Links

* Preorder Family Night by Ani King (out in Oct. through Mason Jar Press)

* Follow Ani King on bluesky & Instagram

* Head to their website to read their pubs or listen to the playlist they created for a few of their stories

* Stories mentioned in the interview: It’s Not Called a Miscarriage if You’re a Horse, Nervous Thing, and Feels Like Rain

* Ani Recommends: Evil Flowers by Gunnhild Øyehaug, Open Throat by Henry Hoke, Bitter Over Sweet by Melissa Llanes Brownlee, Claudine, Literary Namjooning, Pithead Chapel, SmokeLong, OkayDonkey, and Virgo Venus Press

The Interview

Hayley Shucker (she/her): Alright, hello, everyone! This is Hayley from First Chapters. I’m here with Ani King to discuss their writing, and also their upcoming debut flash fiction collection. Hi, Ani!

Ani King (they/them): Hi, Hayley, good to be here, thanks for having me.

HS: Ani King, They/Them, is a queer, gender non-compliant writer and artist from Michigan. They are the first place winner of the 2024 Blue Frog Annual Flash Fiction Contest, a SmokeLong Grand Micro Competition 2023 finalist, and have additional work featured in SmokeLong Quarterly Review, Split Lip Magazine, Fractured Lit, Exposition Review, WigLeaf, and other terrific publications. Most recently, Ani is a Monarch Queer Literary Award recipient, with work on the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist, and coming soon in Best Small Fictions 2025 and Best Micro Fiction 2026. Ani’s first full-length Flash Collection Family Night is available for pre-order from Mason Jar Press and will be released in October this year.

[Note: Best Small FIctions 2025 is now available to purchase. If you like flash and micro fiction, check out the best of the best of the best, sir (MIB reference I had to make.) Back to the interview]

HS: Alright, so we are going to get into Family Night in just a few moments, but I do want to chat about your writing first, and I just want to start with, Ani, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself as a writer? Were you always writing, or did you have a different career first?

AK: I mean, I think I’ve always been writing as a person. I used to write little stories when I was a kid, I wrote poetry. I’ve always really liked doing creative things in general. My first longer work was New Kids on the Block, fanfiction when I was probably about 11, so it’s always been there, but I’ve never really done it as a career in terms of writing fiction and so on.

I worked in tech for about 20 years until last Friday, when I decided to take a break and, at least for the short term, put some focus on writing and writing-related things. I have done some contract writing and editing and so on for some non-fiction stuff. But I really started writing for publication around 2014, wrote some short fiction, and found flash fiction, and kind of fell in love then. And then sort of shifted from writing to, starting a very small magical realism flash publication that ran from 2016 to 2020 called Syntax and Salt.

And so, it’s kind of been an interesting view on both sides of things. So now I’m a submissions editor for SmokeLong, so I read a ton of stuff in the queue, but with a lot less responsibility than keeping the site running, managing all of the social media, making sure that the promotion is going well, working with our writers, that kind of thing. And so it was a fun experience, but I think it always had a time limit, because I also found it really hard to write while I was in constant editor mode. It was very hard to get into that brain space that’s purely creative and just let ideas come out, versus, okay, I’m trying to tweak this as I go, and then by the time you get the first paragraph down, it’s like you’ve exhausted all of the energy you had.

So yeah, I think, it’ll be interesting to see what writing looks like with it as a primary, but still not monetary focus.

HS: That is the downside. We always need to make a living, right?

AK: true.

HS: Yes. So then, you started writing as a child. I think a lot of writers do, right? I think we’re all having the, “oh, when I was a kid, I would write these little stories,” and I think I love that for us, because it was always there for us, right? And we just had to come back and find it as an adult.

So this contract work that you do, is this something that you a service you offer, that we can plug for you, where people can find you?

AK: Not at the moment, so a lot of what I was working on was University of California’s yearly annual security report kind of stuff. The very dry, but let me pay my bills stuff. I will, at some point later in the year, start offering editorial and, like, contracted services. But I kind of want to sit down and plan it out what can I offer for folks.

