On Reading John Edgar Wideman

/ Keith Pilapil Lesmeister / Leave a comment

One of my recent emails, Paris Review Redux, included a link to one of John Edgar Wideman’s stories, “Sightings,” published in 2004. Ever since I read Philadelphia Fire maybe twelve years ago now, I’ve read pretty much everything I’ve come across with the author’s name, this being one of them. And like all of Wideman’s work, it left me in awe of his propulsive prose.

Reading John Edgar Wideman’s work is an experience unlike any other: cerebral, experimental, challenging. As a new-ish reader/READER twelve years ago, I wasn’t attracted to Wideman’s sentences so much as his love of basketball. Philadelphia Fire (which isn’t about basketball, really) possesses elaborate scenes of young men playing hoops on outdoor courts, something of my childhood that I could cotton to as an immature reader more interested in subject matter than the alchemic cohesion and rhythmic sounds of nuanced sentences on the page, of which Wideman is a genius-master.

The summer following my experience reading Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire, I had plans to meet friends out in Colorado, but before dipping through Fort Collins and eventually onto Steamboat Springs, I had convinced my wife to drive north through Laramie where Wideman had once lived and taught. He no longer lived in Laramie, but I wanted to see what he saw; hear what he heard. I wanted to walk those same city streets and lay eyes on the same railroad tracks and eat in the same cafes that no doubt Wideman had experienced at one point in his life. Had Wideman taught anywhere else—say, a larger city of any kind—this experience of re-living his steps wouldn’t have held the same allure. But we were in Laramie, a town of mystery in its own right.

Walking those sparsely populated streets, with a pleasant lack of stimuli, one could see how a writer’s mind could be (over)stimulated—possessed not of the external, but of the inward; how, given the appropriate silence and space, a person’s thoughts are allowed to occupy and multiply in a space normally taken up by honking cars and should-to-shoulder foot traffic which, on the day I visited Laramie, was virtually nonexistant.

While there, I bought a book in a bookshop that I accessed through an alleyway. The bookshop was on the second floor, and I had to climb a set of iron stairs mounted to the side of the building in order to enter. There were a few people in the shop, and as I perused the books, I settled on the one closest to the cash register. A pocket-sized The Elements of Style by Strunk & White. I didn’t know at the time what attracted me to such a helpful (albeit boring) book. Perhaps it was that I wanted to be a writer myself, and I thought surely this book couldn’t hurt. Now, several years later, what I like about that purchase is knowing how Wideman’s work—with all its fancy lingual dexterity—wouldn’t fit neatly into anything Strunk & White advocated; that Wideman set out to break all the rules and in so doing created his own inimitable (element of) style.

If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, try reading the first paragraph of Wideman’s story “Sightings.” 1500 manic words, all one sentence.

What do you suppose Strunk & White would have to say about that?

Heart of the Matter: A Review of “Corzo” by Brenna Gomez, originally published in Prairie Schooner, republished online in The Dark Magazine

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B. Nathanial Steelman

Dare I say, my Laurel Edition of Anna Karenina provokes as much by the epic narrative as by the former owner’s liberal, however often derisive, edits. Before one even opens this classic, “LEO TOLSTOY’S GREATEST HEROINE” on the cover has been revamped (or revitalized? vandalized?) into “LEO TOLSTOY’S GREATEST HEROINE flop.” And on the first page of the front matter, “LEO TOLSTOY” has (d)evolved into “Leo the Lion.” Sure, these two possibly droll, certainly cheap alterations are of the ilk you’d suspect to find, insofar as they are legitimately juvenile, lurking in the stacks of a high school library. That said, there is a platter of amendments housed inside my copy and many of them steam with bona fide, if nihilistic, cultural criticism. Here is the crème de la crème: etched into the very sentence among those in the pantheon of story-starters, the reader observes that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” has, indeed, become “Happy families are all alike sick; every unhappy family is unhappy dead in its own way.”

