Which flash fiction, short story, or prose poetry writers have influenced you the most and how? 

Joy Williams, Susan Steinberg, Sara Lippmann, Sabrina Orah Mark, Susan Cisneros, Aimee Bender, Amy Hempel, Pamela Painter, Han Kang, Ada Límon, Kim Chinquee, Kim Addonizio, Lydia Copeland Gwynn, Tina May Hall, Jenny Offill, Venita Blackburn, Cathy Ulrich, Grace Paley, Beth Ann Fennelly, Miranda July, Anne Carson, Khadija Queen, Lydia Davis, Mary Robison, and Diane Seuss. Lately, I’m fangirling Claire Keegan. I have read every book she’s published. All of these writers have at one time or another opened my eyes to what short stories, flash fiction, prose poetry and poetry can do. I realize these are all women, but truly they are the short form writers whose work I teach, whose work makes me swoon.  

You once said that a lot of published flash fiction “is really more of a scene than a story”. Do you think that ‘single-scene’ quality is something that defines flash versus longer short fiction? And how do you feel the planning and writing of a flash piece differs from that of a short story? 

A single scene can be a very powerful and work as a complete flash fiction. The trick is to allude to more beyond the confines of the scene. Something that resonates emotionally that’s “bigger” than the scene itself. In short fiction and novels, scenes are building blocks and typically don’t work on their own. They’re not meant to.  

I myself almost never “plan” a flash fiction, but yes, flash needs to do all its work in a limited space. That drives how we go about writing it. There’s no room for anything extraneous to the storytelling. It’s more aimed in that way. It’s not so much this, this, this, and this happened; it’s more, this one thing happened, and this is how it reverberates.  

Flash fiction seems to be flourishing in the social media era, and a parallel golden age is taking place in prose poetry. What, in your mind, distinguishes flash fiction from prose poetry, or are they too similar to keep fully distinct?  

Oh I just read the best explanation of the difference from Robert Olen Butler, so I will shamelessly steal it:  

“To be brief, it is a short short story and not a prose poem because it has at its centre a character who yearns.”

But there are published prose poems that feel like flash to me and vice versa. In many ways, the distinction lies in the eye of the beholder.  

You’ve mentioned “emotional urgency” as a crucial driver of flash fiction. How do you feel intensity and/or compression should be balanced with plot or characterisation in a successful flash fiction piece?  

I just finished teaching a weekend workshop on this very thing! I would give more weight to emotional urgency, actually, than characterisation and plot. Robert Olen Butler also said this of plot in flash fiction: “Plot, in fact, is yearning challenged and thwarted. A short short story, in its brevity, may not have a fully developed plot, but it must have the essence of a plot: yearning.” I feel like characterisation comes through organically via emotional urgency, along with voice.  

Wild Life, your amazing “best of” collection, contains 50 stories whittled down from a bibliography of over 200! How did you decide which pieces to include in it?  

Thanks for saying that about Wild Life. I wanted to stay true to the spirit of the original collection of the same name, also published by Matter Press, so a lot of my decisions had to do with this idea of “wildness.” I don’t like the idea of a collection being “here’s everything I’ve written in the last ten years.” I like to think of a collection as a piece of intentional art, where all the works feel organic to one major feeling or theme. There were strong stories I love that didn’t make the cut for that reason.  

You’ve described short story and flash fiction collections as their “own piece of art” that require an alternation of “highs and lows.” Is a pattern of more “intense and ‘softer’ stories” your primary method of collection structuring? 

Yes! I’ve often compared the task of putting together a flash collection as a symphony. Just as we aim for “music” in our individual pieces (varying sentence length, paragraph length, attention to cadence, etc.), we should do the same with a collection. So yes, highs and lows, emotional intensity, point of view and so forth. But also paying attention to where one piece leaves off and the other picks up. I say all of this recognizing that some readers just pick up the book randomly and read all over the place, so none of these things matter in the end, but they matter to me! 

Just as novelists employ a range of physical, virtual and conceptual strategies to structure a book, short form writers range from using post it notes to the latest writing software to structure their collections. How does your story selection process when putting together a collection manifest? 

I’m lucky to have a very long dining room table. We only use it for holiday meals, but it’s GREAT for organizing a collection! I print all my stories out and lay them around the table, then I walk around just – at first – getting a visual feel for them. I use post it notes for the things I’ve already mentioned. Different colours for different aspects, so I don’t have five stories in a row that deal with death or coming of age or whatever. I like to vary the stories formally as well. I should say, too, that once I’m putting a collection together, I take a fresh look at all the stories, whether they’ve been published or not. I see it as another opportunity to revise and polish, often toward the goal of making the pieces fit together better.  

You teach a highly popular series of online writing workshops. How do you feel your writing and teaching processes inform each other? 

I’m absolutely a better writer because I teach. Teaching is a marvellous way to learn anything. Just finding stories that exemplify various craft concepts is a lesson in deep reading. I learn so much from reading the brilliant work of my peers. I love sharing my passion for flash as a form, and seeing that light a fire in my students. It inspires me to keep learning and growing in my own work. I also take workshops from writers I admire. I love being in the student chair.  

What are you working on at the moment? 

I’m pulling together a new collection! It centres around the themes of time and memory. The way our brains work and don’t work in recalling trauma. I’m playing around a lot with form, innovating and experimenting. I’m focused on creating a very unique piece of art, slowly, intentionally, taking great care with every piece before moving on to the next. Ooh that sounds so pretentious, doesn’t it! But this is my way of saying, I’m slow. Don’t look for it any time soon, ha.  