And what does that look like now in 2026? Also, keeping in mind that most folks who are looking for editorial assistance or mentorship or that kind of thing are also living under the crushing weight of late-stage capitalism, and so how to make that something that’s affordable and accessible for people, but also at least pays a couple of bills.

HS: Right, it’s always the balance of you’re offering this service and you are a professional, but then you also recognize that people need to be able to afford your service.

AK: Yeah, the community I largely aim for is the LGBTQIA plus community, right? And so, that’s a much longer conversation, when you talk about socioeconomic issues and so on, but it’s very important to me to be able to connect with my community and make sure they can connect with me.

I don’t want to devalue my work, but also I want to make it available to people who are maybe most going to want or benefit from it.

HS: Right. So whenever you get that set up, you can just let me know, and then I will throw that on the blog. So I think that’s a good transition to what do you write about? What are some common themes in your work for people who maybe haven’t read you yet? Because they will.

AK: I think there’s a lot of identity, as it comes to gender, obviously. For folks who have read me, that’s probably a big one up front, but also family, which makes sense given the collection. I’m not sure I realized how prominent of a theme that was, and so I’ve started putting the collection together. Also, class, I think there’s a whole lot in my work around who are we in relation to our situations and what we can do and what we can afford, hopefully in an interesting way. But it’s that larger theme of connecting and disconnecting from each other as people.

HS: Yeah, I think the class stuff is there from the writing that you have available online to read, because I know you have some stuff in print as well. But, I think it’s even there, perhaps not at the forefront, but your latest piece, “It’s Not Called A Miscarriage If You’re a Horse.” There’s some underlying class stuff in there as well.

AK: I would agree, and I think coming from that set of stories, the Horse Girl stories, for folks who might not be aware, there’s a lot of class conversation in those pieces, because it’s about Horse Girl who has horses, right? And her family is fairly wealthy, and it certainly comes with its own problems, and then her girlfriend, who comes from a much different background, much different family, and how they interact, and the things that they each as characters see themselves as capable or not capable of, or, deserving or not deserving of, I think really shows up in there.

HS: Yeah, I do have it on my list to ask you about horses and about Queen Anne, since those recur in your works, so, why don’t we just actually transition into that? So, for folks who don’t know, tell us about horses.

AK: So I am not a Horse Girl, actually, but my mom is.

HS: Okay. [shocked]

AK: And so I’ve ridden a couple of times. It was not something that was an option when I was growing up. I am the oldest of seven kids, my mom was a single parent the vast majority of the time that I was growing up. She had had, I believe, ponies when she was younger, and then she didn’t actually start getting horses again until after I had already moved out of the house.

You know, horses are super expensive to take care of, just across the board between boarding and feeding and vets and so on. But I’m really interested in them because they are such a sensitive animal. They’re huge, and they’re very strong and very powerful, and they’re literally emotionally ruled by the moon, and could have a breakdown any minute. And I think that’s probably some of the same reason that I’m obsessed with, like, deer and things like that, because these are animals that are sort of contradictions, you know, if you look at them in comparison to humans, right?

Like, we always think of, like, bigger and stronger and so on, and then you have a horse where if you’re, like, have the wrong vibe when you’re walking up, you know, they can have a very significant reaction to that. And sort of over time in writing about Horse Girl and her girlfriend, who I’m calling Tattletail, and we’ll see if that sticks.

I liked the idea that the horse and Queen Anne particular can kind of represent a whole lot of things. You know, for Horse Girl, initially, Queen Anne is a lot of escape and safety and movement and all of these things, and maybe even also a lens to understand Tattletale through. Tattletale is a neurodivergent, you know, teenage girl in the 90s, when girls were not being diagnosed with ADHD, you were really just compliant or not compliant, you know?

I think that it gives, like, a fun literary way to kind of travel through their relationship, either as a sort of misdirection, right? How is Horse Girl relating to Queen Anne? And is that in some way similar to how she does or doesn’t relate to Tattletale?

