“The Joy of Flash,” An Interview with Josh Russell

Josh Russell’s most recent book is King of the Animals: Stories (LSU Press). At Georgia State, he is Distinguished University Professor and Director of the Creative Writing Program. He guest-edited the first flash fiction special issue of Five Points in 2016 and is guest-editing the next flash fiction issue, coming in 2026. 

Assistant Editor, Alicia Raines, interviewed Josh to learn more about the open call, why he loves flash, and what he’s looking for in flash fiction work. 

Read their conversation below. 

What are you looking for in the open call for submissions for the special flash fiction issue of Five Points?

Good stuff. What I’m looking for is not necessarily anything that could be considered “house style.” If we look back at the first flash fiction special issue from 10 years ago, that goes from prose poems to very straightforward realism with everything in between. Mainly what I’m looking for is careful attention to language and “complete” stories. Complete with quote marks around it. I don’t want summaries of 20 page stories. But I also don’t want just kind of random lyricism or anecdotes that don’t have any weight to them.

I read “Highball” by Kim Chinquee, which appears in the issue from 2016. And that one was so good and also funny. I guess the fact that it has weight is what makes it a complete story instead of an anecdote, because it is just one moment of this family and their interaction.

Right. There are several stories by Christopher Merkner in that issue, and one of the things that he manages to play with in those stories is family. There’s so much in domestic scenes. So much that doesn’t necessarily need to be completely explained, but there’s a lot of tension.

Why do you love flash?

Well on a very personal level, way back in the late 80’s when I was an undergraduate, I was kind of trying to figure out what it was that drew me to writing fiction. And why certain writers appealed to me and why certain works appealed to me and etc. One of the things that I really was doing in an unschooled way was writing these really tiny narratives. They were a page long, two pages long. At that point I thought they were poems. But they weren’t. 

So then one of my teachers was like, Hey here you probably would like this. It was an anthology called Sudden Fiction, which was published in 1986. And he handed it to me a couple of years later, it was just on the bookshelf in his office. But it was a moment where people were starting to recognize that this was a type of fiction. And that book is interesting because it was early enough in that moment that people were trying to come up with a name for stories of that type. There is this bit in the back where all these writers are kind of weighing in on what it should be called. Which, at this point, it’s kind of funny to look at because people are like, Oh it’s sudden fiction, or, It’s blasters. Or some people were like, Why do we have to have a name for it? Flash hadn’t entered into it at that point. That was a very early 21st century branding that someone came up with. And I never liked it. 

You never liked the term “flash?”

I don’t like calling very short stories “flash.” But I’ve made my peace with “flash.” 

When I was starting to write these and starting to really recognize them as a separate form of fiction, they were usually called short-short stories with a hyphen. And there was a magazine called, at that point, Sundog. It’s now called the Southeast Review; they came out of Florida State University. And they had a contest. The World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest. The deal with it was that it was a $1 entry fee, cash or check, because it was you know the late 80’s.

A check for $1.

Well, the fact that we all checkbooks too. If you won, you got published, you got a $100 prize and you got a case of oranges.

A case of oranges?

Because they’re in Florida.

Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, haha. 

It was kind of this quirky thing. By this point, when I was interested in this contest, I had started to go to grad school. And I had a bunch of friends who were, also like me, very interested in this contest. It was kind of a competition among us to see if we could win it. It started going from like, Oh I’m interested in this kind of writing, to an intellectual engagement with that size of a story. It had to be 250 words or less, which was like 1 page typed. So I never sat down and very carefully paid attention to how many words there were. I would write the story and then I would kind of go back and think, What can I take out of here? How can I get this down to 250 words and still maintain the essence of the story? Can I? Is it possible? Can I take this two page story that’s 500 words and really cut out 250 words? And usually the answer was no. But if the story was like 300 words, you know, you make every “cannot” “can’t,: you make every “do not” “don’t.” You do all the contractions. You take out the word “very.” You replace every “and” with a comma. You pay attention to what’s essential. 

