The O:JA&L Masters Series: Flash Fiction

ASSOCIATE EDITOR PAMELYN CASTO

INTERVIEW WITH PEDRO PONCE

PEDRO PONCE is the author of The Devil and The Dairy Princess (Indiana University Press, 2021) winner of the Don Belton Fiction Prize and a finalist for the 2021 Big Other Book Award for Fiction. Ponce is also the author of Stories After Goya, Alien Autopsy, and Superstitions of Apartment Life. His short stories and flash fiction have appeared in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Witness, and other journals. His work has been recognized with a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and with residencies at Ragdale, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He teaches writing and literary studies at St. Lawrence University.

To explore or download selected offerings from Pedro Ponce,
click on the title A Map of the Underground
to access the latest chapbook in the O:JA&L Masters Series.

CASTO FOR O:JA&L: Thank you for agreeing to this interview. I appreciate getting to learn what you can tell us about your writing and about flash literature. Let’s begin with metaphor. In an interview you did with New Flash Fiction you said flash fiction is uniquely suited to metaphor. You said the unpacking of metaphor allows the reader to experience the effects of a longer story because the reader is invited to slow down rather than speed up. How might a writer deal with the way the more superficial reader might react toward such stories? Would you say this is also one of the differences between literary fiction and more mainstream fiction?

PONCE: I see flash as the narrative equivalent of a painting or sculpture, in the sense that it’s easier to think you see the whole all at once. This is the power of flash—like a still life, it’s intensely focused on familiar things in unusual juxtapositions. This is also the problem of flash—in the museum of flash, it’s easy to skim the signage and say, “That’s an unreliable narrator—check. That’s speculative flash—check. That’s a hermit crab piece in the form of a grocery list—check. OK, let’s hit the gift shop.” The brevity of flash makes it easy to mistake recognition for reading. I’m as guilty as anybody else—if I’m not in the right frame of mind, I can read a flash collection in one sitting without appreciating the intricacy of each piece, or the connections between them.

This relates to a complaint I see a lot about movies and streaming shows. Sequels, prequels, narrative franchises—what we get isn’t a story anymore but just a bunch of references to what we’ve seen before strung together. Audiences of all sizes are craving what flash potentially provides.

I wrestle with this problem whenever I write flash. In Novelist as a Vocation, Haruki Murakami talks about writing novels as a craft of intense attention, and I think this is a useful idea for flash writers too. The best flash transcends brevity with texture—observing the world so intensely that the reader doesn’t recognize it until it’s too late. Monica Wood’s “Disappearing” is a great example of this. If you stop around halfway through, you could say, “Oh, I get it. This is a metaphor for addiction or an eating disorder.” But the narrator continues to shape and discipline her body until even her unsympathetic husband is freaking out. As the title suggests, the narrator concludes that the ideal body is no body at all. “Disappearing” exposes the primal horror of having a body—any body.

I tend to think that all narrative employs metaphor on some level. A book like The School for Good Mothers might play on mainstream anxieties about parenting in general, and “good” mothering in particular. But the metaphor Jessamine Chan develops here is terrifying: motherhood as surveillance state. She might package it in the narrative beats of The Hunger Games or reality TV, but the metaphor sticks if you read closely enough. Of course, Chan has a lot more space to unpack her metaphor than a writer of flash.

CASTO FOR O:JA&L:  Aristotle said metaphor, a sign of genius, is the one thing that cannot be learned from others. He claims it implies an intuitive perception of the similarity of the dissimilar. Do you agree with Aristotle? Or do you think it is possible to teach aspiring writers about the importance of metaphor?

PONCE: I can’t remember who said that the human brain can’t tolerate a vacuum—I’m sure this idea underpins the work of a lot of artists and writers. I think that humans can’t help making creative and metaphorical connections between one thing and another. Think of the pop song. (I learned metaphor from Elvis Costello, not Aristotle, though if you’re a fan, this is just genius in a different form.) Think of the meme. Memes are pretty sophisticated hybrids of figure and narrative—you need to connect all these layers in order to create and understand them. The human capacity for metaphor is everywhere, even in stuff that is dismissed as “junk.”

Obviously, I think metaphor can be taught. The real challenge is attention—or its lack. We are bombarded by information and disinformation, and sorting it can be exhausting. The ultimate “hack” is to trust what you already think you know, and to ignore whatever doesn’t fit. For me, a lot of learning is unlearning what we think a story is. This is one advantage of reading speculative fiction that, to varying degrees, insinuates the strange and arbitrary into its world-building. The more we immerse ourselves in this fictional strangeness, the more we start to recognize—and scrutinize—how our own world is built.

CASTO FOR O:JA&L: In another interview, you said you learned about the integrity of the sentence from Amy Hempel. I also admire her writing. Can you tell us more about sentence integrity? What might that involve?

