It’s no secret among observers of the publishing industry that short fiction has long stood in the shadow cast by the novel. In spite of their quasi–bête noire status, however, short stories continue to be written and read, their viability sustained in no small part by the ongoing popularity of writers such as George Saunders, Lorrie Moore, Grace Paley, Edward P. Jones, James Edgar Wideman, and others.
Flash fiction—short fiction’s first cousin, also known variously as short-short fiction, microfiction, and postcard fiction—appears to be growing in popularity among writers and editors of literary journals and independent presses. Writing workshops that focus on this genre abound, and flash fiction’s protean nature (“Is this a flash story or a prose poem?!”) makes it a particularly good candidate for writerly experimentation.
One writer who can be credited with putting the flash fiction form on the literary map is Robert Shapard. With James Thomas, he is co-editor of the groundbreaking flash anthology Sudden Fiction, the first edition having appeared in 1986. It has since been reissued and updated several times, and a companion anthology, Sudden Fiction International, also edited by Shapard and Thomas, was published in 1989.
Shapard is a gifted fiction writer as well as a trailblazing editor. In 2022, he won the W.S. Porter Prize for his arresting, multi-faceted collection Bare Ana and Other Stories (Regal House Publishing, 2025), which includes both flash fiction and longer short stories.
I recently had the opportunity to correspond with Shapard over email about the stories in Bare Ana and how he became an early champion of flash fiction.
***
The Rumpus: Carnal desire, alcoholism, mortality, and the parent-child dyad are recurring, sometimes overlapping, themes in your work. Would you comment on how this collection came together? Do you see the stories as being in conversation with each other?
Robert Shapard: I like your word “conversation.” That would apply to stories in the sudden and flash anthologies James Thomas and I co-edited. For sure it was better than arranging stories alphabetically or by theme. Our method was for me to arrange the sequencing, then we’d talk it over and maybe make a few changes. We wanted what most editors do, to make, or fake, some kind of sense to it all and keep the reader entertained.
But truth be told, most readers don’t read an anthology straight through. If you’re crafting a conversation, they may impudently walk away from it, the way people do at a cocktail party. Still, they find their favorites and sometimes come back to you. That’s how I approached my own collection—call it a smaller party. I looked for good stories to begin and end, broke clumps of stories up if they were too much alike. I was aware of themes but valued variation more, except for those dyad stories you mentioned. I saw that and put some of them together as if they were meant to be paired, even though the stories were written years apart.
I did cut several very short stories. They just didn’t add much. And there was a longer one I wanted to put in, but people kept telling me no. People were right, telling me it was too long, nearly novella length, and too weighty. It would have sunk the collection.
Rumpus: Does genre ever feature in your descriptions of your work when someone asks, “What do you write?” Do you think of noir or the speculative as an element of your fiction?
Shapard: I just tell people I write stories, a lot of them very short, some of them kind of weird, just interesting and moving, I hope. I go wherever an idea takes me. If it slips into a genre, I go there. When I was writing the title story, “Bare Ana,” it didn’t start as science fiction. I was living in Honolulu and noticed everybody was getting more tattoos, but not just in Hawai‘i. People everywhere were getting them. Lots of people commented on it. A writer friend, Michael Tsai, wrote an article for Honolulu Magazine scolding people for co-opting tattoo images taken from Indigenous people, like Maori armbands.
I daydreamed a little: what if everybody in the world was totally covered with tats? And what if somebody, in such a tattoo world, had no tattoos? There’s the story. Writing it, I just wanted to make it real and make us care.
Another story, “Sundress,” was inspired by genre, if oral tales count. Specifically, a Solomon Islands one transcribed in a creative writing workshop by Clara Rikisivavene. It was one of those how-things-came-to-be stories that have things of huge existential importance in a simple family anecdote. Actually, my grandmother told stories like that. In “Sundress,” I just tried to make it real and hoped the reader would be charmed.
