micro fiction – Andy writes!

Friday Five: Q&A with flash fiction writer and editor Tommy Dean

‘Short stories and novels are the whole nine rounds of a boxing match, while flash is a duck of one punch.’

Tommy Dean

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.

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!