Interview by Diane Gottlieb
Lovers of flash fiction know the name Robert Shapard. Together with James Thomas, Shapard edited several best-selling anthologies of flash fiction, the first of which, Sudden Fiction, published in 1986, brought the flash genre into the mainstream. Now, some forty years later, Shapard has put together an award-winning collection of his own flash writing: Bare Ana and Other Stories. Bare Ana was well worth the wait, as it is both a gift of masterful storytelling and a primer on craft. Several of Shapard’s characters experience life-changing events, while others make unexpected discoveries in the small moments of their day-to-day lives. The surreal meets reality in many of Shapard’s stories. Some of the stories are serious, others more playful. All are filled with delightfully surprising language and stunning detail and demonstrate Shapard’s deep understanding of, and compassion for, all that makes us human.
Congratulations on Bare Ana, Robert! What a gorgeous collection! I have to say, you had me at the first story. I could tell, immediately, I was in masterful hands. “Thomas and Charlie” is a moving piece about getting lost, being lost, not knowing that you’re lost. Told in first-person, the narrator shares a childhood memory of a road trip with his parents in Mexico. They witness a horrible accident. Just two and a half pages long, the story takes on issues of class, race, and the effects of war and leaves the reader with big questions: how do you protect yourself, your family, help others—or do you? Much of the power in this story, as in actual trauma, lives in the small details that stick with the narrator even many years later. Can you talk a bit about that story?
It actually happened. Of course I changed things. Especially the characters. Adding new details to an old, faded memory. You can’t get bogged down in old details you might not remember correctly anyway. You go with the story, how it’s now unfolding. One memory for sure is true, the painted curtains in the truck windows. Nobody had painted drapes inside the windows of their cars or trucks in Texas that I knew of. So it stuck with me. I cut it out of the second draft of the story. It seemed like pointless detail that slowed the action down. Still, I couldn’t let those painted curtains go and put them back in a later draft. I wasn’t sure why until a year after the story was published. Then I read it again and saw why the curtains were there. It’s a domestic image. The curtains were part of a home, a family upended. Actually, two families, the narrator’s too. In a way the whole story is in those curtains. I guess most writers do this. Go with your subconscious. Anyway, it’s fun when you recognize things in your stories you didn’t know you were doing.
Here’s the section we’re talking about: “Probably there was a farm family in the pickup, which had pink and green tassels and curtains painted on the inside of the windshield … We had slowed almost to a stop, but not entirely. We were going on.”
So, this story was based loosely on an actual experience you had. Do you start your stories with an image, like those curtains, or do the images appear in the process of writing?
A lot of them start from images. Some of them are connected with memories, or fragments of memories but not complete events, like “Thomas and Charlie.” One story came to me in a long, scary reverie as I sat alone in a campus cafe. I wrote crazy fast for half an hour, not a whole story, just the basis of it. But for most stories, images arrive quietly out of nowhere, sort of free-floating, like the smell of a rusty window screen wet with rain. Then it mysteriously connects to a person or time or place. Or to an idea, like the one in my story “Aperçu,” which came from my grandmother telling a wide-eyed me, one summer evening at the dinner table, about the French psychologist Emile Coué. An image can attract things the way a speck of dust or pollen or bit of pollution can float around in the sky attracting water vapors, which condense more and more around it until it gets heavy enough to fall to earth as a raindrop, or a story. I always liked Richard Brautigan’s idea, that Stuart Dybek has talked about, of keeping a notebook with images, ideas, bits—Brautigan called these notes “lint.” Every now and then he’d review his notebook, pick a piece of lint with the most emotional appeal for him, and start developing it with a description, a character, or two characters with some dialogue. But I never kept a notebook for long.
So, you don’t follow a formula.
I don’t. Nor do I write from prompts. I know a lot of writers do. It has a long and honorable tradition. There’s that famous anecdote about Chekhov, where a visitor asks him where he gets his ideas for stories. He says anything will do, glances around, points to a nearby ashtray, and says that’s all he needs to come up with a story in 24 hours. And a hundred years later, Raymond Carver used Chekhov’s prompt for a story called “The Ashtray” in Paris Review.