Regarding “Delbert,” I didn’t think noir, or genre. If it does have a genre, I’d call it a “Ray Carver story.” Most of my stories are new, but this is the oldest in the book, written when I was a graduate student. Carver was widely emulated back then, but I wasn’t trying to be him. His writing was probably just in the air. Then, the unexpected happened. Carver himself came to our writing program for a week to read student manuscripts. Of course, I gave him “Delbert,” I’d just finished it, and he loved it. We were both oblivious of any “Carver influence.” He just kept reading and saying, “You’re a writer!” I was stoked. But it was kind of ironic. Things usually don’t turn out well in a Carver story. I kept writing a non-Carver novel, which went unpublished—now forgotten.
Rumpus: There’s a memorable sensualism in your writing, whether the story takes place in the world of scientists or in the domestic day-to-day. Your characters yearn, as Robert Olen Butler tells us they must, and strive and sometimes stumble. Do you know what they desire before they do? Or do you write toward this discovery?
Shapard: That’s an interesting question. Can I say both? Sometimes I have a general idea which gets more specific as I write. It reminds me of when I used to assign desire to my beginning creative writing classes. We would have been talking about characters. Then I’d give them a standard prompt, “What does your character want?” And I’d add, “—More than anything in the world.” They’d write a while, then I’d break in and add another standard prompt: “Whatever your character wants, they can’t have it.” And I’d tweak it, “It’s literally impossible. Why?”
Again, I’d give them time to write. Then I’d give it one more twist, saying, “Wait, hold on, your character does get what they want after all, even if it wasn’t possible. How can that be?” They were good sports. And they’d start writing again because, after all, people can rationalize anything. And stories did come from this.
So, back to your question: Did their characters know their desire from the beginning? I’d say yes. But after a draft or two, some students began to recognize the truer desire or a clearer version of it. When that happens in my own writing, I find if I can name the new desire, capture it in a single line, it will crystallize the story.
Rumpus: “At the Back Door,” a kind of coming-of-age story, is both funny and harrowing. Hoffpauer, your protagonist, repossesses cars for a bank, and we ride along with him on many of his repo-man escapades. Even when some don’t go his way, he manages to maintain his amiable disposition. What was the inspiration for this story?
Shapard: I was a repo-man. Just a job I had for a little while. The character isn’t me, though. He’s mostly an admirable goof I knew. We did a short hitch in the Marines together. He was a great swimmer like Hoffpauer. But not a car repossessor. What I remember most about the story was what happened after it was published. I read it at a wine party in a downtown Honolulu bookstore and was surprised to see Leon Edel in the first row. He was famous as a critic and as the biographer of Henry James. He’d won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize and supported local writers.
Afterward, he praised “At the Back Door” to me as a “powerful story,” seeing its larger social implications. A younger man I didn’t know stood alongside Edel, nodding along with him. Then he started critiquing the story himself, especially leaning on parts of the story where I’d gone wrong or what I’d failed to mention. I never got his name, but who he was was obvious. He’d been, or still was, a repo man himself.
Rumpus: Your ability to evoke a specific time and place, for example, Tamazunchale, Mexico, in “Thomas and Charlie,” and a small Texas town—the kind that probably has one gas station, a church or two, and a roadhouse—in “Motel,” made me wonder if setting is, in a sense, antediluvian for you, or if character or voice usually comes first?
Shapard: When I’m beginning to dream up a story, things that may be part of it, like place, character, happenings, images, maybe bits of dialogue or a newspaper article or memories, float around in my mind, trying to coalesce. Sort of like the primordial soup in the story “Julie Elmore,” where methane, hydrogen, water, and ammonia just moil around needing something, a form of energy, to generate life on earth. In the story, that energy is sunlight.
So, I glanced over the stories in my collection, looking for what element sparked the story, whether character or setting or point of view. A lot of them start with an objective voice, in plain third person, just getting the reader settled into what’s going on. But then the voice gets more subjective, sort of floating along with the character, then gently spiraling down, dipping and diving deeper than the character knows, although the character’s own emotions and thoughts continually change the tone and coloring of the voice. The most distinct thing about every story in the collection is its voice. Voice is the sunlight of the story for me, the starting point.