There’s a piece I can’t believe I’m forgetting the name of my own story. But it’s the one about the harness, geez, this is terrible, right? “Nervous Thing.”

HS: I did have “Nervous Thing” written down, because I really loved the flow of that one, and the repetition of “the girl I love” coming up over and over again.

Okay, so for those of you listening or reading along, “Nervous Thing” was published in Pithead Chapel. It’s available to read online, and we can link that so people can go read it.

[I’m skimming the story again] Yeah, yeah, that one… That one was really sweet. I mean, they’re all really sweet and then, for those of you looking on Ani King’s website, and you’re curious what ones are part of this Horse Girl collection, they have graciously put little horse icons next to their publications, both online and in print.

And I see you’re also gonna be in Stanchion in the future.

AK: Yep, and that one’s not Horse Girl, but it definitely pulls some feminine rage in there.

HS: I love it.

AK: I’m looking forward to seeing what people think about that. As I grew up with a very religious background in the early days, my dad was a charismatic Christian minister, until I was, I think, 8 or 9, when my parents split up. So—

HS: And you said you’re the oldest, right? Okay, so you got all of that growing up.

AK: All of it, yeah. And certainly some mixed feelings about some of it, but it makes for a very rich amount of material to pull from.

HS: Yes, you know, I will say, reading your stories there is no clue that you did not grow up with horses, around horses all the time. It feels like you very much did.

AK: My mom loves her horse. And I have friends who are horse girls, and so I also asked questions. I was like, is this realistic? Like, I’ve ridden a horse, I’ve gone with my mom out to feed her horse, I’ve talked to her when you know, her horse is ill, or she’s been worried about, you know, various things that just come with having a horse, or the expenses, and so on.

That’s the thing about research. Like, when you’re writing asking questions and, you know, who has experience with this, and I would love for you to tell me all the super boring details about this, because everything comes down to the details, and do I have this right? Does this feel, you know, like, if you’re somebody who knows horses and loves horses does this translate?

HS: Yeah, I think that that’s one thing I see early authors making mistakes in is they don’t do the research, and I’m like, people are gonna call you on your bullshit. You’re gonna write something that is not correct, and when I was getting my MFA, for example, we had people there who used to be lawyers, or are still practicing while getting their MFA. Used to be in some sort of medical industry, so when you bring these pieces to class and they tell you, hey, just FYI, it’s not like that. You need to be like, oh, okay, I’ll go research that. And not double down. I have zero grudges. I say sarcastically.

AK: I know how that…I think sometimes the research, the rabbit hole of it is the fun part of some process. I know way more about roadkill removal than anyone needs to know if you’re not doing it, and it’s because I looked into it for a story that’s not even done yet that will probably be less than 500 words long. And…

HS: And that’s the job.

AK: But I think it gives you that opportunity to really sink into the whole write small to write big, I think, also comes down to, even when you’re just setting a character, it’s not about, oh, he shifted his hair, or he did this, or he grimaced, or this. It’s what is the tool that they pick up to do the job? What are the mannerisms that come with doing this specific thing? You know, do you wash your hands afterwards? And the stuff that someone who knows the job is going to pick up on, right?

Yeah. Law, very much so. Like, if you have somebody who just, like, gets bailed out, like they were in a 1930s gangster movie, you’re missing the opportunity for the tedium of okay, you have to wait for your turn to use the phone, and you’re probably in the drunk tank, so good luck if the phone works, and even if it does, it’s a collect call, and will somebody answer, and will they get a bondsman? And it’s the tension, I think, for a lot of things comes from how you represent the tedium of a moment that somebody has to deal with, depending on what you’re writing, of course.

HS: Sure, yeah, but there are these steps that you’re missing that enrich the story.

AK: Where’s the stress?

HS: Yes, where is the stress? So, since we’re talking about research, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your writing practice? Research is obviously a big part of that, but coming from someone who worked in tech for 20 years, you probably wrote in the background, so what does your writing look like now?

