O:JA&L Special Feature
Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
AN INTERVIEW:
O:JA&L’s new Flash Fiction/Nonfiction Editor
RICHARD HOLETON
Welcome, Richard Holeton, as the new flash literature editor at OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters. We bid a fond farewell to our colleague John Holman who served us faithfully and well in that position, and we wish him the best with his new projects. He will be missed. But we are so pleased that you will assume his spot. We all (staff, readers, and writers) look forward to working with you and look forward to getting to know you a little. In that spirit, here are a few questions.
Casto for O:JA&L: Can you tell us what you’ll look for in the flash literature pieces you select to be published?
Richard Holeton: I’ll be looking for the same things I look for in any good literature—a bewitching voice, lively imagination, fresh language, a driving sense of intentionality. Urgency and/or surprise work well in the short form, I think. Especially for flash, every sentence, every detail, every word should be there for a reason. But for me that reason—both the form and the content—could be almost anything. Was it Flannery O’Connor who said, “Whatever you can get away with”? Wide lens or microscopic. Experimental or conventional. Realistic or speculative. Understated or hyperbolic, the wacky and the sober. I love irony and humor, but can admire sincerity and forthrightness. Subversiveness and irreverence, or passionate reverence. I think the main thing is to write something that only you can write.
Casto for O:JA&L: What seems to be the biggest mistake new or inexperienced writers make in writing flash literature?
Richard Holeton: I think one common challenge for less experienced writers (and really for all writers) is how to use personal experience in their prose, something specifically invited in our “Flash Nonfiction as Personal Essay, Memoir, Vignette” category. Retelling exactly what happened to you or someone else (which the science of memory would tell us isn’t even possible) may be entertaining over dinner, but it rarely makes for a compelling narrative on the written page. Fiction writers need to creatively reimagine and transform personal experience into something else, something that John Gardner called the “fictive dream” and others call “world building”—even the very small world of a flash fiction. Likewise the best creative nonfiction writers, in recreating their authentic experiences, skillfully reshape those experiences using the dramatic techniques and craft of fiction. Dialogue is an interesting case in point. We all know that real life speech—with people talking at the same time, interrupting, repeating themselves, etc.—isn’t very captivating when transcribed directly. It’s a tricky balance, then, to make written dialogue coherent and use it to reveal character and move the action forward, but still make it sound more or less like real people.
Casto for O:JA&L: Your career has included many years as a college writing instructor. Did you incorporate flash literature in your courses, and if so, what text(s) did you use, and how did students respond?
Richard Holeton: As a lecturer at Stanford, I taught first-year and advanced composition, critical thinking, and also a seminar on Vladimir Nabokov, who didn’t write anything very short). But I did incorporate flash fiction when I taught creative writing at San Francisco State University. For that I used Robert Shapard’s groundbreaking Sudden Fiction anthology, as well as the follow-up Sudden Fiction International. These collections, in helping to define our modern idea of flash literature, were (and are) thrilling in the range of aesthetic approaches they encompassed. They liberated students to experiment in their own flash pieces, as I encouraged them to imitate, for example, Gordon Lish’s “The Merry Chase,” which is composed entirely of clichés, or Lucas Cooper’s “Class Notes,” a parody of the alumni newsletter genre. I think imitating writers or techniques we admire is a great way to learn. Speaking of which, I wish we had your “workshop-in-a-book” when I was teaching, Pamelyn— (Flash Fiction: Alive in the Flicker, A Portable Workshop) would make a great companion text to Shapard’s or any of the great anthologies that have come out in recent years!
Casto for O:JA&L: What are some of your favorite flash fiction pieces? Who are some of your favorite flash fiction writers?
Richard Holeton: I mentioned the Lish and Cooper pieces. Also appearing in those anthologies is Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings,” which begins “John and Mary meet. What happens next?” then offers the reader five different possibilities for their story. Lish, Cooper, and Atwood all satirize or toy playfully with form or convention, something I guess I’m fond of, when it’s done well. In the same vein I recently came across J.G. Ballard’s “The Index,” a bit longer than most flash, which takes the form of a fictional index to a fictional memoir; the reader is left to piece together the narrative from the alphabetical index entries. I love “Sticks” by George Saunders (from his Tenth of December collection), which portrays the narrator’s father through a lifetime of lawn ornaments, with Saunders’ trademark comic exaggeration. Similarly, Grace Paley’s “Mother” beautifully captures the arc of a character’s life and death in a couple pages. Who else? Oh gosh. Borges, Kafka, Julio Cortázar, and Italo Calvino all wrote brilliant short works. Lydia Davis is terrific! Among many other fine contemporary writers of flash, I’ll also mention Siamak Vossoughi’s lovely collection A Sense of the Whole, a finalist for the 2022 William Saroyan International Prize that I helped judge (Vossoughi has won other prizes too).