How did you come to flash?
I started out writing longer stories in workshops because in those days they said a proper story was supposed to be 20 or 25 pages. At the same time, I was learning to teach, or teaching to learn, falling in love with lesser-known literary magazines. That’s where I started finding short prose pieces. I’m not sure why I was so fascinated by them. I guess they moved me. Challenged me, made me think. One night, in Utah, I took a dozen of the ones I’d found to an off-campus workshop at James Thomas’s apartment. It was an eclectic group including business professors, psychology professors, townies—an interesting bunch of people. One order of business was to assign who would bring the soup the next week. I asked what they thought of the literary magazine pieces and why were they cropping up now anyway? No one said much. They were all writing novels.
But James called me later and said, “Let’s do a book.” And that’s how we started as co-editors. He already had impressive credits, as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and having published in Esquire, and he was working for a publisher. I’d go over to his house evenings—by then we were both starting families and had houses—with a new batch of stories I’d found, and he and his wife, Denise, no matter how late, would put something on the patio grill and pour some Canadian whiskey, and we’d talk about the stories. And James would have stories, too, and we’d argue and laugh, and agree about a few things, until the wee hours. Fast forward to the anthologies, I spent years reading thousands of stories for them. I was collecting them, not writing them.
What did you look for in those flashes?
Good question. We didn’t know exactly, as long as they were good, and very short—story, prose experiment, or something undefinable. James tended toward stories with a broader appeal, I was a little more oddball, looking for the best but most unusual seashells.
You brought flash into the mainstream, into people’s awareness.
People say that. I always say very short fiction has its own long history. Flashes seemed related yet something new. They were so unusual and various, the best we could do was to enjoy them, try to make sense of them with a name. We had lists, like “skinny fiction,” “sudden fiction,” and “flash fiction.” We asked others for opinions. Alice Turner, who was the fiction editor of Playboy, said in a writing conference panel, “Flash sounds like kiddie bubble gum and awful colors or whatever.”
Or people lifting up their shirts at Mardi Gras.
Exactly. Or the weirdo in a raincoat who flashes you in the park. So the early leader became “sudden fiction” and that became the name of the original anthology. In a way it’s ironic, because it was mostly flash or micro fiction, as we know it now. A few years later “flash fiction” was becoming more popular. James had always liked it better and coined the title Flash Fiction for a new anthology. And it turned out the Internet, which was brand new, loved the name, too.
Now, to your own collection, Bare Ana. The story by that name is about a couple who decide to get their soon-to-be born child a prenatal tattoo! How’d you come up with that?
I just remember thinking tattoos were getting really popular. And people kept adding more of them. I wondered, what happens if they get completely covered with them. Then I thought, what about somebody in a world of tattoos who didn’t have any tattoos at all? That’s the couple’s problem in that story.
I can imagine you getting really excited when you thought, “Oh, I’m going to give their baby a tattoo in utero.” When you get an idea like that, do you say, “Wow, I don’t care where this came from, but I love it and let’s see what happens.”
Yes. And see what happens. You can see it’s becoming a story and you follow it.
I love the wild variety in this book. There’s quite a bit of magical realism and some stories without any of that. I noticed a bunch of the stories use the body as an entryway. I’m thinking of “Skin” or “Sundress” and the peeling off of layers.
I didn’t see until the collection was wrapped up that I had two skin stories. I’m uneasy with it.
Skin is a fabulous metaphor.
I see what you’re saying. I feel it. Though I wasn’t thinking metaphor specifically when I was writing.
Both those stories, even though they’re very, very different, deal with characters who talk themselves into some pretty bizarre notions.
As readers, we don’t know whether things described are really happening. Can we trust this narrator? And does it matter? I just love that so much is left up in the air.