AK: Oh, man. Right now I’m in kind of a weird limbo spot, but I think realistically, a huge chunk of my writing process has always been daydreaming. I have an idea, and I wander around with it, and I go for walks, and I drive about it, and I’m in the grocery store, and I’m thinking about it, and I’m making my weird little phone notes in too many different places.

And that’s probably a ton of it. Some of it is, you know, when you’re talking the generative stuff, I think that that’s it. It’s just the “Oh, that’s an interesting idea.’ My partner is awesome at going through these insane Wikipedia holes, and so he’ll come up and be like, ‘did you know’ and just start telling me about some of the strangest stuff, and like, sometimes, like, hey, okay, so hold on a minute, I just need to write this thing down.

I think some of it is just being open to the idea that anything can be a starting point. Like, anything can be interesting depending on who you apply it to and what they’re doing.

If I’m doing structured writer time, I try to do it in the morning. I am an autistic person with ADHD, which means that my morning routines are incredibly sacred to me, and if I mess with them too much, it kind of throws everything off. And if I can do structured stuff in the morning, it works best before—I know that doesn’t really work like this, but it’s, like, before the ADHD, like, really, like, peaks. Like, I can’t actually focus that much or sit still, and I have a very finite amount of time before my body is like, ‘We are not sitting here doing the same thing anymore.’

And then otherwise, you know, while working, I always just snatched time while I could. Sometimes it’s between meetings, or it was on lunch, or it was, this is a training that I don’t care about, so I’m over here, like…

HS: I’m gonna go make notes over here, yeah.

AK: Right? I think the thing that I probably am a little bit more process-y about is the editing process. And that’s just because you kind of have to be or at least I do, I don’t want to lose my thread, so if I sit down to edit something, I try very much to stick with it. Also, often a morning process for me. And then at night, I get the weirdest ideas, and I kind of have to balance between I’m not a very good sleeper, which is related to being an autistic person with ADHD. Like, you know, is the temperature right? Is there enough white noise?

HS: Not too much white noise. Is the pillow right?

AK: And a lot of it is my brain will just spin out, right? And so, sometimes I have to choose between, okay, I want to really get that idea down, and the fact that it’s going to probably disrupt any movement into sleep, or I just really need sleep right now, so it’s kind of a trade-off there, but I feel like the writing process is kind of an all-day, everyday thing when you’re a writer. It is just taking notice of things. Oh, that’s weird, oh, that’s interesting. Or wouldn’t it be fun if, you know, while you’re sitting at stoplights or standing in lines?

HS: And then, like you said, have your notes app ready to go to, like, jot it down. I have definitely tried to get myself to realize, ‘No, you are not going to remember. Write it down.’

AK: Never, never going to remember, and it doesn’t matter how many times you’re like, I’m just gonna say it to myself over and over and over again. It’s like, you are now in a near-sleep state. You’re remembering nothing that happened. You’re gonna remember you had an idea, and that’s it.

HS: Yes, and I have cats as well. And when they meow at you, constantly. You can’t get a sentence out. I’m like, well, I had a thought, even if it’s just, why did I walk into the next room? And it’s like, oh, just to even pick up my water bottle, I’m like, well, that’s gone. I can’t focus enough.

AK: That’s… yeah, I don’t think that cats are helpful with writing process, like I love my cats, but they’re basically glorified couch pillows who occasionally scream for food.

HS: Yes, yes, and there have definitely been times for me where I’ve been writing or editing, and one of them comes in to scream at me, and I’m like, well, that’s done, I’ll revisit this in an hour or so, thank you.

AK: Yeah, and like it’s so funny, though, because with people, I’ll be like, hold on a minute, I gotta write this down, I can’t figure out this. And my family is very forgiving of the times, and I’m like, I promise I was listening to you, but I hold on. I just have to do this.

HS: Yeah, good. Well, let’s talk about Family Night. We’re talking about editing. Earlier, you mentioned, putting together a collection. Alright, this is the blurb for Family Night.

