flash-fiction – Andrew Careaga

Friday Five: writer Kristin Kozlowski

‘Like a lot of writers, I am trying to understand the world around me.’

Today’s Friday Five Q&A features a writer I only recently discovered, Kristin Kozlowski.

It was a serendipitous discovery. I was researching literary magazines to submit to when I stumbled across her quirky and delightful flash fiction piece, “My Neighbor Posts a Sign in His Yard,” in Fish Barrel Review. After that read, I knew I had to check out more of her writings, and the more I read, the more I was curious about what inspires and motivates her. So I reached out to ask if she would be interested in being a part of this feature. Fortunately for all of us, she agreed.

Photograph of writer Kristin Kozlowski — Kristin Kozlowski

The obligatory end-of-year wrap-up post you’ve been waiting for

The year in writing, recognition, loss, and life

If nothing else, 2024 for me was a year of transition and disruption. And — I hope — a year I learned to be more grateful and empathetic.

After 40 years of full-time work, much of it in academia, I entered a new phase of life last January. Some call it retirement, but it has hardly been that. My pursuit of creative writing and some freelance work has kept me busy enough. In addition, my wife and I and our cat had a couple of health scares that made us reevaluate our values and gave us greater insight into the workings of the U.S. health care system, the good, bad, and ugly of it. We also mourned the passing of a few friends from our church family and continue to honor their memory.

In other words, a lot of life happened in 2024. Here are some highlights from the year:

Two bits of good news

About a recent short story publication and an online interview

We interrupt this month of writing-focused activity to bring you a couple of happy updates from my weekend:

My short story “Lower Strata” was published by the literary magazine Spillwords. This story, which went live Sunday (November 17, 2024), was something I’d written 25 years ago, probably, and shoved away after a few revisions. I reworked it over the summer a few times then sent it on to Spillwords, and last month they let me know they were going to publish it. This was one of those rare occasions in which the one and only litmag I’d submitted a story to accepted it. Like a lot of writers, especially unknowns like me, our stories encounter many rejections before they find a home. (It’s part of the gig. There are a lot of very good writers out there, and only so many places for our work.) So I guess this one hit a responsive chord with an editor or two there. I hope you also like it. I’d love for you to give it a read and share your thoughts. I’m always looking for ways to improve!
I was “spotlighted” by another literary magazine, Bulb Culture Collective. This litmag specializes in republishing pieces that have been published previously by magazines that are no longer in operation. Such was the case with my flash fiction piece, “Baseball 1971,” which I’ve discussed here previously. BCC also selects writers for their “Shine a Light” series of features, and they reached out to me a couple of months ago inviting me to be a part of it. Their e-interview with me went live also Sunday, November 17, 2024.

So that’s the news from these-here parts. If you’re interested in reading some good stuff, I recommend you add Spillwords and Bulb Culture Collective to your reading list.

Image via Spillwords.

Friday Five: literary Easter eggs

Some literary morsels to entertain, inform, and possibly inspire.

On this Good Friday, as we enter Easter weekend, here are five literary morsels — little Easter eggs I recently hunted down to pass along for your reading and listening pleasure. May they provide some amusement, entertainment, and even inspiration.

13 Ways of Looking at Socks is one poet’s “meditations on something so deeply mundane that we rarely think about it until we reach into the sock drawer and it’s empty or just sad and disappointing and now you have to do laundry.” The author, Mary Roblyn, wrote it as a riff on Wallace Stevens’ 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. In Roblyn’s case, she accompanies her writing with relevant photos.
“Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” We’ve all heard that old saying, right? Writer B.J. Novak (he of “The Office” fame) takes it literally in this short audio piece, which he and actor Aasif Mandvi read to open a recent episode of the podcast Selected Shorts (highly recommended for fans of short fiction). The story is from Novak’s book of short stories, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories.
Vermilion Cliffs is a lovely piece of micro fiction by Allison Field Bell, published in Fractured Lit, the online literary journal devoted to flash and micro fiction.
“Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly/My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,/Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily/Soft-scented in the air for yards around;” — begins Claude McKay’s poem/meditation “The Easter Flower.”
Here’s the pitch, baseball fans: Some of the greatest books about sports are also about so much more. Just in time for the opening of baseball season, Keith O’Brien, the author of a book about one of the game’s greatest tragic figures, Pete Rose, gives us Greek Tragedy in the Bottom of the Ninth: On Baseball’s High Literary Drama. Play ball!

Photo by Laurentiu Iordache on Unsplash

Published!

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been playing around with flash fiction and its subgenre micro fiction as a way of trying to crystallize my writing. One tangible result is this story, “Lunch break.”

Wouldn’t you know it: two days after telling you that I seldom use the exclamation point, it makes an appearance in the title of a post for the second time in a row.

Its presence is deserved, I think, to help convey the joy of getting published less than a month into this new leg of my writing journey.

“Lunch Break,” a bit of micro fiction I submitted to the website Paragraph Planet, is today’s featured story on the site. Huzzah!