Interview: Amy L. Clark discusses Metallic Origami, Wanting, and Flash Fiction

by Tori Bond

Amy L. Clark is assis­tant pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish and the Inter­im Direc­tor of the Writ­ing Pro­gram at Reg­is Col­lege, and pro­fes­sor of writ­ing and crit­i­cal think­ing with Bard College’s Clemente Course Boston. She is also the found­ing mem­ber and chair of the board of direc­tors of the char­i­ta­ble orga­ni­za­tion The Endow­ment for Unex­cep­tion­al Humans. She has had fic­tion and non­fic­tion pub­lished in lit­er­ary jour­nals and antholo­gies, includ­ing Hobart, Juked, Quick Fic­tion, Action Yes Quar­ter­ly, McSweeneys Inter­net Ten­den­cy, and The Amer­i­can Book Review, and Best of the Web, and her chap­book Want­i­ng is avail­able as part of the book A Pecu­liar Feel­ing of Rest­less­ness (Rose Met­al Press). Her online home is www.overtimewriting.com. Amy has always want­ed to be a rock­et sur­geon.

What attracts you to writ­ing flash fic­tion?

I had nev­er heard of flash fic­tion until I took I grad­u­ate course in it, and when I did end up in the class, I was ini­tial­ly pret­ty skep­ti­cal of the form. But the class was taught by the won­der­ful Pamela Painter, and she always does an amaz­ing job of pulling bril­liant lit­tle sto­ries out of peo­ple. Once I got used to the form, I came to love a cou­ple things about it. First, the sto­ries are so short that, as a writer, it is freeing—I don’t have to pour years of time and effort into a short short the way I would a nov­el, which means that I’m always open to rad­i­cal revi­sion of a piece of flash fic­tion, or even, when one fails, to scrap­ing it alto­geth­er, throw­ing it away, and start­ing some­thing new. Sec­ond­ly, I have come to real­ly love the econ­o­my of the form. In a piece of flash fic­tion, the sto­ry has to be told, and the char­ac­ter has to be devel­oped, using just a few, key details and turns of phrase. I think that real­ly appeals to my (prob­a­bly overde­vel­oped) wish for order: for signs and sym­bols in the world and in our char­ac­ter to mean some­thing, and to mean only one, seem­ing­ly inevitable thing. That impulse is not some­thing I’m always proud of in life, but when I’m writ­ing flash fic­tion, it’s help­ful and enjoy­able.

I find it inter­est­ing that you write both short short fic­tion and nov­el length fic­tion. How does your writ­ing process dif­fer when writ­ing short ver­sus long? Are you able to work on both at the same time, or do you alter­nate, focus­ing on one project at a time?
 

For a long time, I wrote most­ly tra­di­tion­al-length short sto­ries. Flash fic­tion enabled me to focus my lan­guage and my details, and was an easy tran­si­tion from reg­u­lar short sto­ries. I didn’t attempt a nov­el for a long time, and when I did, that was the tran­si­tion that was real­ly hard. The first nov­el I wrote end­ed up, after the first major draft, at only around 150 pages, and more alarm­ing­ly, the pac­ing was com­plete­ly wrong. I re-wrote the entire nov­el, focus­ing on the fact that I could slow down and devel­op the char­ac­ters and for­ward move­ment over many pages and chap­ters, and that details car­ried a dif­fer­ent amount of weight in a nov­el than they do in a short sto­ry. It was huge­ly grat­i­fy­ing when I felt like I sort of fig­ured out how to do that.

In your sto­ry “Quar­ters,” you per­form “metal­lic origa­mi,” trans­form­ing a quar­ter into the thing the pro­tag­o­nist deeply longs for most, her lover. This is achieved in one para­graph. How do you make such large moves in such a small space?
 

Actu­al­ly, the quar­ters become the hand of a man who repels and fright­ens and fas­ci­nates the pro­tag­o­nist, and only after all that, turns her on. I think mak­ing a move like that—from, in this case, a very spe­cif­ic phys­i­cal object to a large, amor­phous feeling—happens through ask­ing read­ers to equate things in sur­pris­ing ways. We spend our whole lives look­ing at things and ideas and going, “what is this? What is it like?” and in a moment like the one in “Quar­ters” I’m real­ly ask­ing read­ers to think: “what if it’s like this total­ly dif­fer­ent thing?” When it works, it’s because the metaphor or the crazy leap in the mind of the char­ac­ter some­how seems intu­itive to read­ers, because they have made sim­i­lar crazy leaps or can under­stand how oth­ers do.