Touché? For better or worse, family is, as a fountainhead, a framework, that experience and structure we humans can neither shake nor escape, if only on the procedural—that is, subconscious—level. It’s too deft and deep. Even if a family has absented from a person’s life, a boy’ll still stretch into those voids to feel, as he yearns, for attachments. Family makes us who we are. Take Brenna Gomez’s debut short story, brilliant and tragic. Published originally in print by Prairie Schooner in Spring 2017 and republished online by The Dark Magazine in May 2019, “Corzo” is about nothing other than a family struggling to find equilibrium. Specifically, you could say it is about heart. 

I may never forget the opening scene. I had thought it was a dream, at first, or a sort of horror that Fuckhead gets himself into in Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. A young daughter, yet one matured by the dint of parental dysfunction, arrives home after school and sees in her father “a ragged chest wound the size of a plum”; he asks her to help him cut out his heart. After mija refuses, her father, Eduvigo Herrera III, implores her, “‘Please do this for me. I never ask you for anything.’” Accordingly, mija—Sara—identifies the falsity of this claim, inasmuch as she, being the daughter and the big sister, frequently is asked to do too much by and for her parents who religiously partake in “epic screaming matches” and methods of self-destruction; incumbent upon her is, too, the pressure to get “straight As, to never be in trouble.” But—because she is, precisely, the daughter—she relents and seizes her father’s heart: “It was soft around the edges and firm in the center. Every so often it shuddered like it didn’t know it wasn’t being used anymore. It was a deep purple so dark it looked black.” And if the premise thus far hasn’t compelled me to see what happens next, this specificity of imagery convinces me of the narrator’s rectitude, and the author’s, to boot, which I oblige to trust and honor by reading.

Flannery O’Connor ascribes such images to so called “anagogical vision”: “the kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or one situation.” In her lecture “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” from the collection Mystery and Manners, the storied writer banishes the notion that fiction is predicated upon the abstract, and rather champions the notion that the art form is “about everything human and we are made out of dust.” The form is about, in other words, a human’s experience through her senses; and the form achieves any meaning by the overall medley of these senses as they experience circumstances over time. And so, when Eduvigo requests, additionally, that mija cut his heart up like dinner meat, to squeeze the pieces through the mouth of the empty Corzo tequila bottle—and when the mother, Izzy, arrives home and declares that Eduvigo shouldn’t have made the daughter do it, and when the knowledge is made known that Eduvigo’s grandfather had taught him the ancient cultural practice of excising a heart to punish loved ones—and so on and so forth goes the medley—the image of the heart inside the Corzo bottle embodies, literally and metaphorically, the heart of Gomez’s story: an Hispanic family centered around patriarchy and its pathology. Don [Somebody], the former owner of my copy of Anna Karenina, wouldn’t, I imagine, be astonished.

Subsequently, the Herreras are haunted by a man who loiters both alive and dead. Izzy begins to habitually recite the Hail Mary; suddenly, to Sara, she looks old; and she painstakingly attempts to tip off those bygone screaming matches with her husband, however great with rage they had been. Freddie, the little brother—whose name is poignantly close to Ed, as if to insinuate an Herrera III will, of course, pass on to an Herrera IV—prattles on at school about zombies. While Sara, the point of view and the narrator, imagines pressing a hot iron to her father’s face—“Would he even feel it?”—and she cannot concentrate at school; and the trauma could explain why she misreads a boy’s foul intentions for fair. Meanwhile, Eduvigo, heartless, bleeds through his work shirts; he no longer laughs, yells—in a word, feels. Subtle but sure, the irony regarding masculinity plays convincingly. In America, we have inculcated an archetype of masculinity, that a man is austere, stoic, among other things. In “Corzo,” a man has to die—in a manner of speaking—to become this way; and his wife wants the former—we suppose volatile—man back, because she does not know who, nor what, this other man in her kitchen is, nor doing, the fountainhead of familismo having now been compromised. 