Family Night is, by turns, a lyrical celebration of queerness and an exploration of family and loss, often through a lens of magical realism. Ani King’s collected flash fiction stories explore relationships and connections. A teen girl attempting to summon her missing mother home with cigarette smoke and yacht rock songs. Two sisters disputing how to care for an unhealthy elderly unicorn. A woman accidentally raising two daughters from the bones of her long-did pet rabbits.

And I think online you said werewolf sex as well. [through some post on bsky]

AK: Yes.

HS: Where is that in my summary, Ani?

AK: Right? I know, I was like, I need to use this is my big social media hook. It’s also, come for the werewolves.

HS: Guys, come for the werewolves. Hooked. Hooked.

AK: Right, the werewolf sex story was when I actually wrote for a Taco Bell Quarterly Call. Or edited for, I should say. And just got to the, like, deadline of, like, okay, like, if this hasn’t been accepted or rejected, I just have to pull it so it can be, like, ready to go in the printing. But it was so fun to put this collection together. I’ve had, honestly, kind of feels like rom-com dream experience so far with Mason Jar.

HS: That’s an amazing way to put that.

AK: So, last year, at the beginning of the year, I was like, I wanna maybe shop a chapbook around, and we were also going to sell a house and buy a house, and there were all of these things going on, and I was like, ‘yeah, no, totally, no big deal.’ And so then, around April, after we had bought our current house.

I was like, this is insane, there’s no universe in which I am going to shop a chapbook around. And then, Heather Rounds with Mason Jar reached out through my contact form, which I just want to plug for everybody, have a contact form on your website. If you don’t, like, just go get one now. And reached out.

HS: And have a website.

AK: Have a website. It doesn’t have to be much. It really just has to have something about who you are, what you do, and how to get ahold of you. And yeah, so Heather reached out and said that she had read my peonies story in Gone Lawn, and that they were curious if I was working on anything longer form.

And I was like, oh, man, I guess so, and my best friend, Benny, who I will shout out to, was like, you do, you always do. The answer is always yes. Yes, you do.

So I responded back and let them know, hey, you know, I’m not working on a novel or anything like that, but I do have a flash collection. I sent, I think, 80 pages over and ended up talking with the team there, and they liked it, and I like their approach and what they’re doing. And so, we started putting it together.

It was fun and interesting to figure out what the themes were, but it was more so because I had help with that. I think it can be really hard to look at your own work and say, here are all of the themes that I’m exploring. Especially, I don’t really write with that intent. I’m not usually like, ‘I would like to tell a story about heteronormativity and what it does to relationships.’ It’s more of a, like, ugh, I have an idea for a weird character.

Or whatever bizarre thing happens, and even though I think there are intentional choices there, a lot of it feels kind of invisible, or background, or you’re like, I don’t know, I was sort of in a fugue state the whole time I was doing this, and then it came out. And then putting everything in order, I think, was what really exposed everything. I printed the whole final manuscript out, the accepted, here’s what we’re doing, and started just ordering by hand. It was a lot like building a playlist at first.

Okay, here are things that are about teenage yearning, or here’s this, or here’s that, and then I finally started organizing by family relationship. Here are stories about moms, and dads, and siblings, and aunts, and apparently, I don’t have a single story about uncles, which is probably because I don’t have many that were in my life, but that’s a thing to think about.

And I had a fantastic developmental editor, Liz, who I think really saw what I was trying to do. And I think that’s something about a really great editor is they bring stuff out, the whole time that they’re looking at it, it’s about how do you make this the best possible story that the writer can also see. So, yeah, it’s been a very cool ride, honestly.

HS: Awesome. Are these mostly news stories, anything that we would be familiar with on your website?

AK: I think about 40 of the 54-ish stories have been published before. I have pulled the links down for all of those, except for “Feels like Rain,” which is with Paranoid Tree Press, that one is still up there. It’s also behind me, framed, because they do this really lovely print zine that they send out every month. And then the rest are new, or things that folks will not have read before, including the werewolf sex story, sapphic minotaur trapped in a maze of heteronormativity situation going on. See? Like, it’s there. It’s just an accident. Ish.