So I started to have this intellectual engagement with that. And I started to realize the two moves I’m doing here are omission and distillation. Either I’m consciously leaving something out or I’m consciously boiling something down. So if I’m working with that, say… If I set this story in a diner, do I really need to do anything but say that it’s in a diner? Because everyone knows what a diner looks like. If I say it’s chemistry class, isn’t everyone going to kind of see bunsen burners? 

So there was that idea of omission: What can I leave out? Then you start doing radical omission. If I can omit setting, can I also omit plot? Does there really need to be conflict in this story? Sometimes the answer is yes, there needs to be plot, yes there needs to be conflict. You can’t omit that, it doesn’t work. And that was very useful because I was trying to write these 250 word stories. I never won. Twice I was a finalist and got published in the magazine, which thrilled me, but never won the oranges. 

Oh man. 

So I was doing this. And then what I noticed was that I was taking that question, “What can I omit, what can I distill?” and I was bringing it to longer work that I would do. So you know I have this 25 page story, and I’d think, Do I need everything in here? What can I omit? Is there too much landscape painting going on? And often, the answer is yes.

So, that is one of the reasons I’ve remained interested in the form. Because the skills aren’t necessarily limited to what you can do in a one-page, two-page story. They are good training for writing in general. And I think they really informed everything I do. 

How do you know, when you set out to write a story, that it needs to be flash? How do you know that the story fits the format? Which I guess could be asked for any field of work…

Right. I mean, how do painters know that they need to do a big landscape instead of a sketch or a sculpture or whatever. The somewhat corny saying that I repeat to students, graduate and undergraduate, is: Form follows inspiration. 

If you sit down and you’re like, Time to write a two-page story! Okay, you’re starting with the container. You’re not starting with what you need to find a container for. For example, I wrote a one-page story about a man and a woman who have an assignation. The whole story takes place in the moments after they’ve slept together. There’s this gesture to the fact that they came back to her apartment after being at the bar. Do I really need the scene at the bar? No. All that really mattered for me was that there were two things going on. One is the epiphany the woman has that her way of thinking about physical intimacy is not at all the way the guy she’s with thinks about physical intimacy, and in her mind they’re kind of gender-reversed. Like she’s very casual, he’s very serious. And they’re lying there, and she’s getting as far away from him as she can, because she also feels like, feeling bad afterwards is just how you should feel—the second thing I wanted to include. That bit is very expository. Because there was this question in my mind. What do I need to have here, what can I omit, how can I distill this? Distillation often means telling more than you show.

Which is one of those things, we hear all the time, show don’t tell. The question I think is balance. Because if you show everything it’s just like a clumsy transcription of a movie. But at the end of it, she’s lying there feeling bad and she starts thinking about the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” And that was the whole story. I wanted to have these people who have very different visions of the world— and they’re not “normal,” they’re not stereotypical — visions of what physical intimacy is all about. And she’s thinking about “The Dead.” And the guy says to her, What are you thinking? And she says, I’m thinking of James Joyce. And he laughs! And that’s the story!

That’s funny.

And you know, that could be a 25 page story. I could put all kinds of scenes in, I could involve his point of view. Whatever. I could explain when she was an English major, what she’s doing now. But a lot of that stuff, more and more, feels artificial and it also bores me. And I think, If I’m bored writing this, surely whoever reads it is going to be bored. 

I think also, things just either grow or they have a tendency to contract. There are, in my last book, several one-page, two-page stories that were going to be novels. In my original conception, I was like, Oh this would be a great novel. And then I started trying to think in that and I was like, Hmmmm maybe not. In my last book there are also three traditional stories that are about 25 pages long. My original conception of them was that they were going to be novels. For me, things get smaller. 