You are both a poet and a visual artist. Does one or the other of these feel primary to you, or are they both equal passions?

They are equal passions, but I feel a little more at home in the visual art world. Maybe because I have far more years of experience as an artist; my husband is an artist and most of my friends are artists. That said, it doesn’t seem strange to call myself a visual poet, either, because I often include text in my work.

Your art is incredibly distinctive. How did it evolve? And which artists and writers have influenced you the most?

Thank you for saying that! My art has evolved over many years, almost like a natural progression, mixed with determination to attempt to create something new. I formed an early art appreciation for process artists such as Lynda Benglis, performance artists such as Chris Burden, and the Fauvist Artists, with Henri Matisse being my foremost inspiration when it comes to the canvas. Many text artists like Christopher Wool, Jenny Holzer, and Barbara Kruger have definitely influenced my work as well. They really understood the power of words.

Can you tell us a bit about your process. What inspires you in the everyday? Are there particular creative problems you encounter, and how do you solve them?

I take lots of photographs of whatever strikes my eye. I think I qualify as a photography hoarder. This includes my collections of old photographs from the 19th century. Daily, I read in small increments of time, write down ideas, draw, and paint my ideas that come to me. The last couple of years canvas painting has become a part of my process instead of a finished project. I paint to create something else. Eventually I photograph it in bits and pieces to be digitally edited into that something else. My only problem is lack of time, and lack of computational skills. There’s always something new to learn.

What is your favourite piece/series of your own work and what is the most experimental piece/series you’ve ever done?

My favourite series was a site-specific series of paintings, exploring a theme that runs through much of my work, which is opulence. It’s a loud theme sometimes, as my series of large-scale paintings exploring Grimm’s ‘The Fisherman And His Wife’ shows. The canvases were painted with rhinestones, beads, sequins, lace, etc., and took a few years to complete; it was technically a process art. I wanted to make them too beautiful, too decadent, too much, and yet alluring. And like the story, each painting – with the first one being just traditional paint – became more ornate and embellished. My most experimental work might be the visual poetry book published by NoPress called Monospaced Poems. I plan to make a pdf of it soon.

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It seems as if vispo walks a tightrope between what words mean and their visual impact. How do you feel the collision of these two art forms alters a reader/viewer’s understanding of both?

Yes, it’s a tightrope for sure. I know I have taken great liberties with the genre, experimenting with how far I can go. I often remove words I don’t think are needed. I’m like an editing machine, where it all ends up on the floor. I trust my readers. Many will understand what I am saying and even bring their own unique perspective to it. Most visual poets aren’t looking for word meaning, because it’s a visual language and experiencing it is very different from text poetry. If we use actual text, it often isn’t necessarily about the word(s), but rather about the word’s relationship with the image and/or the reverse. Mind you, we don’t just make visual poems for each other. Someone who is not a visual poet or poet once said they liked my book without ‘understanding what it means’. That’s a great compliment really.

I’ve read that your work merges digital technology with traditional mediums like painting, drawing and photography to create a new language of expression. How do you combine and balance those elements?

I think I may have touched upon that in question 3 but I will say a bit more about technology. I don’t have any formal training in tech but it has always played a part in my artwork dating back to my first desktop computer in the mid 80’s. I used to draw with the original (black & white) photoshop and then print it, apply colours to it with dry medium, then use the images to inspire a large-scale oil painting. Nobody saw the process, the only thing left was the canvas painting. The first one I called ‘Apple Blossom 1’ because I used a Mac.
Sometimes my creative process is similar to erasure poetry in that I am removing details by computer so that my work better emphasizes what I want to communicate.

In your work, what are the main borderlines between and intersections of traditional textual poetry, concrete poetry, visual poetry, and visual art?

I have an appreciation for many genres of visual art. The limitlessness of art. When I work with text poetry, it’s not unlike art to me, but obviously it hails from its own history. Perhaps I overstep some of the literary boundaries, but that spurs me on. The endless possibilities are the part of the process that I find exciting. I experiment with the relationships between typographical and spatial elements to present new language and meaning.

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Do you constantly keep pushing the boundaries of art/technology experiments or do you feel that you’ve now found your ideal language for expression in your current work?

No. I will never stop trying to develop a new language of expression. My art has always been connected to technology, and both art and technology are always changing.

You teach art – what do you love about teaching art? Do you ever discover something new when you’re teaching?

Teaching art has been a very positive influence on my artwork in so many ways. Primarily, it kept me from becoming too hyper-focused on my own work. You gotta look up. And the students offer a unique challenge in that I couldn’t just teach art from my own perspective – I had to teach visual art from the art world’s perspective. Of course they asked ‘what do you think?’ and I shared my own ideas but they, too, shared their own ideas. It’s a win-win situation to be a teacher. Very rewarding.

What are you working on at the moment?

I enjoy working on several projects at a time. I am working on a commissioned canvas painting, a music album cover design, a visual poetry book, publishing an online visual poetry pdf journal called InterPoem, and my newest venture in the very near future is a podcast.

Finally, what advice could you offer to writers and artists who want to experiment with hybrid forms and intermedia?

There’s a huge amount of free information on the internet. There are a number of artists/poets who are willing to chat about their work and give advice. Look at what’s currently being done. And above all else believe in your work and craft your own path.