HS: Yes, someone reads your work, and they’re like, oh, I love how you did X, Y, and Z, and you’re like, I did.

AK: Definitely.

HS: That was absolutely my goal.

AK: I meant to do all of this.

HS: So I really love the cover of the Family Night. Yes. As someone was born in 90, and I grew up in the 90s, so I had all these VHS tapes.

AK: Yeah, oh yeah. My mom was a VHS collector, like, and she just got rid of it some years ago, but I mean, like, a whole basement wall just VHS’s top to bottom. So, I found the image when I was looking through non-AI, because fuck AI, just to say it, stock photos, because it’s my first book, and you know, budgets are real.

I found a few that I really liked, and I sent it over to Mason Jar, and that was one where I was like, I don’t know if that’s one that folks will pick, but it was so bright and so different from everything that I had seen.

And then, this is going to be probably a little bit niche, but if anyone has ever watched Adventure Time, there is an episode with a purple horse called the Poo-brained Horse, and it has these big, wide eyes, and my partner, one day had a picture on his phone of just the eyes and held it up to his face. So this is a very personal, like, family meme that’s related to the book cover that most people would never capture. But I was like, this is just layers and layers here. But I love the image even without the association.

Just because I was born in 1980, and I loved the idea of the stack of VHS tapes and the person looking at them and holding up over their face. I was thinking of family videos, right? All of these little collections of moments and so on. And also it felt era-appropriate. Most of the stories in there are I think probably, if not overtly, kind of have a theme of, or at least a feeling of, okay, this is the, like, these are 90s teens, or this is happening in a pretty specific time.

HS: Yes, I absolutely had those knee-high rainbow socks I see on the cover, they have the rainbow socks. I had stacks of VHS tapes, and I miss them. I still have a VHS player and a few VHS tapes because a lot of that media is gone. There’s no way to get a digital version of it. So I’m like, ‘No, I can’t. I have childhood trauma. I need my VHS tapes in case I ever want to watch it again.

AK: Yes. All those, like, collections of things that people taped and put together, like cartoons and the start-stop for the commercials.

HS: Yes, you would sit there and wait to pause the recording during the commercials.

AK: It’s like making a mixtape. It’s such a similar thing.

HS: Yes! I’m so glad that you’ve put together this collection, and I love how you described it as this dream, this romantic comedy, this experience. I think we’re all trying very, very hard to get our work out there, and so when we get it out there, and then it’s this amazing experience, that’s what we need.

AK: Absolutely, and I got so much really good advice from folks, you know, who have published, who were like, hey, just things to be aware of. Here’s been my experience, here were the things that I was okay with, here are the questions I wish I had asked. Because I do think, especially in the flash community, like, it is a fairly good community. It’s very easy to get information about, okay, how do I query? Linds McLeod, who also writes terrific work, has a thread on Blue Sky that is straight up ‘hey, here’s how I have successfully queried, and here is, you know, a formula for getting that out there, because here are the things that I read that don’t catch my interest, and here’s how you can do that.’ It’s a very generous community with information, and I love that. I think it’s made writing more fun, right?

HS: Absolutely. I think it’s a lot more fun when you don’t feel like you’re screaming into the void.

AK: Yeah.

HS: Nice. So I was gonna ask, what do you wish you would have known? But it sounds like you were able to ask a lot of people and get information before diving in.

AK: I don’t, so far, have anything where I feel like I didn’t have the information I needed, or couldn’t ask for it. I have things that I think I would tell other people, which is just ask a lot of questions. If you’re considering a press of any kind, reach out to people who have published with them. Not everyone will answer, but send a few emails, hit a few contact forms.

‘Hey, I have an opportunity here, I’m curious what your experience was like, and if you’d be willing to tell me about it.’ Or even just broadly, ‘hey, I’m considering, you know, trying to get this published. What are some things I should think about?’ Because I think that you can’t really know everything, and no two presses are the same, but there are some things you should know.