On a yellowed notecard, scrawled in faded blue cursive, Don holds forth two inquiries re: the following cultural constructs: What is a successful marriage? and Why love? Honest questions, to be sure, no matter intonation. There are certain regions of the mind made gray, we know, by altogether bewildering, embattling percepts in our everyday lives. Nurses who smoke like chimneys, for example, or spouses who berate, but who “love,” each other—as in “Corzo”—epitomize the conundrum of not practicing the preaching. Why upkeep institutions, such as marriage—even love—if their abuse dwarfs reward is a premise always worth writing about, insofar as wellbeing hangs in the balance. Gomez owns it. She’s shaped a short fiction through the sensibilities of a young narrator whose upbringing by all means substantiates O’Connor’s zinger that “anybody who has survived childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”

“Corzo” is, ultimately, a reflection. Set in the past, over approximately a couple of weeks, mija—which means daughter in Spanish—still at this late date needs to know just what happened. To her father, sure. But more to her little brother, Freddie, it seems. Toward the end of the story, after she and Freddie arrive home during another screaming match, Freddie takes the bottled heart to his father and says the he still wants his dad. Freddie hurls the artifact over the apartment’s railing, the glass—a motif—shatters, as glass iconically does when it collides with just enough stubbornness. His father does not react. The most striking line of all the story: “‘Dad,’” Freddie says, “‘didn’t even get mad and nothing happened to him. He’s like invincible.’” And the most striking response of all the story, from Sara: “‘Damn it, Freddie!” she screams, “‘Just eat your dinner.’” Because trauma, so easily and cunningly, is transmitted generation to generation at some, and yet every, point.  

Sweaty with Effort: an interview with Rachel Swearingen, author of “How to Walk on Water”

/ Keith Pilapil Lesmeister / Leave a comment

Rachel Swearingen’s debut story collection, How to Walk on Water, is simply fantastic. Cover-to-cover, it’s one of the best story collections I’ve read in a long time. The stories are delicately nuanced, perfectly crafted, and the characters we meet are some of the most memorable I’ve met in fiction. It’s been well over a month since I’ve read the book, but I can still feel Ona’s frustration and lonliness, Arthur’s confusion, and Nolan’s desperation to find the truth.

I had the good fortune of asking Rachel a few questions about the joys and challenges of writing short stories. We talk about building characters, narrative pacing, favorite books, and obviously we had to talk about dive bars and martinis.

Keith Lesmeister: If we think about plot in the way John Gardner described it—character on a journey or stranger comes to town—I’d suggest many of your stories involve the latter, but not always in a straightforward way. For instance, in the opening story “Felina” we see the title character as both a “stranger” but also part of the protagonist’s “journey.” Similarly, the next story in the book, “Notes to a Shadowy Man,” holds an element of a journey for the main character (as she’s away from home to begin with), but the character’s change doesn’t occur completely until we meet a man three quarters the way through. I guess what I’m suggesting here is that your stories don’t immediately fall into an either/or camp in terms of plot arrangement. They often times contain elements of both, and I think that’s in part because the characters you write are so lively and full of uniqueness and each is competing so drastically for his/her own time on the page that when they do finally get there and have their moment, it’s often quite memorable. Could you discuss how you plotted your stories? Or perhaps talk about how you view plot in general?

Rachel Swearingen: It’s interesting to think of my stories in this way. The longer I write the more curious I become about why we tend to rely on such classic story types and shapes. Even the most experimental fiction often goes back to these archetypal stories. I don’t know about you, but I never grow tired of narratives in which strangers appear, and no matter how hard I try to write different protagonists, most of them end up as seekers of some kind.

