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The Splonk Five: Interview with Stuart Dybek

Can you tell us a bit about your relationship with flash? Why it appeals and what frustrates you?

In senior year in high school I went Beatnik. The fact that I already played tenor sax in a neighborhood jazz combo–that also played polka at corner tavern weddings–gave me a head start. All I had to do was also begin to write poems and stories. The poems were influenced in part by fellow Beatniks, Allen Ginsburg, Gary Snyder, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Just the title of Ferlinghetti’s book, A Coney Island of the Mind, was inspirational. I never read at the Fickle Pickle, a Chicago coffee house where poems were read to jazz, but I did write a piece that entertained the track team when we’d ride the bus to meets. The piece was titled ‘Opus Turd.’ Bathroom humor sure, but what could be more Beat than the POV of a turd floating down the Chicago Sanitary Canal, which moved sewage through my inner city ‘hood’. Instead of escaping to the open sea like Scuffy the Tugboat, who was ‘meant for bigger things,’ my 1st person narrator was headed for a wastewater treatment plant. His refrain throughout the single page prose piece is ‘I must see it all!’ Though written in prose, I knew it wasn’t exactly a story. I had never heard of prose poems or anti-poetry, and I thought poems had to be written in lines. Today it might have passed for flash fiction. Had anyone asked what it was back then (no one did) I’d have said word jazz, a term concocted by a Chicago based original named Ken Nordine whose LPs of poetry with jazzy backgrounds I thought were cool. Writers write. Musicians play. I was looking for writing that could be more like playing, more like improvising. I am not suggesting that there is no room in the classic genres for that sensibility, but for me, what has come to be called flash remains a form that very much accommodates an impulse to improvise. 

By senior year in college I was no longer playing sax, or reading the Beats, but I was still writing and had even published a few poems. I’d also written a couple stories that years later be part of my first collection of fiction, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. And I was still writing short prose pieces that weren’t conventional stories. I thought of them as being located in some unnamed no man’s land between poetry and prose that one got to not by playing notes off sheet music but by improvising.

In terms of construction/technique, how is flash fiction different, in your view, from other genres – in particular poetry (including prose poems) and the short story?

Genre for a writer isn’t about impermeable walls, but rather with locating a piece on a continuum. Flash by now has established its own place on that continuum, but I’m describing my experience with writing what’s now called flash, in a time before there even was such a term. There were no flash fiction anthologies, magazines, contests, or websites. The robust flash fiction network of today didn’t exist. It has been frequently observed in essays that before the term flash caught on there was a plethora of names for the prose miniature: fables, the short short, SmokeLong, Palm of the Hand Stories, Four Minute Fictions, vignettes, to name a few. There were pieces by earlier American writers that could serve as models. The majority of models were foreign, available to read in translation. Many models went back to the beginnings of modernism in 19th century Europe, especially France, before spreading to international literary culture. (One of my favorite books on the history of these short fictions is Andreas Huyssen’s Miniature Metropolis.) The short prose pieces that I had been writing since college were first published by poetry editors as prose poems.  Most fiction editors did not think pieces that short qualified as stories. One can speculate as to how flash fiction differs from the prose poem, but there is indisputably an overlap along the genre continuum. If one regards flash as a form suited to improvisation, then the question needn’t be, how is it different from the prose poem, but what is it that they share. It is not necessary today to hatch theories that writing flash-length pieces has to do with the effect of twitter on society, or of TV commercials on attention spans, as if flash came into being in response to the digital age. Such claims have traction if their point is that the current vogue for flash fiction might have to do with a twitter generation, but to ascribe flash technique to the influence of twitter is to ignore the long history of the prose miniature. Flash fiction, like the prose poem, exhibits many of the prominent aspects of modernism and postmodernism such hybridization, fragmentation, the centrality of image, the interplay of the lyrical and the narrative, the employment of the volta, of epiphany and of open endings. Flash, like the postmodern phenomena of metafiction, can serve as a way of expanding, redefining, or breaking genre. 

Fundamentally, for you what makes a flash piece successful?

Any notion that a form that accommodates improvisation has requirements seems a contradiction, so of course it is not required that a piece of flash fiction should intend to change reader’s expectation as to what a story is. Still, because of its length, the form lends itself to experimenting with storytelling. To be able to side step conventional expectation and still manage to satisfy a reader in a way the reader was not expecting, a way that hopefully also deepens the experience and meaning of the story, is something that flash seems a ready vehicle for. I think of flash fictions as laboratories of prose rhythm. There is something about the compressed length and the speed with which the short form moves that seems capable of heightening a reader’s sensitivity to sentence rhythm and when a writer is attentive to that it heightens the reading experience enormously. Perhaps the greatest challenge for a writer working with flash fiction is managing to draw character in psychological depth within such a restricted space. When a piece manages to do so, often through the use of voice or tone, it is always impressive.

What flashers do you admire and why? Are there any specific pieces that you found compelling?

