Flash Interview: Whitaker Talks To Flick about Flash, Food, and Fiction

An interview with Sherrie Flick. Sherrie Flick published her debut novel Reconsidering Happiness
with University of Nebraska Press as part of their Flyover Fiction
series in September 2009. She is also author of the award-winning flash
fiction chapbook I Call This Flirting (Flume Press, 2004). Anthologies include Sudden Fiction (Norton, 2007) and Flash Fiction Forward (Norton, 2006), as well as Sudden Stories: The Mammoth Book of Minuscule Fiction (MAMMOTH Press, 2003) and You Have Time for This (Ooligan Press, 2007). Her essay "Flash in a Pan" appears in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, 2009.

How and when did you begin writing flash fiction?

I started writing flash fiction as an undergraduate. First, I took some poetry workshops as a freshman, and had migrated over to fiction by the time I was a junior. I first wrote stories of a more traditional length, and then found some friends and some authors whose work I admired (Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Diane Williams) who wrote very short stories, and that intrigued me, and I soon found my voice.

Who and/or what inspires you? What authors (flash or otherwise) do you enjoy reading?

I've gotten into gardening the past few years. I have a big vegetable garden that takes up most of our back yard. The whole process of growing things has affected my own creative process for the good. Gardening can be very detail-oriented. Plus, you need knowledge of the big picture. You have to think about the past, present, and future and how they fit together.

As far as reading, I really enjoy Etgar Keret's work. His flash fiction collections are stellar (The Girl on the Fridge, The Nimrod Flipout). I also admire Steve Almond, Stephanie Johnson, Pamela Painter, and John McNally. I try to read constantly. I've been on a Colum McCann kick lately (This Side of Brightness is a devastating book). I think he is a genius. And I also loved Bonnie Jo Campbell's American Salvage. I really loved and have recommended Gary Shteyngart's Super True Sad Love Story to several students. William Tester's Head blew me away; although it was published in 2000 it was new to me this year. Also Mary Robison's Why Did I Ever, a novel in flash chapters, as well as Christine Schutt's Florida. Paul Yoon's Once the Shore. Beautiful. I've been rereading Chekhov lately and just bought his collected letters. I could go on and on.

What aspects of flash do you find most challenging? Most satisfying? Most important to include?

I guess the parts that I find most challenging are also the most satisfying: condensing a whole, full world into a small space. I love wrangling with words.

What advice would you give to writers in general and specifically to those who write flash?

Read widely. Write every day. Take risks. Think and talk about craft.

Last year your first novel was published. How was writing a novel different than writing flash for you? Do you prefer one genre over another? What are you writing currently? Are there other styles or genres you're interested in pursuing?

Writing the novel was completely different than writing flash fiction. For me, it was a new world, and so I had to try to understand the process as I went. With flash, I can jump in and out of working on stories, and I'm usually working on more than one at once. I'm also really comfortable with writing little stories because I've been doing it for a long time. That doesn't mean it's easy--I guess it's just less intimidating to me. With the novel, I had to make a big commitment to working on one story for an intensive period of time, to exploring the fictional world I'd created both deeply and widely. It felt like a huge risk to me--this new venture, but that in itself was great. I really enjoyed the creative challenge. It made me think differently about crafting my work--both long and short.

I'm currently working on new flash fiction manuscript. I also have a second novel half-drafted, but I've decided to put that on the back burner while I focus on the flash book. I'm writing a lot of new short-short stories and trying to order the manuscript and see what it needs. I'm also interested in putting together some kind of gardening/cooking/baking non-fiction book--a cookbook maybe? I'm not sure what it wants to be yet, but I'm circling around it in my head, and this summer I'll teach a food writing course at Chatham University and hope to think more about that project then.

Tell me about your blog Sentences and Food on your website. What inspired it? Do you enjoy gardening and cooking?

I think I've addressed this a bit throughout. But yes, I love food; I love gardening; I love cooking and baking for my husband and friends. I do a lot of the above. Plus drinking red wine. I learned how to can this summer and made blackberry jam and pickles for the first time. I used to work as a baker and that's where I learned to love everything about food. Food and baking play important roles in my novel. So it does leak out into my fiction as well.

What did you want to be when you were a child? Did you always want to be a writer? If you weren't a writer, what would you want to be/do?

I pretty much always wanted to be a writer. If I wasn't a writer I'd want to be an organic farmer. My dream job would be running a little roadside vegetable stand.

About the Author

Rachel Whitaker is in her second year of the Publishing Master's program at Rosemont College. She has had several film reviews and articles published in Ticket Magazine as well as the Ambler Gazette, both in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Upon graduation, she hopes to work as a copyeditor. Originally from Southeastern Ohio, she currently lives in Norristown, PA with her fiancé and their two cats.

For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.

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