But you asked about plot. One of the more practical reasons I bring strangers into my narratives is because they inject energy and newness into a story, which means that plot might take care of itself. When you have protagonists who are too into themselves and too passive, you need to find ways to get them moving, and to externalize their yearnings. Plotting a story didn’t come naturally to me at first. I had to study it, and my thoughts on plot continue to change. I’ve come to think of plot more simply as change—in energy, pacing, character, atmosphere and in the prose itself. I’m not as wedded to traditional plot these days, although I find it’s now hard for me to break from it. Linear plot, especially, doesn’t make as much sense in light of the way we experience time and history and memory now.

KL: I’m aware that the first question slipped from plot to character development, which go hand-in-hand of course, but what I’m interested in here is how your secondary characters were often times rendered as perfectly as the protagonist. I’m thinking specifically of Mitz whose larger-than-life personality earned her a title spot, and yet she’s not the point-of-view character of the story. How do you manage these magnificent secondary characters and not allow them to take over the story completely?

RS: Thank you for this, Keith. You do this too to great effect in your own stories. I think the short answer is through training and practice, and especially through reading. Characters often reveal themselves through how they view other characters. There are so many examples of this in American fiction. Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway is at one extreme. We don’t even realize how little we’ve learned about him until he is finished telling the story of Jay Gatsby. Henry James does this as well in much of his work. There is this sense of the narrator’s unlived love in so many of his stories. And I think this can be a danger too, in that focusing too much on colorful characters can allow us to lose sight entirely of the protagonist. But then again, that battle for prominence can be exciting too. Louise Erdrich’s “Saint Marie” is a perfect example of this. I love that story, and I still get chills thinking about Sister Leopolda and her battle with Marie. There are so many great payoffs to giving more attention to secondary characters, including that we begin to think more about the person who is judging the secondary character. I love it when protagonists slowly become more unreliable. In Mitz’s Theory, we never get Mitz’s perspective. Ona has turned Mitz into a figure that will continue to haunt her, but we never find out how much of an effect Ona ever had on Mitz, or how Mitz would tell the story.

KL: Perhaps as a follow up, could you discuss how you go about building complex and meaningful characters?

RS: I would love to hear your answer for this, Keith. I could say that it’s all craft, that I build my characters draft by draft, and make sure I don’t protect them too much and that I test them, but I think that’s only partially true. I have had to abandon stories because I couldn’t make the characters live. There’s some sort of magical chemistry that makes characters come alive, and for every story the formula is a little different. For me, it’s often atmosphere and place and voice. I can feel when I’ve caught a spark, but even that isn’t completely trustworthy. There have been times when a story has taken hold of me, and I revisit it only to find that something isn’t quite working. The story doesn’t breathe. It seems to me that with all art there is something at work that cannot be fully controlled or planned, and that’s one of the things that keeps me writing.

KL: Your work, for me, conjures the word “atmospheric” – that there’s something happening between the characters and the environment in which the story takes place that feels unsettling or perhaps off-kilter. This notion of atmosphere is different than mood or tone. I mean, Mary Miller, in one sentence can really set a mood. Atmosphere on the other hand requires an accumulation of illuminating detail over the course of the story. For instance, in the story linked here, “Advice for the Haunted,” there’s this great list of what the deceased former owner of an apartment left behind after she passed: “We found a half-used bottle of anti-anxiety pills in the medicine cabinet, a glass accordion in a folded tablecloth, a baggie of foreign coins in a boot at the back of a closet. In a rickety piano bench, we discovered faded Polaroids of two girls at what looked like a family picnic.” And the details continue to emerge and build off one another and this build-up helps create this atmosphere of what can be described affectionately as strange and unsettling. It’s also what really lingers (at least in this reader’s mind) long after finishing the story. How do you do this?? I’m not sure if there’s an actual question here, but perhaps you could comment as you see fit.