One way we define a genre is by its masterpieces. I’ve been talking about flash in the context of its predecessors and I’ll stay with that in answering this question. Usually when one is talking about flash fiction the focus is on a particular piece. But I mentioned hybridization earlier, and many of the flash pieces I most admire are part of a sequence—none more so than the pieces in Calvino’s brilliantly sustained Invisible City. It wasn’t a surprise when a poetry anthology, Another Republic, edited by Mark Strand and Charles Simic, laid claim to some of those Calvino pieces as if they were prose poems. Calvino of course published them as a prose sequence that adds up to a novel. Does it matter what name the short prose piece goes by when a book is that beautiful? For me they are chapters in a novel, prose poems, and also set the bar for brilliance in the flash fiction form all at the same time. 

I mentioned prose rhythm and there’s a quote from Ernest Hemingway I like: ‘a writer needs to hear the way through a story’. One can ‘hear’ a young Hemingway doing just that in those early vignettes that are printed in italics as signal they are something other than short stories, between the stories of In Our Time. They were written in another century, in another age, but still read fresh. Hemingway’s experience as a reporter is often credited as an important element in the formation of his style, but there is a velocity in those vignettes that has nothing to do with the style sheet of the Kansas City Star. Calvino in his Harvard lectures discusses what he terms quickness as a trait he values in a piece of writing. One senses that speed in the Hemingway pieces. As an aside, I’d add that it is that kind of velocity one senses in the work of Emily Dickinson that makes her poetry read so fresh and for me makes her the greatest American poet of the 19th Century.

One more digression on the subject of American poetry, this one involving three of the most prominent poets writing in the time when modernism bloomed in America: Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound. Pound is one of the subjects in one of my favorite books having to do with image and compression in literature, Traces of Dreams by Haruo Shirane. The book has to do with haiku and also with its influence on modernism. If one thinks of the most often anthologized poems by those three American poets– ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,’ ‘The Red Wheelbarrow,’ and ‘In A Station of the Metro,’– it seems fair to say that each those poets wrote with haiku spirit. Hemingway in those vignettes from In Our Time writes with flash spirit, as does Jean Toomer in Cane.

A book I’ve treasured is Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm of the Hand Stories, translated by Lane Dunlop. It is a book that is elevated by both haiku spirit and flash spirit. There are several pieces in it that changed my expectation as to what a story is or can be. There is piece called ‘The Bell Cricket and the Grasshopper’ that I’d call a flash masterpiece. I have read it many times just to experience it’s magic again. One of the qualities these three works I’ve used as examples (I could go on for pages with others) is that I have reread them often. Flash is short enough to expect a reader to reread if the piece warrants rereading. It is common that magazines or anthologies today specify a word count for what qualifies as flash. There are obvious practical reasons that might be so, but it is important to remember that the length of a piece is only one measure of a fiction miniature. Word length can be measured. The number of times a short piece demands to be reread cannot. Word length doesn’t indicate the weight of the piece, how compressed the language is. Flash spirit is not a matter of word length. Like poetry the best flash pieces are written to be read again. Kawabata began to write his Palm of the Hand Stories in the 1920’s. In an introduction when the collection appeared in the 1970’s, Kawabata wrote that writers often write poetry when they are young, but that he wrote these Palm of the Hand stories instead.

What flash piece of your own are you most proud of? Where can we read it (if it’s available)?

My first book of poems interplayed prose poems—or maybe some were flash fictions—with poems in lines. There is a flash length fable-like story called ‘The Cat Woman’ in my first book of stories. My second book of stories, The Coast of Chicago, staggers flash-like piece with more conventional length stories, and one of the conventional length stories, ‘Nighthawks,’ is a sequence of self-contained short shorts. The ‘Nighthawks’ sequence is something I’m still happy with. Over the years I wanted to publish, as a kind of homage to the history of the prose miniature, a book that was primarily a collection of flash pieces. That book is Ecstatic Cahoots (FSG, 2014.) I wouldn’t say that the opening piece, ‘Misterioso,’ in that collection is the piece I’m most proud of, but it is the shortest piece of fiction I have so far managed to write.

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Stuart Dybek : The Start of Something: Selected Stories by Stuart Dybek was published by Jonathan Cape/Vintage in 2016. Two collections of fiction, Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern, were published by FSG in 2014. Dybek’s previous books of fiction are Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, The Coast of Chicago, and I Sailed with Magellan. He has also published two volumes of poetry, Brass Knuckles and Streets In Their Own Ink. His work has been published in The New Yorker, Harpers, The Atlantic, Tin House, and Poetry, is widely anthologized, and has appeared in numerous translations including Japanese, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian,and Turkish. He is the recipient of many literary awards including the PEN/Bernard Malamud Prize for “distinguished achievement in the short story”, a Lannan Award, an Academy Institute Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Harold Washington Literary Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and four O’Henry Prizes. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry and in Best American Fiction. In 2007, he was awarded both a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Rea Award for the Short Story. He received a 2018 Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement by a Chicago author. Dybek has taught at Stanford, Princeton, the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, the Warren Wilson Low Residency Program and is permanent faculty on the Prague Summer Program.  He is currently the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Northwestern University.