PONCE: Amy Hempel was one of the first writers who taught me that writing is like music—specific words make specific sounds depending on where they are placed in the sentence. When I studied with Amy at the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore, she had us listen to how sentences ended, for instance. Sentences are stronger if they end in monosyllables instead of polysyllables. It’s the difference between writing, “The door is scarlet” and “The door is red.” The redness of the door is concentrated in that single sound at the end of the sentence. After Amy, I continued to learn about how prose can sound from writers like Stuart Dybek, Christine Schutt, and Roberto Bolaño.

I can’t start a story unless the first sentence sounds right. And I can’t continue a story unless the next sentence sounds right. As a writing teacher, I try to use different techniques to get students to play around with language, but I’ve never been much of a freewriter. When I’m stuck, writing until the page is filled with whatever I’m thinking will not work. Usually, I’ll just wait until what I see in my head is expressed clearly on the page. What does “clearly” mean? It really depends. Sometimes, that first sentence is concise and declarative: “The door is red.” But the story isn’t about the door, it’s about what’s behind the door. The redness, when I think about it long enough, is like radioactivity; it’s warning others to stay out. There’s a person staring into a red door. They don’t want to go in, but they have to. The next sentence is going to be a long one—instead of acting, this person is going to rationalize not going in. Semi-colons will probably be involved. The semi-colon is a fussy way of organizing a sentence, so the protagonist is probably a fussy person who prefers order to chaos. But the hesitation of the narrator—the protagonist insists on order, so they’re going to tell their own story—suggests that what’s behind the door lacks order in a disturbing way. So, we’ve gone from sound to character to setting to the first atmospheric hints of conflict.

The integrity of the sentence isn’t just about starting stories but finishing them. If the first sentence is strong enough, “clear” enough to the writer, then you can also see how it connects to the middle and the end. Of course, the story changes and evolves with every new sentence you add, so I don’t mean to suggest that this is a straightforward process. But when I feel lost in a story, struggling to imagine what happens next, it’s reassuring to think that the ending has already been written if you read the beginning and middle closely enough.

CASTO FOR O:JA&L: What other ideas or concepts might you have gotten from Hempel? I understand that she studied with Gordon Lish (who also mentored Raymond Carver) and someone said that from Lish she learned how to get rid of what’s unnecessary in a story. This is also what your writing does. Would you describe what you might consider essentials or nonessentials in short-short fiction?

PONCE: When I reflect on what is essential in a work of fiction—regardless of length—I think of urgency. The speaker of the fiction—whether a first-person narrator or the disembodied voice of second- or third-person—is urgently trying to say something, and for at least a brief moment, the reader is immersed in this urgency. The urgency can be dramatic or comedic—this thing happened and I have to tell you about it. It can be laconic or lyrical. One of the first short-short stories I remember reading is Raymond Carver’s “Popular Mechanics.” You can say the style here is stripped down, but there is nothing minimal about it; the parents fighting over the baby turn into these mythical archetypes out of one of Goya’s etchings, and the language feels almost biblical in that last sentence: “In this manner, the issue was decided.” You can feel the urgency in every word. But urgency can also be suggested through digression and indirection as well. Kafka comes to mind in pieces like “A Common Confusion.” The language of “A Common Confusion” feels bureaucratic as it describes a business trip. The urgency comes from the contrast between the voice and the reality of the fictional world, which is arbitrary and cruel to the protagonist. It’s one of Kafka’s strangest stories—and that’s saying a lot—but it works because the language tries to give the story’s unsettling atmosphere a veneer of the ordinary. If the world is this bad during “business as usual,” how bad does it really get?

Crafting this kind of urgency is a matter of forgetting about time and thinking of the “plot” of flash as juxtaposition. A novel or novella or short story tends to dramatize change over time—this happened, then this happened. Flash tends to suggest change by putting different elements next to each other, paragraph to paragraph, sentence to sentence. The juxtaposition is more intense because the form requires concentration into a few hundred words. Smooth chronological transitions are often cut out. Time, place, mood, all of it can shift radically from one sentence to another, and even in the same sentence. I’m thinking of a story like George Saunders’ “Sticks,” where images of setting evoke a painful family history. Another example of a brief flash that is anything but minimal. I think this is why flash draws comparison to poetry, except that instead of line breaks, we have paragraph breaks.

CASTO FOR O:JA&L: One of my favorite Annie Dillard quotations says: “One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place. Something more will arise for later, something better.” Do you save ideas or concepts or images for another time, another story? Or, like Dillard, do you spend it all every time?

PONCE: Admittedly, Dillard’s idea of spending it all terrifies me! I do tend to hoard and save, which might explain a lot of my dry spells between projects. I have a notebook, but more often than not, an idea will strike me, and I’ll write it down on a sticky note or the corner of an envelope and I hope it won’t get lost. I tend to classify ideas before trying them out: This feels like flash. This is too big for flash—it’s more of a novel, and so on.

I’ve loosened up my process somewhat, since the pandemic actually. Even before the pandemic, I was reflecting on all I’ve written, and all I haven’t written. I wouldn’t say I’m spending it all these days, but I try to listen to what the story is telling me, instead of telling it what it is.

If memory serves, Borges never wrote a novel because he was too impatient. A lot of his pieces—arguably flash before flash—resulted from talking about imaginary books he didn’t have the urge to write himself. That’s not a bad way to think about it.