Yet this may seem paradoxical. Voice may not even be there in the moil of elements before the start of the story. It may not appear until you write the first line. Or maybe not until you are already well into the story. Or even done with it. In light of this, it seems odd how we often describe a story only in terms of its primordial elements like character, place, conflict. For example: “This is a story about Jane Doe and her fight for sanity in a strange Long Island neighborhood.”
Rumpus: Would you share a few thoughts about how to write fiction that isn’t didactic but nonetheless has an awareness of the pressure morality exerts on a story and its characters? One of the qualities I most admire in your writing is how deftly you portray your characters’ moral complexities. To return to “Thomas and Charlie,” the narrator remembers an episode from his boyhood where his mother pleaded with his father to stop the car and help at the scene of a roadside accident, but he refused.
Shapard: I would just keep in mind the old saying that in stories—most literary stories anyway—actions are less important than the effect those actions have on characters. Let me see if I can trace back to this particular story. I have many memories of Mexico in my youth. Something like this happened. Of course, I changed some things. Then I let the characters play things out.
At the point where they drive on instead of stopping to render aid, I could have had the narrator say, “I knew it was wrong. We should have stopped.” But where would that moral argument take us? Isn’t it already obvious? So instead, I have the boy just watch and listen. At the end he says, “I only knew we were lost.” They were lost literally on the map. But this is an alibi. He’s pushing it away as if to say he was young and didn’t know anything. Now let’s go back in the story a little, where he says, “We were going on.” We. He’s complicit. Of course he is. They’re a unit, this little family. Notice how he alibis for his mother, too: “She always took refuge in my father’s direction.” Although she wanted to stop, she was complicit, too.
And what’s with the father, the main culprit, if we can call him that? What’s with that crazy singing? Was he damaged by the war? The narrator now remembers every detail. Is he haunted by what happened? Let’s put it in story terms: Is he forever changed by it? Or, in a weird way, does he treasure it, this long-ago moment in time, with his long-ago father?
Rumpus: Many stories in this book are flash fiction, a literary genre that I’d say you’re both an early adopter and a godfather of due in part to your editorship of the flash fiction text, Sudden Fiction. When you first began writing, were you primarily writing poetry or fiction? How did you become an ardent admirer, teacher, and writer of flash?
Shapard: My author website has lots about this. Here’s the skinny version: in graduate school, I wrote poems and longer stories as required. At the same time, I discovered literary magazines, publishing things not approved by writing programs, including very short pieces. There weren’t many of them, hardly any compared to now, but I was fascinated. Years later, in another writing program, I took a dozen samples gleaned from magazines—call it a mini-anthology—to an off-campus workshop. No one was really interested except James Thomas. He wanted us to make a book, and that led to a partnership of more than thirty years. We researched mountains, many thousands, of very short fiction stories from literary magazines, single author collections, anywhere we could find them. It was fanatical, a labor of love. Through the years, we were both writing, teaching, editing magazines, running writing programs. It seems odd now that I hardly tried writing flash myself. I kept writing long. But my stories did get shorter over the years. In retrospect, it shouldn’t be surprising—after all, I’d been hanging out in the flash neighborhood a long time.
Rumpus: What are you working on now, if you don’t mind sharing a few words about it?
Shapard: I have a novel in progress. Actually, it’s in manila folders, one for each chapter, each chapter in its own connected upright wire mesh file divider, the whole thing rambling like a caterpillar through the clutter under my office windows. Also, I wrote a flash yesterday. Wait. Not a flash. More like an idea for a flash. That’s not a good sign because, for me, writing about a flash often doesn’t turn into one. But if I start writing a flash itself,it stays one. I never know when that might happen. Maybe tomorrow, in the coffee shop.
***
Author photograph courtesy of Robert Shapard
