Interview with Dinah Cox: Flash-Prose Contest Honorable Mention
Dinah Cox shares her thoughts on flash-prose. Check out her Flash-Contest Honorable Mention story here.
William Ruof: What exactly about the flash
prose genre appeals to you? How do you find that it changes your writing style?
Dinah Cox: I like the energy and intensity in
very short fiction pieces—they’re like the toy surprises at the bottom of the
cereal box, though I’d like, one day, to write something more like the entire
grocery store. I’ve read on more than one occasion that the blurring of generic
boundaries means there’s no difference between the short-short, the flash
fiction piece, and the prose poem, but I’ll go out on a limb here and say I’ve
written in all three genres (the short-short, the flash-fiction piece, and the
prose poem) and each one has its own distinct attributes. The short-short is
more like a joke; without a punch line at the end you can forget it. The flash
fiction piece has, as a goal, more emotional intensity than the short-short,
and the prose poem, where each sentence is at once more compressed and more
expansive, is the highest form of the three, the one chance we prose writers
have to aspire to something greater.
WR: You chose to include a lot of dialogue
in your story. Did you find yourself having to cut back on your story to meet
the 500-word maximum?
DC: I wrote this piece after a fairly
long period of not having written anything at all. I don’t remember having to
cut anything in particular, but often I remember the writing process as much
more effortless than it actually was.
WR: One of the housemates in your story is from Buffalo.
I have to ask, being a Buffalonian myself, do you have any ties to the city, or
was it just a random choice? How is setting important to you as a writer?
DC: In my story, the housemate from
Buffalo brings home a pizza but refuses to share it with everyone else. When I
was an undergraduate, I had a housemate from Buffalo who was generous to a
fault with her pizza and with everything else. She grew up to be a volleyball
coach at the college level. This particular short piece is set in a bookstore
because I’d just read something dumb about social media as the twenty-first
century bookstore; I’d just had an electronic exchange with an old friend, and
I started to imagine how much better and more meaningful that exchange might
have been had we met in a bookstore instead. Many of my stories are set in
Oklahoma, where I’m from.
WR: If you could give one piece of advice
to aspiring writers, what would it be?
DC: The best advice is the oldest and
most oft-repeated advice: read everything. Whenever you’re not reading, write.
Whenever you’re not reading or writing, think about the next time you’re going
to read or write, and make sure, if you can, that time comes sooner rather than
later. Seek advice from more experienced writers; listen to them when they tell
you about your shortcomings, even and maybe especially when it’s painful to do
so. Overcome your shortcomings. Continue to read and write.
WR: You use first person really well here.
Why did you choose to write this piece in first person instead of second or
third?
DC: At the outset, the narrator felt like
a franker version of myself. I was thinking of an old friend—wishing her
well—and, though I haven’t seen her in almost twenty years, I wanted to write
about what it might feel like to meet her again. The third person felt too
distant—I didn’t even consider it. Neither did I consider the second person;
I’ve written only a small handful of stories in the second person, and that’s
probably enough for the rest of my life.