–Interview by Diana Clarke

Chew on Leslie Blanco’s bite-sized fictions in the December issue of PANK, then come back here and ask yourself if they were really stories at all.

1. Workshops and publishers often demand that writers categorize their work along tradition lines of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, but I see short shorts, such as your pieces here, as something like poems and fiction at once. Where would you plot your own work on the genre continuum?

 Interesting that you should ask this question of these particular stories, because I have categorized all of them alternately as nonfiction, poetry and finally, fiction. Many years ago I went through a difficult divorce, and I could only write about the emotions I felt by jotting down tiny little scenarios. Anything longer was too painful. At the time I thought of them as autobiographical prose poems, which I thought I was writing only for myself. Before long I had an entire divorce memoir written in “poems,” which I entitled, tongue in cheek, Screw You: Angry Divorce Poems for Women. I had a vague idea some day of anthologizing the divorce poems of other angry women. I put this secret manuscript away for many years. I got remarried. One day I took the secret manuscript out, selected a few “poems” and showed them to my poet friend who also happens to edit a literary journal of poetry and flash fiction. Nope, he said. No way. Not poems! These are flash fiction. Eventually, I realized that memoir will always be too vulnerable a form for me and that yes, these could work as flash fiction.

When I started to rework them as fiction, I loved the way that imagining they were poems had changed my patterns and habits as a writer. I began to see that I had granted myself permission to let language drive the stories, to rely more heavily on imagery, and on blank space, the meaning of which could be interpreted by the reader. Finally, I began to see the form itself as a metaphor. This is how our relationships are! So much of what’s important is unsaid. So much is left out or taboo. So much emotion collects in the vacuum we don’t fill with words. For me, flash fiction is simply its own genre, a hybrid, stealing elements from poetry, fiction and nonfiction, and uniquely suited for the efficient and intense laying-bare of emotional truth. Continue reading →