Flash Interview: Meg Pokrass
Award-winning author Meg Pokrass, who will serve as our guest judge for the CRAFT 2024 Flash Prose Prize, has published eight collections of flash fiction and two novellas. Meg was generous enough to conduct this flash interview through email with Associate Editor Jahzerah Brooks. (In the spirit of flash prose, we’ve kept it short!) Please join us as they discuss Meg’s forthcoming collection, First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories, a captivating exploration of the lovely, the strange, and the heartbreaking. —CRAFT
Jahzerah Brooks: Meg, you curated this collection with work written over fourteen years. How did your writing change over that time? How did you know that you were finished with this new collection? That you’d told the entire story?
Meg Pokrass: Over fourteen years the work has changed the way I have changed. I’ve grown more philosophical—and naturally, as a human being who is moving through middle age and now firmly on the other side of it—slightly detached from my younger obsessions. I see my story themes and life themes as interchangeable. I believe these odd little stories indirectly tell the story of my life much more powerfully than I could. I don’t feel I have told my “whole story.” I believe I have many more collections in me.
JB: Several themes recur throughout the collection: family dynamics, from the broken to the curious; coming of age; love and heartbreak. Is there one overarching theme that you believe tells the story of First Law of Holes?
MP: The human desire for a world that is lasting, set against the reality that nothing can stay the same forever, is an overarching theme in my work. The impossible wish to return to a safer, more unconditionally loving past is often present. The heart is a scarred warrior, but it still has a big dumb smile on its face.
JB: I’m quoting your press release when I say, “The first law of romantic relationships: Once in a hole, stop digging.” Why did you choose “First Law of Holes” as your title piece? How is this statement reflected throughout the collection?
MP: Landing in a hole might be frustrating. And in other ways, it can be comforting and familiar. In the title story, the main character keeps digging herself out of familial and romantic holes and we wonder if she isn’t simply landing in new ones. Some conditions, such as being born to an unreliable father, are not changeable—and yet humans are minted by their realities. When falling in love with a contortionist, and dumping one’s unreliable clown of a husband, one might be helping oneself out of a hole, and yet there are going to be new “knots.”
A hole can be looked at as a happy cave, and at the same time, it may be made of quicksand. Fiction we love to read is all about conflict and trouble, and I believe my characters are given plenty of trouble. We learn about people through the creative ways in which they survive difficult situations.
JB: I noticed that your shortest stories affected me much differently from the longer ones. In fact, I left some of them feeling emotionally winded. How do you work with length/brevity to affect the reader?
MP: The stories themselves decide how long they want to be. An awareness of the effect a story may have on the reader isn’t part of my writing process. I don’t set a word-count constraint or have any conscious awareness of “outcome” in mind when I sit down to write. On the contrary, it’s as if the story itself decides what length it is meant to be told in. Some of them pop out whole in only fifty words. The longer ones want to wind their way out more gently—evolving through associative logic.
I suppose what I’m doing is anthropomorphizing my stories. Giving them agency. The process remains a mystery, and mysteries are what keep me going.
JB: Birds show up in quite a few of the stories. What do they represent?
MP: Since I was young, birds have represented a deep emotional connection for me. I was very close to my grandmother who died when I was thirteen. When she was dying, she told me she hoped to come back as a bird, and I felt sure she returned to me as a hummingbird. Hummingbirds would show up when I most needed them to—when I felt the most vulnerable in my younger days.
JB: And I can’t leave you without asking about the clowns. What do they symbolize for you? Especially in terms of love.
MP: It’s natural to both admire and distrust a clown at the same time. The clown is the embodiment of a kind of terrible beauty manifested by the direct expression of raw emotion. The face makeup a clown wears draws something from the actor beneath it, divesting him of artifice. The beautiful mess that results reveals the clown’s interior as well as our own. Love itself, as one moves through life, wears different masks, and can be many different clowns. And in the end, a clown lets us know who we ourselves are. The clown’s mask, in other words, unmasks all of us.
MEG POKRASS is the author of The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections of flash fiction and two novellas in flash. Her work has been published in three Norton anthologies, including Flash Fiction America, New Micro, and Flash Fiction International; Best Small Fictions 2018, 2019, 2022, and 2023; Wigleaf Top 50; and hundreds of literary magazines including Electric Literature, New England Review, McSweeney’s, Five Points, Split Lip, Washington Square Review, and Passages North. Meg is the founding editor of New Flash Fiction Review, festival curator of Flash Fiction Festival UK, and founding/managing editor of the Best Microfiction anthology series. She lives in Scotland, where she serves as chief judge for the Edinburgh Flash Fiction Award. Find her on Facebook @MegPokrass.
JAHZERAH BROOKS lives in Englewood, Ohio, with her son and dog. She received her MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles in 2019. Jahzerah currently serves as flash fiction associate coeditor at CRAFT. Find her on Instagram and Threads @jahziewrites.
