You don’t need to write a novel to be a literary success
I know a lot of readers love to absorb themselves in a thick, juicy novel. I’m not one of them. I do enjoy a good novel, but I’m partial to the short story. As a writer, I prefer to write short fiction. Thankfully, writers like Alice Munro have given us a stellar example of how a writer of fiction can achieve success without ever writing a novel.
A masterful storyteller and perhaps the greatest writer of fiction in the past 50 years, Alice Munro died Monday, May 13, 2024, at age 92.
‘Short stories and novels are the whole nine rounds of a boxing match, while flash is a duck of one punch.’
The genre of flash fiction has become more popular and visible in recent years, thanks to the work of people like today’s Friday Five writer, Tommy Dean. A writer of “mostly flash fiction,” as he puts it on his website, Dean also is an editor of the flash fiction literary magazine Fractured Lit and a writing coach who offers editing services and writing workshops. He is the author of Hollows (Alternating Current Press, 2022), a collection of flash stories, and two flash fiction chapbooks, Special Like the People on TV (Redbird Chapbooks, 2014) and Covenants (ELJ Editions, 2021). He has been previously published in The Lascaux Review, New World Writing, and Pithead Chapel. His stories have been included in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020. He lives in Indiana with his wife and two children, and he and I share the common experience of having detasseled corn in our youth.
Continue reading “Friday Five: Q&A with flash fiction writer and editor Tommy Dean”
Andrew Careaga 