How much will I get paid and when? is an important question to ask. What comes out of royalties before they get to me? The contract stuff is really important. It’s not the fun stuff, but I would say, make sure you understand anything you are signing. And ask questions about promotion.

I’ve been really fortunate in working with Brenna, who is with Mason Jar, who is awesome, who has a massive list of places. But one thing I’ve heard from folks is that sometimes they wish that they had known a little more about how much effort they would have to put into their own promotion, and I think that that’s important to know. It might not change your decision, but at least then you can kind of plan for, here’s the effort that I’m going to need to make.

HS: Yeah, I think that’s not just with flash but with longer prose as well. How much work the author is going to need to do to promote themselves. I think I blame, not in a bad way, but I blame, like, television and film for having to cut out all the little things to make it easier for us to watch, but then we don’t see those steps, and then we’re like, ‘Oh, it’s super easy, you’re gonna go on this world tour, that your publisher’s gonna pay for.’ And agents and publishers are like, we don’t have the budget for these.

AK: I know! Well, and especially with Endowment of the Arts issues. Over the last couple of years, you know, there is less money going into the arts, and there is especially way less money going into the arts for queer people. Your own budget for time and money and capacity, I think, really play a huge part talking with Mason Jar, it’s been a, okay, like, ‘here’s what I realistically can do during these time frames, and here’s how far I can go,’ and ways to get creative.

And then I think there’s also important to know it is work. Even if you love writing, and, like, not just the I love having written, but I love doing it, and I love a lot of the process, there is a point where it is labor, it is effort, and you do need breaks from it.

And I think because everyone has to hustle so hard to get their stuff out there that we don’t necessarily think about, okay, ‘how do I build a break into this’ so that you can get some energy back and then still enjoy as much of the process of selling a book as you might writing it? Because I think that if you don’t, then you burn out really fast.

HS: Yes, yes. And you need to know what you can do realistically, like you said, to promote yourself.

Alright, so as we’re wrapping up, so the theme of my little blog is kind of openings, and I look at the first chapter, usually, of novels, and talk about how that might catch a reader’s interest. And I have done a few short stories as well, but flash is a different beast, pretty much entirely, in the best way. So, do you think about openings of flash? Do you… you’re nodding, yes. How much time do you spend thinking about the opening?

AK: So, the opening is almost always what I have first, or think I have first, and then sometimes that changes. I’ve now spent years writing flash, and reading flash, and working in a queue, and having to articulate why I don’t think something is working. And a lot of it is openings I will say with flash, a lot of it is get to the point faster. My goal when I write flash is to bring you in from the moment you read the title all the way through to the end.

There are some things I lean on a lot. I tend to use my title is my opening line and goes right into things, because when it works, it’s great. You just have this immediate flow into it, and you just kind of keep, you know, keep rolling towards the end. I don’t think flash has a lot of room for initial exposition. Every word has to count, which means that you kind of have to be learning the character as you go.

You don’t really have, unless it is so well done, because I think there are some stories that do it, and I don’t have an example offhand, but you can’t really start out with the, and this was a person, and here’s how they looked, and here’s what they were doing. Unless that is the story in some way. Because micro and flash fiction, and it’s like a hundred to a thousand words, you don’t have a lot of space for filler.

The reader’s tolerance for filler is almost non-existent because it just stands out so much. So yeah, I think about openings a lot. I think I wrestle with endings more than openings, and usually what it is, is I need to stop sooner than I did.

HS: Yes. That’s often my problem as well.

AK: It’s so much easier to see it in other people’s work when you’re giving feedback, and be like, if you just stop, like, two paragraphs sooner, like, done. Perfect story, no more notes. There’s an exercise, in SmokeLong, I’ve been doing SmokeLong Fitness for, I think, almost 3 years now, and one of my favorite exercises is take your story and cut it in half. Cool, do it again. And if you can, do it again one more time, because it kind of helps you see what matters, what’s missing, Or what you need to add, because what you have isn’t entirely conveying what you mean to.

