Acclaimed shortform author Chelsea Stickle has recently published two chapbooks: Breaking Points, which explores crucial moments in women’s lives through a variety of flash forms; and Everything’s Changing, which conjures images of transformation, both magical and otherwise. Chelsea took…
Sibling Circus My brother was addicted to dog biscuits and this might have been how our act started. When our mother arrived, he’d pop one in his mouth, throw one to the real dog and then toss one to…
Sibling Parenting Ai Ping’s brother said women who habitually declared they found happiness in everyday things were the hardest to please. If a woman required x affirmations of happiness a day, each having an effect which lasted an average…
CRAFT is delighted to share a triptych of humorous microfictions by Grant Faulkner, previously included in Best Microfiction 2022. The following pieces take on the subject matter of craft and critical essays from the perspectives of three fictional individuals,…
This final girl is fleeing like all the others, flinging open the front door of a small suburban house. This final girl is screaming, long hair streaming, all torn T-shirt and superficial injuries and sudden athletic desperation. But something…
My Favorite Elvis The boy and the dog were both named Elvis. Whenever Daddy hollered “Elvis” they both came to him. Even when it was one of them he wanted: the boy for a chore, the dog for a…
This is what you do if he wakes up sad. This is what you do if he comes home angry. This is what you do if he stops taking his medication. This is what you do if he stays…
There is a town at the edge of things where women hold in their screams. They die young: high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes, cancer. The girls watch their mothers and grandmothers and aunts play Ring Around the Rosie,…
Nine of us cram into Brad O’Neill’s dad’s Buick, a girl to each lap, and Gulp’s snugging my middle before all the doors crash shut. I look back to see his tanned cheekbones; it’s really him, Gulp North, under…
Let’s say you follow her home. The barefoot girl on the corner of Union, where Nut Creek gnaws at the back steps of a church and the struggling crisis center. She cuts her own hair, with garden clippers. Let’s…
At this point in my many years of making work, I am much less a determiner, less in charge of things—consciously anyway—and much more of a conductor/conduit/follower. I studied poetry in Iowa, but my public success has been as a novelist. And what I really want to be when I grow up is a musician (of sorts).
I go through my life in a creator state of mind. There are numerous writing projects underway (in all stages of completion or abandonment); scads of paintings, 3D, photos, and video art projects filling more and more real and virtual space; and increasingly, making and manipulating sound is taking my time and filling my spaces. Ideas and beginnings gather and collect. Too, I have several projects that combine all of these elements. Through diligence and intention, I have learned to quell any pressure to complete, to perfect. Anything. I have endeavored to be present in the making of whatever idea presents itself to me. And they always do, those ideas. I’ve learned to love and wallow in the creative process, with limited attention to what the final product has to or must be. Be like. The result is that I finish a lot of work (on its schedule rather than mine). Then I move on to the next thing.
It’s been years since I’ve written a poem. That one came to me as a surprise, and I did nothing with it except give it to my wife. Recently, and between video projects, I fell into a flash fiction hole. Found a rich vein there; two dozen and counting. And of those, “Let’s Say, Triptych” started life as that last poem. Much of the meaty parts of the poem are present in the first panel of the story’s triptych. But I was in full-on fiction writing mode, and following, not leading. Following. There’s a thirty-year old idea in the story. There’s a tomato sauce stain from last week.
I was very pleased with where the narrative led me.
Though most of STEVEN SHERRILL’s years and public success have been as a novelist, he was born a poet. Somewhere along the way, he took up banjo and synthesizer. He’s having so much fun in this realm of short-short-flash-micro. It feels like home. In the end, in the stories, he’s hurling himself against the potential for love in almost everything.
