amelia gray That story to me reads like the most sincere and straight love story I’ve ever written, and so to me it needs this counterpoint. But really, I don’t read the counterpoints in that story as gratuitous violence, particularly; it’s more of a nod to that idea of loving someone so much that you want to consume them. There is violence in emotion. For me it is impossible to pull one from the other. Mixing the weird with the mundane is a talent of yours. Have you always been able to conjure whale hearts into houses, or was that a skill you developed over time? What developed was the desire to go beyond the straight metaphor and explore it a little more. If I wrote the whale heart story ten years ago it would have only been this heart in a family’s living room, the father chipping away at it and thinking of his dead wife. Writing it when I did, it made more sense to me to have one of the characters state the metaphor: this heart has something to do with the dead woman, okay, now what. It seems less of an aloof sense, which makes the story less about the metaphor and more about the idea. I learned that from a few different people, by the way, that direct sensibility: Aimee Bender, Shirley Jackson, Kelly Link. Your stories are powerful and concise. Are you drawn to write flash fiction naturally, because of this concision, or do your stories start long and then get whittled down? So I’ve started hundreds of stories by now, and I do feel like I’m starting to know how long something will be as I get started. I don’t think I’ve ever started a story that felt like a 500 word story and had it be longer. On the other hand I’ve often had high hopes that a concept had stronger legs than it ended up having. Good flash fiction in general tends to feel like it has some concise intention behind it. Regarding Arts & Letters
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