Stephen King, methinks, likened writ­ing to telepa­thy, the writer trans­fer­ring what’s in his/her head to the reader’s. Think of all the micro fic­tion you’ve read. What sticks in your head? Why?

This upcom­ing issue of Smoke­Long Quar­ter­ly marks my last as an edi­tor, and one thing I’ve always enjoyed about SLQ are the author inter­views. Here are some of my favorite ques­tions and answers, asked by a whole host of SLQ edi­tors.

Some sto­ry starters and mas­ter plots (reworked).

In Alice Munro’s sto­ry “The Lives of Girls and Women,” a young girl Del con­fronts the orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ples of the peo­ple in the Cana­di­an small town of Jubilee. Reli­gion, neigh­bors, sex, mar­riages, gen­der, love, social mores–all these throw obsta­cles in the way of Del as she seeks to grow into wom­an­hood. The sto­ry begins with Del’s search for glo­ry in her small town, and that search for glo­ry becomes con­nect­ed to sex, as she finds a “sex” book belong­ing to Del’s friend Naomi’s moth­er. Mr. Cham­ber­lain, a male friend of a board­er in Del’s house, gropes Del, lead­ing to fur­ther encoun­ters with Mr. Cham­ber­lain. Del returns from these encoun­ters, that jour­ney into chaos, with a new under­stand­ing of sex, of men, of the type of woman Fern desires to become.

Today’s my birth­day (44!), so I took a break from the nor­mal Thurs­day craft entry to tell every­one that I love The Kooks. Lis­ten to them today and be inspired.

If you are like me (and for your sake I hope that’s not the case), then you tire of the dis­cus­sions about the lines that divide the prose poem and the flash, and you could, in the end, care less about why some­one breaks lines or doesn’t, why sin­gu­lar para­graphs tend to be called prose poems, and the more para­graphs one cre­ates, the more like­ly one is writ­ing flash. All you know is that break­ing your lines cre­ates some­thing not very good.

Lydia Davis can do it all–write dev­as­tat­ing short fic­tion (see Break it Down), write a killer nov­el (see End of the Sto­ry), trans­late Proust.

My nephew, who fin­ished his first year in a far-off school, sent me a sto­ry to read. It had this line at the begin­ning: “He was an art major, with too much time and glue on his hands.” I’m sure he didn’t know that he had employed the tech­nique of zeugma–of words, such as time and glue, con­joined by a word or phrase that appears with them, the on her hands.

Write of fall, of all the pos­si­bil­i­ties that exist with­in it. Use five words from “Wil­low Poem.” Try to remain “obliv­i­ous to win­ter.”

This final entry in the Mon­o­myth looks at James Joyce’s “Ara­by” and how the mon­o­myth works to both struc­ture the sto­ry and pro­vide its mean­ing.