back at me. I see myself with what Julia refers to as “Strobe-light clarity. We look so different, so impossibly possible to ourselves that we are caught off guard.” I see my future, not through rose colored glasses, but with frightening precision and at the same time disturbing vagueness. My destiny has changed and so have my dreams. I don’t know how it will be achieved, but I know it will be.

The chapter ended with the ever so practical advice, Finish Something. Surprisingly, the “something” wasn’t about finishing a piece of poetry, an essay, or a painting, it was just about “finishing.” I found myself thoroughly engaged by the story of a young composer who bounced from project to project, full of energy and “promise,” but could never quite deliver.

His close friend and mentor advised him to clean up his arranging room, to organize his mess. He resisted and dawdled, and if not for the gentle prodding of his friend he would have quit. When he was done he “felt determination,” and moved beyond having “promise” to completing projects and feeling productive. The author didn’t say so, but I suspect he also felt peace.

We often stop before we start, afraid to try something new. We forget that we’ve encountered and mastered things we never thought we could. The learning curve isn’t easy, in fact can be downright scary, but it’s also exciting and mysterious and the destination is well worth the trip.

This article was originally published on November 7, 2011 at it’s a whole new world.

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 Beth Lee-Browning lives outside of Philadelphia, is a transplanted Midwesterner, and a mid-life woman who is discovering the joy of living life to its fullest and under her own rules. She chronicles her adventures from the ordinary to the unusual with keen and thought provoking observations, a unique wit, sensitivity and an underlying theme that “everything is going to be all right.”

Read Beth’s blog at it’s a whole new world.

By Sue Ann Connaughton 

In “Navel Gazing,” Every Day Fiction’s top story for April, Ao-Hui Lin gets close and confessional with readers in a conversation about diet, lovers, and expanding navels in a cross-genre piece with elements of mystery, horror, speculation, fantasy, romance, and realism.

Flash Fiction Chronicles interviewed Lin about the importance of a truthful narrator, intended message to readers, her writing process, and advice for reaching a wide audience without sacrificing personal style. 

FFC: The readers of Every Day Fiction rated “Navel Gazing” exceptionally high on the star-rating scale and in the comments.  Why do you think the story was so popular with readers? 

Lin: First of all, I’m immensely gratified that it was rated so highly and I sincerely thank everyone who took the time to rate and comment. I’ve read so many wonderful stories at Every Day Fiction, and I’m honored that readers found my story entertaining. As to why, I think it’s because the story doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s definitely horror and fantasy and possibly tragedy, but nevertheless a thread of light humor runs through the whole thing. There are places where I was going for a giggle even if I followed it up with something that I hoped would make the reader shudder.

It’s also one of those stories that takes an unexpected turn and yet the end is still somehow inevitable. 

FFC: Joe’s character is portrayed entirely through the narrator’s eyes—a couple of physical traits, diet behavior, his mysterious demise—but she may be an unreliable narrator.

When is it important and when might it be unimportant, for the reader to believe the narrator is telling the truth? 

Lin: I think it’s important to create a bond between reader and narrator, so playing with an unreliable narrator is always tricky. At no point, do I want the reader to feel like he or she has been lied to, because that breaks the bond. The reader needs to know that my narrator is sincere; she’s not trying to fool the reader even if she’s reluctant to elaborate.

As an aside, though I’m using the pronoun “she” for simplicity’s sake, I never explicitly state that the narrator is a woman, and in my own mind I’m not committed one way or another. Many readers will take the reference to anorexia and the narrator’s relationship with Joe and come up with “woman,” but that’s definitely not a given. What is given is that the narrator loved Joe passionately and was deeply affected by his death.

Which brings me back to the unreliability. Is she (or he) so unbalanced by her loss that she’s created this horrific image in her head, or did it really happen? I think the story works either way, as long as the reader believes that the narrator loved Joe and is genuinely terrified. Whether the reader buys into the creepy crawlies, or decides that the narrator is unhinged, or some combination of the two, it’s all still firmly along a spectrum of horror, either physical or psychological.  

FFC: The narrator’s appearance and behavior mimic Joe’s so closely that I considered whether they might represent one character, rather than two, a metaphor for the struggle to control the fears within.

What message(s) would you like readers to take from this story? 

Lin: That’s very interesting! I love it when readers see something in a story that I didn’t intentionally put there, but after the fact makes so much sense. I certainly enjoyed playing with the idea that loss of control can be terrifying, and I wanted to explore the paradox that at least when you’re dieting, food is both the enemy and necessary for life. But I think what drove me to write the story was the strong emotion the narrator feels for Joe, and the fact that no matter how nightmarish the end was, she still remembers her love and attraction for him. If there’s a message, it’s that attraction transcends physical appearance. 