RS: I like how you separate mood from atmosphere, and I want to spend some time thinking about this. I’ve had to work on pulling back on details in stories. It can be too much for contemporary readers. It’s a delicate balance for a short story because the more details you include the less room you have to do other things. On the other hand, atmospheric details can build a secondary story that competes with the primary one and creates some wonderful tension. Shirley Jackson does this wonderfully in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Filmmakers use this to great effect. Like most elements of fiction, however, there’s a slippery quality to images and details. I’m thinking about this more these days, especially now that we’re experiencing an explosion of more nefarious uses of visual storytelling in disinformation and propaganda.

KL: Your stories don’t shy away from the most difficult of issues related to: family, violent crime, loss, mental health, existential crises. Do these issues emerge naturally, while writing, or are they part of an initial conceptual impetus for the story? I’m interested in “idea”-centric fiction versus say character-driven, but your stories manage to do both. Take Mitz for example. We see a host of mental health issues (among others), but the narrative never loses sight of its characters, meaning there’s never a direct address of the mental health itself. It’s always addressed within the context of the characters’ actions or dialogue. How do you manage that balance between ideas/issues and characters/plot?

RS: For me, everything comes out of the story and the characters. I’ve never been able to begin a story with a theme or idea, although I do get inspired by news reports and ideas that come up in other art forms. “The Only Thing Missing Was the Howling of Wolves,” for example, was inspired by a radio story about people secretly baptizing the children in their extended families.) While I was writing this collection I realized that my characters were often working through generational or cultural or personal trauma and grief, but I didn’t set out to write about these things. If anything I tried to avoid these subjects, but questions kept surfacing. So, I guess it’s not ideas, but questions that trigger stories. For “Mitz’s Theory,” it was how do we separate our narratives from the narratives of those we love, and how much responsibility do we bare when the people we love are in trouble?

KL: And for as quirky and heartbreaking as these stories are, there’s a sense of patience and calm that radiates from each. Meaning: it feels like you’ve spent many months/years with these stories and they have benefitted from a cohesiveness that only comes from hours spent revising. I don’t want to sound overly fanboyish here, but there wasn’t a single false note in the entire book—everything felt as if it belonged, as if each of the words and sentences have been barrel-aged (probably some really good bourbon barrel) to form a perfect melding of characters and scenes. Perhaps you could discuss the amount of time you spent with these stories.

RS: Thank you so much, Keith. These stories did take time for me, probably because I don’t always know what my stories are about until I’ve set them aside to get some distance. It’s funny, a reader once said that my stories are “sweaty with effort.” I felt so seen when I read that and embarrassed–until I realized that this criticism comes from the, mistaken in my view, idea that good writers just sit down and in a burst of inspiration write perfect stories that appear effortless. That myth of effortless perfection has robbed so many artists of good work. I’ve yet to meet an author who doesn’t have to sweat out their stories, and then do it all over again. Sometimes you are gifted a story that comes easily, but most of the time writing is like finding your way through a dark forest.

KL: How did you decide on the order of the stories? What were you conscious of as you placed them opening to closing?

RS: Most readers jump around in collections, and so I tried not to overthink this. That said, I did decide to use “Felina” and “Advice for the Haunted” as bookends because they are in conversation with each other in some ways. Both take place in city apartments between lovers. I start with “Felina,” which is probably the strangest story, so that readers will know what they are getting into and won’t be surprised by the oddness of some of the stories that follow. It’s the earliest written piece in the book, and it’s also more contained and interior than some of the later pieces. “Advice,” on the other hand, opens up to the outer world” by the end.

KL: As a short story writer, I imagine you read quite a few short stories and short story collections. Could you recommend any? Perhaps the best you’ve read in the past year? Or other reading recommendations?

