writing life – Andy writes!

Friday Five: four months in

What I’ve learned from diving back into creative writing.

Four months ago, I relaunched this blog in its new incarnation, as a website dedicated to the craft of writing. I had just wrapped up a nearly 33-year career in communications, public relations and marketing with Missouri University of Science and Technology and, while I was certainly ready for a break from the day-to-day rigors of what that career had become, I was not ready to retire from writing. I was instead ready to dive back into writing for the joy of it. I was ready to grab hold of this new chapter of my life.

The past four months have been invigorating.

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.