Casto for O:JA&L: Why do you think flash literature has been such a success? Do you think that success will continue?
Richard Holeton: It almost seems axiomatic that flash appeals to us distracted 21st century readers who still hunger for literary experiences amid all the other information noise. But even in the 1980s, when Shapard’s Sudden Fiction burst onto the scene, people were talking about distraction and readers being less willing to invest their time in longer-form literature. “People are more distracted than ever before,” Lydia Davis said back then. Now in the age of TikTok, Instagram, and mobile phone addiction, short attention spans would seem to be a defining condition of our times. But as you know well, Pamelyn, from having written widely on the subject, short-form literature has been around a long time, as long as people have been telling stories. And so, too, have claims about modern life causing distraction. There were dire warnings about the railroads, the telegraph, the radio, comic books, TV, and then of course the Internet—all of these were going to destroy our ability to concentrate and communicate; even Plato argued that writing itself would ruin people’s memories. So maybe the claims about short attention spans remain a bit overblown today—think about the commercial success of genre fiction like romance, long-form TV shows that unspool like complex serial novels, and the prevalence of deep dive “individual research” online. Nevertheless, when platforms like Medium feature the reading time at the top of every text, flash lit seems well suited to busy modern lives and especially well suited to reading on screens, which seem to be replacing paper as the dominant medium of the present and the future.
Casto for O:JA&L: Which of your own writing projects are you most pleased with? Are you presently working on new projects?
Richard Holeton: Thanks for asking! I’m working on a collection of my short fiction (I’ve been putting some pieces up on Medium), and I have an experimental novella called “Camp Tugley Goes Rogue” that is looking for a publisher. My favorite project is my postmodern hypertext novel Figurski at Findhorn on Acid. It was published originally on the Storyspace platform, and it gained some critical recognition as part of the “Eastgate School” of early hypertext fiction. After the original software became obsolete, I worked with the fabulous Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University-Vancouver to rebuild and redesign the novel for the modern web in 2021. It’s freely available now online, along with a recent one-hour radio play adaptation by Portland’s Reimagined Radio. Readers may be interested to know that the genesis for Figurski was a 500-word flash fiction that won first prize in Grain Magazine’s “Short Grain Postcard Story” contest. The novel is structured as a combinatorial fiction; the discrete scenes are determined by every possible combination of three characters, at three places, with three artifacts, all in the form of “Someone(s) at Somewhere with Something(s).” An overall plot revolves around one of the artifacts—an 18th century mechanical pig, and an identical forgery—as the eccentric characters traverse global and virtual locations competing for its possession at the end of the 20th century. Each scene or “page” is quasi-independent, so the novel operates as a kind of large set of interconnected flash pieces.
Casto for O:JA&L: Richard, I’m eager to see your new work, too. It sounds fascinating, especially your postmodern hypertext novel Figurski at Findhorn on Acid. I look forward to spending some serious time with that project. Thank you so much for letting me interview you. It’s been a pleasure getting to know you a little bit and I’m sure our readers and writers will enjoy meeting and working with you, too.
About the interviewer:
Pamelyn Casto, twice a Pushcart Prize nominee, has published feature-length articles on flash fiction in Writer’s Digest (and in their other publications), Fiction Southeast, and Writing World (and elsewhere). Her essay on flash fiction and myth appears in Rose Metal Press’s Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field and her 8,000-word essay on flash fiction is included in Books and Beyond: The Greenwood Encyclopedia of New American Reading (4 volumes). She also has a 5,000-word article on flash fiction as the lead article in the new book Critical Insights: Flash Fiction. Subscribe to her free online monthly FlashFictionFlash newsletter (first issue published in 2001) for markets, contests, and publishing news for flash literature writers. Casto is an Associate Editor at O:JA&L. Pamelyn Casto’s new book Flash Fiction: Alive in the Flicker (A Portable Workshop), a new release from O:JA&L’s Buttonhook Press, is available now on Amazon. Explore more in Pamelyn Casto’s featured series of close readings: Pamelyn Casto: A Featured Series of Close Readings.
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