RS: Yes, although I didn’t read as many collections this year as I would have liked. John McNally’s The Fear of Everything is fantastic, and if you’re looking for atmospheric, spooky and humorous/heartbreaking stories, this is your book. Check out his story, “The Phone Call,” which is spectacularly creepy and would make a great piece for an undergraduate fiction course. Donna Miscolta’s Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories follows the awkward and smart Angie Rubio, as she moves from kindergarten through high school, with one story for each year. It’s deceptively simple in form, and compulsively readable. Jen Fawkes’s Mannequin & Wife is a cornucopia of extremely imaginative, genre-bending stories. And Caitlin Horrocks’ Life Among the Terranauts, which I just read in December, is also super imaginative. It’s eerily suited for the times, as it opens with a story about an entire town going into hibernation and ends with a story about a group of scientists isolating themselves inside a geodome. 

KL: Last series of questions, rapid fire, on preference.

RS: Disclaimer: If you were to ask me these same questions tomorrow, I’d probably change my answers.

KL: Techno or Jazz?

RS: Jazz.

KL: The Cranberries or Mazzy Star?

RS: Mazzy Star.

KL: Dive bars or Martini bars?

RS: Dive bars, but I still might order a dirty martini to get the olives.

KL: Ceramic wine cups or wine glasses?

RS: Wine glasses.

KL: Thursday or Friday?

RS: Are they different now?

KL: Do you call it a cemetery or graveyard (or boneyard)?

RS: Graveyard.

KL: Holiday dinner: turkey or ham?

RS: Turkey. (These days, preferably alive and in a field with no hunters in sight.)

KL: Deciduous or coniferous woodland?  

RS: Coniferous.

Rachel Swearingen is the author of How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, winner of the 2018 New American Press Fiction Prize (October 1, 2020). Her stories and essays have appeared in VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, Agni, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2015 Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in Fiction, a 2012 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the 2011 Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. In 2019, she was named one of 30 Writers to Watch by the Guild Literary Complex. She holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and a PhD from Western Michigan University, and teaches at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.

Review of “Everything Eats Everything” by Gabrielle Griffis, published in Split Lip

/ Keith Pilapil Lesmeister / Leave a comment

A delicately woven portrait about the people we love, the cycle of life, the interconnectedness of all things, and the mystery and mysteriousness that stitches it all together.

And how does one go about addressing such gigantic concerns and ideas in such a brief space? Griffis does so elegantly by juxtaposing large questions and ideas with microscopic, seemingly insignificant observations:

“[Grandma] says, ‘Do you ever wonder why everything just works in your life? Some people, everything in their life doesn’t work. It’s one big dysfunction after the next, malfunctioning electronics, parking tickets, which is why you need to be nice. Some people are being persecuted by shadows.’

A field mouse runs through a thicket.”

Could a person actually see or hear a field mouse run through a thicket? Maybe. Probably not. I’ve seen them at my feet, briefly, fleeing for their lives, and if it were dark out, or I hadn’t looked down at that precise second, I’d be none the wiser, meaning: they scoot silently through the grass. But that’s beside the point. The point is that somewhere in that grand space — say, a thicket of bramble in the middle of a cut cornfield — a field mouse is most likely running through that space. Meanwhile, a person, somewhere, could be “persecuted by shadows” — losing their mind: fogetting “names, dates, places.” Everything is happening everywhere and all the time.

Our first person narrator is a (literal) cake eating, popsicle loving eleven years old, so the quaint questions about life (What is a biome?) and fascination with the unknown (Have you wondered why witches are old ladies on brooms?) make sense. And answers for asked or unasked questions usually come from Grandma, who lives in an apartment attached to the narrator’s house. The apartment smells like “boiled vegetables.” Grandma, in all of her boilded vegetable glory is at the heart of this piece, doling out advice like it was her birthright. Perhaps her most interesting idea/advice is about boundaries. At their best, boundaries provide a sense of belonging; help with understanding stages of life; structure time; order relationships. But “[Grandma] says watch out for psychos. She says unhealthy people don’t understand boundaries, which is why the world is dying. All the boundaries are messed up.”

While that advice is interesting, it’s definitely not her best. Perhaps this might capture it:

“She hands me a list of life advice: 

Your memory is an eroding seashore.

Barren maples look like nervous systems.