Your sto­ries illu­mi­nate the unex­plain­able in rela­tion­ships, in unique and sur­pris­ing ways. How do you think about sur­prise or new­ness when you write? 

That makes it sound like I’m doing some­thing right! Thanks! I’m not sure I con­scious­ly think about sur­prise or nov­el­ty when I’m writ­ing. In fact, one of the things I’m always warn­ing stu­dents against is the sur­prise end­ing that can some­times read like a trick or the end of a joke. I like bad jokes a lot, but lit­er­ary sto­ries are sup­posed to do some­thing dif­fer­ent, some­thing more. I would guess that a lot of what reads like “new­ness” in my short shorts is real­ly just the way my actu­al, skewed brain works. I do try to cre­ate char­ac­ters who see the world a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly, and that hope­ful comes across as inter­est­ing and fresh but still ground­ed in basic human truths. I know a lot of dif­fer­ent kinds of peo­ple, and in my life, I’m usu­al­ly more inter­est­ed in the ways that, for all our dif­fer­ences, we are more alike than we are strange to each oth­er. But in fic­tion, that gets reversed: it’s what makes char­ac­ters just a lit­tle bit “oth­er” that is often so com­pelling to me.

Want­i­ng what can’t be had seems to be a com­mon theme in many of your sto­ries. Do you start know­ing what your char­ac­ter most want, or do you dis­cov­er this dur­ing the writ­ing process?

The title of my col­lec­tion in A Pecu­liar Feel­ing of Rest­less­ness comes from the dou­ble mean­ing of “Want­i­ng.” It can mean “desir­ing,” of course, but also “lack­ing.” It was also my lit­tle homage to one of my all-time favorite writ­ers, Grace Paley, whose “Wants” has one of the best lines ever writ­ten about human rela­tion­ships and plumb­ing. I’m fair­ly old-school when it comes to devel­op­ing sto­ries, and I still think that what a char­ac­ter wants, and what she is will­ing to do to get it, cre­ates the best ten­sion in a piece. So, even when I don’t start a sto­ry know­ing what my char­ac­ter wants, I try to fig­ure it out before I get too far into any­thing, oth­er­wise I feel like the piece los­es focus, los­es its human­i­ty, and I lose inter­est in it. Any­way, it’s not hard to assign a desire to a char­ac­ter; we all want so much all the time, and as a writer, you just take your pick.

When I attempt to write flash fic­tion, I fall back to my long fic­tion habits and then pan­ic when I get to 1000 words and an end­ing is nowhere in sight. What do you feel an end­ing needs to achieve in flash fic­tion and how do you arrive at a sat­is­fy­ing end­ing for your sto­ries? 

In my opin­ion, the end of a flash fic­tion piece should work this way: if you read the first para­graph of the sto­ry and then skipped to the last line, it would be utter­ly unex­pect­ed and bewil­der­ing. But some­where in the last cou­ple para­graphs of the flash piece, there is a change. Because it’s flash fic­tion, that change piv­ots on a sin­gle sen­tence. And after read­ing that sen­tence, the end­ing of the piece should now feel inevitable, like it is the only pos­si­ble end­ing for this sto­ry. I also think that the end of any kind of sto­ry has to make a con­nec­tion with the world or the read­er. This is prob­a­bly extra­or­di­nar­i­ly old-fash­ioned of me (or maybe impos­si­bly new-fan­gled, what the hell do I know?), but I real­ly believe that fic­tion should help us make sense of the world, and that fic­tion also has a job to do in the world. Good, nuanced char­ac­ters help read­ers get to know, and get to be, peo­ple they oth­er­wise would nev­er have had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to meet. And this helps us devel­op empa­thy. And empa­thy is the fun­da­men­tal com­po­nent in a just world. So I do think that the end of any kind of fic­tion needs to make this con­nec­tion, to show read­ers Oh! This is what that was about! and then to get them to think about that about—how there are sim­i­lar things or peo­ple or desires in their own lives, and how to move through the world now that we have met these new peo­ple and seen these new things and thought these new thoughts. I sup­pose that’s kind of a lot to ask of an end­ing, and I’m pos­i­tive mine don’t always suc­ceed, but that’s sort of my mod­el.

FF.Net Author’s Note
 

Tori Bond is an MFA in Cre­ative Writ­ing (Fic­tion) can­di­date at Rose­mont Col­lege. She grad­u­at­ed from Rut­gers with a degree in Eng­lish and holds an Associate’s degree in com­put­er sci­ence. She iden­ti­fies her­self as a nov­el­ist, free­lance writer, mom, and failed house­wife with a flash fic­tion habit.