Among the many traits and habits shared by artists and writers, nothing unites them quite like a good, vague excuse.
Where have you been?
Working on a few projects.
Wonderfully forestalling. Effective and abstract. And it's the reason we'll give, because in the year or so since we've last publshed a feature from The Prompt, we've certainly been busy, but the ongoing distinction of the series has hovered over us like a telltale adjective, a bit of stage direction straight out of Beckett, and thus, we'll go on. Let's call this break a period of head-down time.
All this to say that the editorial team here at Phillips is very excited to bring back the series, and to kick things off again, we've joined up with Meg Pokrass, the award-winning writer, editor, series alumna, and purveyor of Pokrass Prompts to talk flash fiction and how the form has found a home in contemporary culture. Additionally, we invited Pokrass Prompts subscribers to submit a work of 100 words (or shorter) to be featured in our next installment.
PHILLIPS: We’ll start with the obvious, and feel free to answer in a way true to the form: what is flash fiction?
MEG POKRASS: Although the standard definition of flash fiction is “a story of 1,000 words or less,” at its heart, flash fiction is an experimental form that marries the compression and lyricism of poetry with the dramatic urgency of fiction. What Ernest Hemingway referred to as "the iceberg theory," that is, showing us just the tip, and leaving us a sense of the enormous shadow below the words, is what successful flash fiction needs to do in a very short space. The writer must learn to trust the reader implicitly.
P: What is flash fiction not?
MP: A shorter short story. An anecdote. A joke.
P: The idea of precision always lingers, but it feels like a post-hoc relationship to the word limit. Do you think flash can thrive on imprecision, or even despite its self-imposed limits?
MP: Every word matters enormously in flash fiction, and yet, at its best, flash fiction feels unruly, messy, dangerously full of heart. There is a bigness about these tiny stories when they are successful.
Meg Pokrass, "The Settling of Crows," from Right Hand Pointing. Click image to enlarge.
P: Art and literature have always gone hand in hand — are there any artists you reference for inspiration? Better yet: are there any artists you’d consider flash-friendly?
MP: It's an obvious one, but Edward Hopper has been an inspiration for ekphrastic writing over many decades. Connecting with any Hopper painting feels like eavesdropping (or even spying). The viewer is looking in on someone’s private moments, and somehow those moments feel both universal and timeless. Often his subjects are the ones looking out, and there is a sense of disconnection between their lives and the world outside of their windows. Every one of Hopper’s paintings is a flash, as demonstrated by the wonderful flash fiction story “Office at Night” by Pamela Painter.
A more unusual artist worth mentioning is the American surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie, whose paintings are filled with mysterious symbolic objects. Each of her paintings is a work of flash fiction, suggesting a hidden story, yet trusting the reader implicitly. We may not know the meaning behind her details, but we feel the significance behind them. My flash fiction “If You Want to Be Loved, Love”, which I wrote in one of the amazing Ekphrastic Review’s art and writing workshops, and which was included in The Best Small Fictions, was inspired by an amalgam of Abercrombie paintings.
P: Do you often see overlap or potential between longer works and flash? You mentioned to Grant Faulkner that occasionally “it’s as if the baby story has been living a secret life inside the mother.”
MP: I have discovered many interesting pieces that felt whole but were hiding in the middle of my far longer stories that never felt they quite “got there.” I often write longer short stories or flashes out of tiny, connected segments, as I did with “The Producer” published in Northwest Review. This way of creating a short story can work very well.
P: The very word prompt has taken on a new context for generating content, what with A.I. and language tools and the like; to get the “right” generation, you have to give a “precise” prompt. How do you keep your prompts (and stories) human?
MP: The prompts at Pokrass Prompts and in my writing workshops, are open-ended, and I see them as the opposite of precise or prescriptive. I want the prompts to feel like creative food for writers who are looking for inspiration.
Ideally, writing encourages us to turn off the mind and open the heart. A.I. can’t do this for us — even if the robotic writing produced is technically “better” than we are. A.I. has not loved the people we have loved, it has not lived through our childhoods and seen or experienced what we’ve seen and felt. It can’t intuit our complicated human worlds, it can only mimic us by regurgitating our style.
Meg Pokrass, "The Logic of Extotherms," from The Odd Magazine. Click image to enlarge.
P: It’s a rather short form cultural landscape at the moment. Do you see flash evolving with the world around it? As an editor, have you noticed trends in the space?
MP: In the last few years flash fiction has become an acknowledged literary form, and the form seems to be here to stay. When I began writing flash fiction fifteen years ago, hardly anyone recognized it. Now, it seems as if literary magazines are hungrier for good flash fiction than they are for longer, traditional length short stories. Flash is being widely published these days, and in publications like the New Yorker and New York Times.
P: Your new collection, First Law of Holes, comes out later this year, and showcases new works alongside selections from the previous two decades. What was it like to assemble old and new? Did you make any discoveries in either direction?
MP: It’s been interesting for me to see how my writing has changed over the years. Assembling this collection has allowed me to see this in detail. My writing has grown and evolved in the same ways I have as a person. I am amazed to see how each collection of stories holds a unique worldview inside it.
First Law of Holes will be published in September 2024 by Dzanc Books.
Meg Pokrass is the author of nine flash fiction collections and two novellas-in-flash. Her work has appeared in hundreds of literary magazines including Electric Literature, New England Review, Wigleaf, Washington Square Review, SmokeLong Quarterly and McSweeney's Internet Tendency. Her flash fiction has been widely internationally anthologized and included in three Norton Anthologies of the flash fiction form. About Meg's forthcoming collection The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories, Charmaine Wilkerson, acclaimed author of Black Cake, says "The First Law of Holes feels like an entire universe of characters and experiences. Infinite, expanding and dotted with stars." Meg currently lives in Inverness, Scotland. Find out more about her here.