Anhedonia is a chemical imbalance. 

If you resist everything, you will turn to stone.

Try to sort the puzzle.”

Yes, when everything is fractured and out of place, where does one start? Sort the puzzle. Sound advice for all of us. Thank you, Grandma.

Check out the story here. And check out more work from Gabrielle Griffis here.

Gabrielle Griffis is a multi-media artist, writer, and musician. She works as a librarian, and lives on Cape Cod with her husband Corey Farrenkopf. Her fiction has been published in or is forthcoming from Wigleaf, Okay Donkey, Monkeybicycle, Gone Lawn, XRAY Literary Magazine, decomP, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere. Her writing also appears in Repair Revolution: How Fixers are Transforming Our Throwaway Culture.

 

Flash Friday Interview: Filling Space, Filling Pools–a conversation with Erika Veurink

/ Keith Pilapil Lesmeister / Leave a comment

There’s a graceful, unflinching precision to Erika Veurink’s writing. A kind of easygoing conversational tone mixed with a matter-of-factness that makes it impossible to turn away. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m kind of enamored by flash fiction for all the ways in which it marries longer form literary elements to the lyrical qualities of poetry, but I’m also a fan of this form because it shows the myriad ways stories can be told. 500, 750, 1000 words—from micro moments to grand histories. Flash fiction covers it all. And through precise glimpses, of language and detail, and without all the potentially overbearing exposition, we are offered an entire relational history, as is the case in “Mystic Hustler.”

“My husband is desperate to finalize the divorce. He hates my newfound spirituality. He hates that I was having an affair with our doorman and blames it on my awakening.”

In three brief sentences we are introduced to three characters, a tantalizing situation, and the protagonist’s “awakening.” What might that awakening be? The title reveals a little.

Fortunately, for us readers of flash, Veurink’s published quite a few pieces in fantastic online journals such as CHEAP POP, XRAY, and Hobart, just to name a few.

Check out our conversation, and check out her stories featured XRAY and CHEAP POP.

Keith Lesmeister: Based on the couple pieces I’ve read, it seems the short form (under 1000 words) suits your style quite well. Could you discuss your general interest in flash forms? Do you start off thinking it’s going to be a flash piece? Or does the content dictate the length?

Erika Veurink: Honestly, I’ve never written a longer fiction piece. I think the length of my attempts at fiction is general intimidation. I lean toward brevity in all my work, mostly because it’s what I prefer as a reader. The challenge of a certain word count feels exciting to me, like a creative constraint.

KL: The structure of the “Gatsby Effect” is so interesting. At first, it feels like several non-sequiturs stacked on top of one another with a rather undefined form taking shape, but then, soon into the reading, a reader can identify a kind of structure that occurs as certain details lock into place, informing and complementing and building on one another. Could you talk about how this structure took shape? Was it already there in your mind as you started writing, or was it something that happened on its own?

EV: The structure for that piece specifically felt it was being revealed to me as I passed the idea. I don’t outline and I really believe that everything belongs. First drafts feel like filling a pool. I write without judgement or the pressure to organize concepts. Then I zoom out and try to trace the lines between little islands of images. So, a lot of stacking, cutting, and hoping.

KL: Did any of your recently published flash pieces start as poems? There’s a refined lyrical energy and startling insights that propels these pieces, not unlike a poem.

EV: Stories usually come to me in an image, crosses in the “Gatsby Effect” piece or phrases, “mystic hustler” is a line from an interview. I collect them and fill the space around them until I can afford to not be precious, which is the exact point any real creativity is born. I read a lot of poetry and take a lot of walks in the city and make lists of objects, which are the inciting incidents for most of my writing.

KL: What helps us readers connect to the characters—both in the XRAY piece and the CHEAP POP piece—is that the narrators both have a wry, self-deprecating voice, yet there’s also something entirely earnest here as well. Maybe earnest isn’t the right word, but it’s something along those lines. And our connections deepen when we find out about the various relational issues. How do you go about developing your characters so fully in such a brief space?