Ten years ago, we did a flash issue for Five Points. There are little interviews in there; one’s with Stuart Dybek. And I can’t remember exactly what the question is but he said, Everything starts with an image. If I can handle that image in a poem, so be it. If it grows longer and needs a narrative, then it gets to be a very short story. If that’s not enough, then it could be a longer story. So I think some writers, they’re just working and saying, Oh it doesn’t fit in this container. So what about the next? Think about Tupperware. It’s not gonna fit in that little container, maybe the next size up, maybe the next size up! 

Do you know the whole world when you go to write flash?

No. And that’s another great thing about it. When I’m writing a longer story… I’ve done 3 novels now and I have a novella forthcoming, and like I said, in that collection there are some longer stories… In those cases, I’m a little uncomfortable thinking, Okay I’ve got one sentence,  how can I trust myself to go to the second sentence and the third sentence? If I think it’s going to be an 100 page or 200 page manuscript. If it’s feeling like the container that’s gonna accommodate it is a page or two, I’m much more comfortable with trusting that I’m going to be surprised.  

Adjacent to that, I think is the idea that it’s a lot less frightening to go into a project that you know is going to be a couple of pages long, with the idea that you can really take risks. Even with my students, I find this is the case. Right now I’m teaching a senior level undergraduate class where they have to write a story that’s around 5 pages long, a second story that’s around 10 pages long, and a third story that’s around 20 pages long. And a lot of them, even though they’re 20, 21, 22 years old, feel like they’ve already figured out their optimum form. And it is the 10 page story. So when I tell them they have to write a 5 page story, they groan. When I tell them they have to write a 20 page story, they groan. But one of the things about that assignment is that if they totally fail at it, it’s not like they sat down to really write this 20 page story. It’s like, Oh I had to do this. 

One of the things about really short work is that you can do really formally innovative stuff that you wouldn’t be comfortable doing in a novel — or that I couldn’t think about doing. You know, lists, lots of repetition, omitting things that would be impossible to omit in a longer work. So I do think that there’s less at stake in two pages. But two page stories can be really great. I think some of my best work is a page long. 

Do you have any favorite flash pieces?

It depends on what we’re gonna call flash. 

Very short fiction. 

Very short fiction! Well, you know, one of the ones that gets taught a lot, or used to get taught a lot, is Hemingway’s “A Very Short Story.” Do you know that story?

I haven’t read it yet. 

It was technically one of his first books, there were two very close in time, I think it was his first book. It was a book of stories, it was like 30 pages long. Just these tiny little stories. And this one, A Very Short Story, appears in that very early kind of chapbook that was published in Paris in 1923, I think. It’s great. It’s less than 750 words long, it’s two pages printed. It does really interesting things with point of view and voice that I don’t think I recognized when I read it the first few times, but as I’ve reread it, I’ve seen that it does this tricky thing with what seems to be 3rd person limited but is actually 3rd person attached. Anyway, I like that one a lot.

Stuart Dybek is one of my favorite writers, I think in part because I read him at just the right time. You know in 1990 when I was introduced to him by the same guy that handed me the Sudden Fiction Anthology. 

Nice, good professor. 

Yeah. So there’s Hemingway’s “A Very Short Story.” Dybek has a story called, “Laughter.”

Oh I read “Laughter!” That was so funny. It was funny at first, and then at the very end, I was like, Oh this is actually kind of creepy now. Which was cool.

Yeah! I have a former graduate student who after we read Dybek said, I like Dybek! You can always count on it being: Something happened, and I’m still sad about it. 

Hahahaha.

Well, it’s nostalgia!

Lydia Davis also has some wonderful short stories. One is called, “A Position at the University.” And then there’s “The Old Dictionary.” Just fantastic. And then there are a lot of people who are foundational for those people, but for me too. Prose poets like Max Jacob, he was a surrealist era French poet. There’s an Austrian writer named Thomas Bernhard. He has like 100 very short stories called The Voice Imitator. Borges. You know. Good stuff.