Q&A: Tommy Dean, Writer
Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks, Special Like the People on TV (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014) and Covenants (ELJ Editions, 2021), and a full flash collection, Hollows (Alternating Current Press, 2022). He lives in Indiana, where he currently is the editor at Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. A recipient of the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction, his writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019, 2020, 2023, Best Small Fiction 2019 and 2022, Monkeybicycle, Moon City Press, and numerous other literary magazines.
This interview was published in Five South magazine. Read the full interview by clicking on the link.
INTERVIEWER
What drew you to flash fiction, and what do you enjoy most about writing it? What are you working on next?
DEAN
The challenge to fill up a story space with a limited number of words! I found that I tend to think about characters and their story in “hot spots,” one moment in their lives that reveals everything about them. I love the challenge of cutting out parts of the typical narrative arc, to reveal characters by way of the smallest brushstrokes, to make a reader feel something new and/or different by using brevity and heightened language. I love that you can convey a moving story with a three-dimensional character in fewer than 1,000 words, that you don’t need to dwell in interior thought, exposition, and backstory. And that these elements if used at all can be condensed to only the necessary number of words or space in a story. I’m putting the finishing touches on a new flash fiction collection that I hope to find a home for in the next couple of years.
INTERVIEWER
I encounter a lot of readers who are unfamiliar with flash. Why should someone who loves to read and read fiction, but is unfamiliar with flash, read flash?
DEAN
Great flash provides the reader with a burst of narrative, an opportunity to have the feelings of a full story or novel in less than five minutes. Flash asks and inspires the reader to think about the characters and the story long after reading the last word. Flash lingers; it invites and marvels, it challenges, and it demands notice and attention. Readers can get a large amount of reading satisfaction in little reading time. But the depth of these stories will sneak up on these new readers, and it can be addictive, as well as entertaining and edifying.
Read the remainder of the interview on Five South.