HS: Yeah, nice, thank you. Alright, and then I want to end with, do you have any book recommendations? Maybe a couple book recs and a couple literary magazine recs?

AK: Absolutely. So, one of my favorite short story collections is… I’m gonna butcher her name, this is terrible. It’s Evil Flowers by Gunnhild Øyehaug; [Translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson]. And it has a super fun, bright cover, and they are short stories, but there’s a lot of flash-level work in it. The stories are very immediate, they’re very connected to each other, and she gets really meta with a lot of it, so it’s super fun.

And then Open Throat by Henry Hoke is a novel, but it feels like you’re reading flash, and it’s about a queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion, who lives under the Hollywood sign. It’s another one that’s so immediate, but it also there’s so much, character in the voice, and it is such a masterclass in how you can break almost every rule and still tell a complete and really satisfying story.

And then my last one is just a straight-up fantastic, flash and micro collection called Bitter Over Sweet by Melissa Llanes Brownlee.

[I’m giving Ani a double thumbs up]

I know you’re familiar with, Hayley. For folks who might not be, it is a collection of stories that are linked together about are generally focused on Tita, who is a Native Hawaiian, also work that tends to talk a lot about class and gender, and what does colonization and tourism look like, in a place where it’s essentially made everyone dependent on it. Even though that’s not what should have happened.

The writing is so sharp, such a good thing to read if you’re like, oh, ‘I need some inspiration.’ I’ve been reading emails too long, because they’re all very brief, and I’m, like, such a fan of Melissa’s work, so I think some of it is just that, you want to talk about immediacy, you want to talk about movement, you want to talk about voice and character, and all of them coming together in a very perfect way, it’s definitely a good book for it.

HS: Yes, I was actually just revisiting that yesterday, because I was looking for stories. I have a contract job for a week coming up in July, and I need some flash pieces and some micro, so I was looking at that, and I’m like, yes, yes, yes.

AK: Yeah, and, like, giving book recommendations is probably one of my favorite things. Whenever someone’s like, do you have a recommendation for a book? I’ll appear from a thousand miles away and be like, hi, hello, I have so many thoughts for you.

HS: Nice. And what about some literary magazines, either in print or online?

AK: So I am a huge fan of Claudine, who is a little bit newer, I think Diane Hardy is doing such a cool job in, doing small but really impactful monthly issues, and I’m a big fan, like, I wish I could shout out to everyone I’ve ever worked with because I’ve had so many good experiences.

Literary Namjooning is great. I don’t know if you’re familiar. I am a not-secret K-pop fan, even though I never know anyone’s name or any of their histories, but Literary Namjooning is based on, essentially one of the dudes from BTS, talking about going to quiet spaces and libraries and forests and so on. It has a very, it’s hard to say, it’s got a restful vibe, but also there’s tension in it. They do some really neat stuff.

I love Pithead Chapel, I love Smoke Long, I love Okay Donkey. I think a fun new one that, it’s a little bit self-serving to plug, is Virgo Venus Press. It is very fun, very young vibe. Just very punchy is a good way to say it.

HS: Nice. Okay, that one is new to me, so that one I can go look up as well. [When I looked it up, I saw I had heard of it already.]

AK: Yeah, trying to think of the new one. I want us to be able to keep all of our lip mags around. It’s always so hard to see them close, especially, again, National Endowment of the Arts and other grant impacts have made it really hard for people to keep that stuff going.

HS: Yes, all the smaller guys are feeling it, for sure.

AK: Very much so.

HS: Alright, thank you so much for joining me today, Ani. It was so much fun. Alright, so, don’t forget, you guys, Family Night is available for pre-order from Mason Jar Press. It’s coming out in October. And you can find Ani King on their website, aniking.net.

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Coming Soon: June Roundup featuring shout-outs, book reviews, and general musings.