EV: I’m interested in characters who return to honesty. I think it has a lot to do with growing up in Iowa. Earnestness is attractive to me. I like to think about how characters speak to themselves, that sort of internal dialogue. What characters say to other characters can have so much more to do with the landscape of a piece than their own personality. I’m very visually driven, so if I’m feeling indulgent, I might imagine the apartment a character comes home to after work or what they order on a third date. When I’m lost in the process, I can find myself carrying the character with me, asking myself how they would respond to actual events in my own life.

KL: I want to talk about how to end a flash piece because they are notoriously difficult to conclude. I mean, hell, all stories are difficult to end, but I think even more so with a flash piece. How do you attempt to resolve your flash pieces? Or any work for that matter.

EV: When I’m having trouble ending a piece, I backpedal two or three sentences, paragraphs if it’s a larger work. I do find myself trying to squeeze in a final argument or indulging personal interests at the last second. But the essence of an ending should be clear without a grand banner of a pull quote. I try to keep it simple, quiet. That’s the greatest indication that I trust the story.

KL: Have you ever considered standup comedy? I think there’s humor in your work, and it stems partly from melodrama (ie “No one had ever had pneumonia before I did. No one had ever been in love with the wrong person.”) and there’s also a comedic timing within the irony and deflection (ie “…I talked on the phone with email guy for hours. I made it about him and cut my hair with kitchen scissors. I wanted company and I wanted layers.”). Humor is so difficult to write, I think, and I’m always so pleased to read it when it’s well done, as it is here. How do you that?? I need some lessons here.

EV: My personal sense of humor is very strange. Comedy makes me uncomfortable. To me, the funniest people are the most sincere people. I’m a fairly serious person, so I find so much of what resonates as humorous to me is other people being serious. Also, I find the people I’m closest to the most humorous. I think proximity means a lot. What that means for writing, I’m not really sure. I think I write in a sort of affectless nature, as an active rebellion against the Midwestern long vowels of my childhood.

KL: In both pieces, there’s a strong current of spirituality and religious symbols that run through both (prayer beads, crosses). Could you discuss the importance of this idea in your work? Does it show up often?

EV: I was raised very religiously and find that as I get older, my writing in religious symbols is out of necessity. It’s my first language and in many situations, the most concise container for my ideas. I never set out to write spiritually, but then the piece is done and there are fifteen references to communion. I memorized Bible verses and was at church at least twice a week. All the media I consumed as a child was Christian. I remember feeling genuinely surprised the first time someone pointed out the religious throughline in my work. It’s that deeply ingrained.

KL: Who is an author or authors we should all be reading right now?

EV:  I’m lost in a personal obsession with Annie Ernaux at the moment. Her slim novels read like devotionals on longing. I can’t get enough. I think Daisy Johnson’s book Sisters might be my favorite of the year. Her book Fen is also genius. And The Shame by Makenna Goodman has also been a top pick. I think we could all do to read a little more Annie Dillard, just generally.

KL: Last series of questions.

KL: Cityscapes or landscapes?

EV: Landscapes

KL: Pumpkin pie or Pecan pie?

EV: Pumpkin pie

KL: Flying or driving?

EV: Driving

KL: Hazy IPA or Gin & Tonic?

EV: Hazy IPA

KL: The song “Read My Mind” by The Killers. Do you prefer the original? Or the cover by boygenius?

EV: It has to be the cover by boygenius.

KL: And, most importantly, as a fellow (former) Midwesterner: Is it a casserole or a hot dish?

EV: Once and for all, casserole.

Erika Veurink is a writer living in Brooklyn by way of Iowa. She is receiving her MFA from Bennington College. Her work has appeared in Brooklyn Review, Cheap Pop, Hobart, Midwest Review, Triangle House, x-r-a-y, and elsewhere.