LETTER FROM THE EDITOR by Alex Tanner: NOT THE NEW YORKER’S FLASH ISSUE FLASH ISSUE

Flash fiction is a genre for sickos. It’s very hard to write, and, often, very demanding of its readers. I’m deeply suspicious of it and I always have been. And after a summer spent reading a bunch of it, I’m more in awe than ever of the sickos who do it well. 

It’s been instructive and illuminating to work on these eleven great pieces by eleven great writers. While reading and editing their work, I’ve seen what it is to find spaciousness in the compact, to see potential in scarcity, to do the work of imagining more into spare places. Every editor leaves these notes, or notes like them: Can we get a little detail here? Can we add a few lines? Can we linger in this moment? Can we expand? Can we see more? But flash makes everyone, even editors, fall at the feet of judiciousness. So sometimes I’d leave a note along these lines and then sort of remind myself that the answer would likely be No, and that that was right and what was best for everyone. 

In this issue we’ve got stories about schooling, literal and emotional; stories about deciding what’s real and what’s not real and whether it matters; stories about feeling sickened by our bodies, by those we love; stories about our obligations to babies, to strangers, to our spouses’ weird friends, to our own fictive creations; stories about desire and its overflow; stories about not fitting in anywhere, even into the spaces we’ve carved out for ourselves. I’m wowed by each of them individually, by how they speak to each other, by what they say as a group. I know you will be, too. 

Long live sickos,

Alex