CASTO FOR O:JA&L: How important is revision to your writing process?  Do you spend a lot of time with revision?

PONCE: Lately, revision has been pretty fundamental to my flash. I do tend to draft flash in one sitting. If I try to write it over days or weeks, I worry that the trail will go cold, so to speak. I never assume that this early draft is “done.” Even as I’m writing it, I know that certain sentences are flat, certain images aren’t developed enough. Then, I set the draft aside for a time and return to it. That time away lets me see the shape of the story, what’s missing, and what can be better.

Revision sometimes isn’t a choice. I’ll have a piece that has collected a bunch of rejections, and before I send it out again, I’ll look it over. Inevitably, there will be gaps that can be filled in, language that can be sharper. I’ll send out the new version, and if/when that one comes back, I start thinking about the next version.

CASTO FOR O:JA&L: I read in Double Room that you admire prose poem/ flash fiction writer Barry Yourgrau’s work. So do I. I have a couple of his collections. In the interview you said you admire how he “invests the minutiae of everyday life—a family dinner, a chance meeting, a fireside nap in an armchair—with the suggestive logic and imagery of dreams.” How important are suggestive logic and dream imagery?

PONCE: The suggestive is essential, particularly in flash. There’s not much space for the usual architecture of narrative. In a lot of very short fiction, the suggested is the plot: this moment takes me back (or possibly forward) to this moment, and here possibly is why. It doesn’t have to be dream-related, but it can feel that way. I think that’s the appeal of Yourgrau’s work.

Dreams are funny things. They’re a kind of internal poetry, but when put in fiction, they can feel contrived—anything but suggestive. I love surrealism and strangeness, but my skin crawls when I read a story and get to a sentence like, “That night I dreamed that X.” Say it’s a story about a couple; one partner wants kids, the other doesn’t. They’ve just had another argument about it. That night, the partner who wants kids dreams that the partner who doesn’t returns from the grocery store with a carton of eggs. But just as they’re about to start preparing breakfast together, the carton is opened and revealed to be empty. I will probably finish reading the story, but I’ll really resent it if the narrator mentions walking on eggshells after waking up.

I can’t stand when writers turn their personal pet peeves into creative best practices without explanation, so here is mine, for what it’s worth: that hypothetical dream is really disguised exposition. It’s a way for the character to process and express feelings without leaning on conventional summary or scene. Sure, it’s more interesting, and potentially, you can pin the rest of the story structurally on the images that come out of it. But what you get from something like this—particularly in an otherwise realistic story—isn’t worth the contrivance. And if you do this in flash, the brevity makes the contrivance stick out even more.

When I use dreams, they work best when you dramatize them as is—the dream is treated as fictional reality. Many years ago, I had a dream that I turned into a piece for Quick Fiction called “Cotillion.” The piece was basically a gift from my subconscious. In the flash version, no one is dreaming and no one is trying to make the dream mean anything. I just imagined myself as a character in the dream and followed the logic from there. That story continues to set the standard for what I want to do in flash.

CASTO FOR O:JA&L: What other writers of short-short work do you admire? Do you think short-short literature is here to stay? Will it continue to be popular? Or is it another passing fad? Why or why not do you think so?

PONCE: I’m only half-joking when I say that someone, somewhere, is probably working on their anti-flash manifesto. It happened with experimental fiction when Tom Wolfe went after it in “Stalking the billion- footed beast.” And the fiction Wolfe targeted wasn’t as big then as flash is now. Flash is read, and written, and taught, across multiple genres, including nonfiction. I don’t think it’s just about attention spans. The impulse to break up experience into smaller bits is also a way to process something that’s too big to take in all at once. It’s the impulse of someone who wants to pay attention in a world that does everything it can to dilute attention spans.

I don’t think flash will ever go away. No genre ever goes away. It’s as close as any public library. If public libraries go away though…that’s a different story.

In the current wealth of flash out there, I’ll stick to recent favorites: I just discovered the work of Angela Woodward. Her stories are like these vast root systems that weave their way into realism and fantasy at the same time. The same goes for Benjamin Niespodziany. I reviewed a collection of Ana María Shua’s very short stories in translation a while back, but there is a lot that hasn’t been translated. I’m trying to get my Spanish into good enough shape to dive in.

CASTO FOR O:JA&L: Fine and prolific writers like yourself usually have something more going on. Do you have any new work on the horizon? Any new projects you’re working on?

PONCE: I’m working on a new collection of flash as well as another collection of short stories. I’ve spent more than a decade working on a novel that I showed to two trusted readers. The manuscript still needs work. Maybe I should follow my own advice and break it up into smaller bits.

CASTO FOR O:JA&L: I look forward to reading your new work, too. Thank you for doing this interesting interview.

 

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. 

Image: Portrait photograph courtesy of Pedro Ponce.

This project was made possible, in part, through support from
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OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its imprints Buttonhook Press, HOT BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Issues, and HIGH BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Art, supports writers and artists worldwide.

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