FFC: I’m curious about your writing process for “Navel Gazing.”

What was in your mind when you wrote the first sentence: a situation, character, theme, point of view, atmosphere, or something else? How did you proceed from there?

Lin: I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but “Navel Gazing” was about the most process-less story I’ve ever written. I have a dear friend who actually does have an enormous belly button. (We are still friends, despite my use of this anatomical anomaly as fictional fodder.) I’ve also had many conversations with other women about the seeming futility of dieting and the way our bodies have changed after childbirth. Added into the mix was the ADHD quality of my own ongoing internal monologues and one particularly restless night.

I was lying in bed at 2AM, my mind wandering while trying to resist the lure of the refrigerator, when the line about “sleepwalking with the munchies” came to me, and that was enough to establish the voice of the narrator. I sat up, grabbed my computer, and had the story written and submitted by 3AM. It started with the voice and that one line and that time of night when things go bump in the dark, and it just wrote itself. I wish all my stories went so easily. 

FFC:  “Navel Gazing” shows that an 820 word story may explore a quirky plot, offbeat characters, and hazy ending, and still produce a cohesive flash fiction that appeals to a diverse readership.

What tips can you offer the writer of flash fiction who wishes to capture a large audience, without compromising his or her unique style?

Lin: Oh wow, I don’t know that I’m qualified to answer that. I do know that I enjoy reading flash fiction that’s character-driven and rich in plot. It’s tempting in this short format to say there isn’t enough room to develop character or make much of a plot, but I think that’s a mistake. When a writer starts sacrificing character and plot in favor of style, it’s going to weaken the story. At the same time, those elements are only going to enhance whatever a writer does with his or her particular voice.

I also think that mixing genres works particularly well in flash fiction, because there isn’t enough time to harden or disappoint reader expectations. A writer can suggest a bit of world-building, a touch of humor, a tragic backstory without going too deeply into it, and readers will fill in the rest, satisfied that they got enough to set the story. By mixing genres, writers can further play with reader expectations and avoid disappointing readers who expect their genres to be fully fleshed out.

Ao-Hui Lin spends a lot of her time pondering the nature of motherhood and hopes that when her children are grown they won’t wonder why so many of her stories about mothers end in tragedy. Her work has appeared in Jersey Devil Press Magazine and is forthcoming in Drabblecast.

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Sue Ann Connaughton writes from a drafty old house in New England. Her most recent works appear in The Linnet’s Wings, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Boston Literary Magazine, Barnwood International Poetry Magazine, and Meadowland Review.

Sometimes I’m asked why I write, and it’s a difficult question to answer.

I love to write flash because it’s short. I can conceptualize a piece of flash fiction and write it down in one sitting, in one big burst of energy. Then I can write it again. And again. And again. I can go through four or five completely new drafts in the time it might take me to draft one longer short story. If, after a few stabs, the piece just doesn’t work, the let-down is smaller because the time investment is smaller. As a result, I take more risks, try more ideas, and often surprise myself!

I love to write flash because it’s small…and big at the same time. A short short story can start with a small idea, a line of dialogue, a tiny scrap of concept and explore it until it becomes something bigger. A piece of flash is like a devotional or a meditation. I enjoy being able to focus on one effect until I’ve taken the reader where I want her to go.

I love flash because there’s room to play! You aren’t asking your reader to commit to twenty pages of the same character or voice or structure, so you have room to try some tricks you might not be able to sustain for 4,000 words. It’s very freeing to be able to try something new without worrying if it will wear on a reader after fifteen pages.

What are your reasons for writing flash fiction?

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Aubrey Hirsch is a native of Cleveland, Ohio. You can find her work in journals like The Rumpus, American Short Fiction,  Third Coast, Hobart, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review, PANK and Annalemma.  Her posts appear regularly in this spot the first Monday of every month.  She recently had two stories longlisted for Wigleaf’s Top 50.  ”Chairman of the Boards,” FLYWHEEL MAGAZINE and  ”Multiple Sclerosis FAQ,“ FICTION SOUTHEAST.

Markets added

• The Saturnalian (500, weekly) open to all genre
• In Between Altered States (200-300, monthly) issues are themed

Editor interview added

• Short, Fast and Deadly (420 characters, weekly) publishes all genre

Contest added

• Fiction500

View complete markets listing.

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Jim Harrington discovered flash fiction in 2007, and he’s read, written, studied, and agonized over the form since. His Six Questions For. . . blog provides editors and publishers a place to “tell it like it is.” He’s also the Markets Editor for Flash Fiction Chronicles’ Flash Markets Page. You can read his stories on his blog. He can be contacted at jpharrin [at] gmail [dot] com.