In the story “Delbert,” the narrator’s name alone told me something. I’m not sure what. Just that it sounds workaday, to me, down-to-earth. Which is exactly where he’s not, most of the time.
It’s perfect.
Someone who read “Delbert” told me, “You do hysteria really well.” That made me proud, so I decided that was what I wanted to do.
You do it wonderfully! And what you do with language! I have to mention the opening of “Deep Green Lake”: “She unbuttoned the fish—they were in her raincoat pockets—ran the bathwater and released them into the tub.” Unbuttoning fish!
When you write something like that, do you just love it too?
I do. I get captured by an image, the language. I think a lot of people, especially flash writers, are drawn on by language. Which creates more images. Like Joyce Carol Oates said, in Sudden Fiction, “Voice is everything, the melting of the ice on the stove.” She was referring to Robert Frost’s definition of a poem, a structure of words that consumes itself as it unfolds, like ice melting on a stove. Though Jayne Anne Phillips says a flash should have a leftover ghost, like an image made of smoke.
There are so many instances where you create magic with language. And you’re funny too. Do you know Etgar Keret? Two of your stories, especially, reminded me of him: “Big Bug Love” and “Best Boy.” You have this lovely way of poking fun at our humanness.
I know Etgar only a little, by email. He told me he started writing flash after he discovered Sudden Fiction in an airport bookshop. As for “Best Boy,” that was fun to write.
It’s wacky—Boris Karloff and a young narrator, meeting in a diner. How did that one come about?
I loved those old Frankenstein movies, when we were kids. I’m still surprised young people don’t know Boris Karloff was the original monster. But readers whatever age don’t need to know that. They can remember being in the story’s place, a coffee shop in the dead hours of the night. Being there with a strange person. I wanted to get that feeling.
I do remember late nights at diners, and you do get to that feeling when reading the story. I so deeply appreciate the playfulness and the respect for our misguidedness, our quirks, and eccentricities. You are gentle with them all and show us it’s okay to have fun with them.
I can’t help wondering, with all the anthologies you put out, why did you wait so long for your own book?
Because life happened. Because I was writing unpublishable novels, because I was teaching, directing a writing program, editing literary magazines, which I loved, and writing grant proposals for them. Collecting stories for the anthologies.
You know how to organize a collection. Was it harder to do with your own stories?
The stories seemed all over the place. It took months, just digging them out of the magazines I’d published them in, getting them into one file, in one format. Also, I was in awe of all the wonderful anthology stories I helped collect. Mine seemed humbler; I wasn’t sure they deserved to be collected. But gradually, throwing some stories out, especially the longer ones, an order appeared where one seemed to naturally follow another, so the book found its way. I organized the sequences of stories in the anthologies, so maybe I was applying that. A lot of people helped. My wife, I can’t say enough about. Most of all James—overall and in detail, he’s always been a great editor.
What’s next?
I guess I’ll go to the coffee shop. To read, to write. That’s usually the goal. Maybe a new collection.
I would read that in a heartbeat. Do you have any advice for flash writers today?
Not advice, just encouragement. Just remember, very short fiction has long traditions, but flash is new. With every flash you write, you’re creating a new form. A new way of feeling, of thinking. A small new way to be.
About the interviewer: Diane Gottlieb is the editor of Awakenings: Stories of Body & Consciousness and the forthcoming books Grieving Hope and Manna Songs: Stories of Jewish Culture & Heritage. Her writing appears in Brevity, Witness, Colorado Review, River Teeth, Florida Review, Huffington Post, among others. She is the winner of Tiferet Journal’s 2021 Writing Contest in nonfiction, and a finalist for Hole in the Head Review’s 2024 Charles Simic Poetry Prize and The Florida Review’s 2023 Editor’s Prize for Creative Nonfiction. She is the Prose/CNF editor for Emerge Literary Journal. Find her at https://dianegottlieb.com and @DianeGotAuthor.
First published in Chicago Review of Books