Five Questions with 2013 NANO Prize Winner Blair Austin!

Sophie Rosenblum: Congratulations on winning the 2013 NANO Fiction Prize! What does it feel like to win this contest?

Blair Austin: Thank you so much. I feel very lucky, surprised and happy, and grateful.

SR:  Is flash fiction something you’re just starting to work with, or have you been writing work of this length for some time?

BA: I’ve long been interested in short forms of fiction. I first encountered them as a student of Edward Dorn’s at the University of Colorado. Probably like many other folks, I tend to think of flash fiction and prose poetry as something on the order of fraternal twins. There’s a fine line there, for me. I’m drawn to both narrative and non-narrative stuff. The suddenness of a short bit of writing and its potential to strike a quick chord (in the head, heart, or elsewhere) often appeals to me. But sometimes it isn’t enough, eh?  In my own work I’ve often felt that the too-short stories have a remote, lost quality, almost post-human, that can make it tough to find an emotional anchor in the world.

SR: What do you think makes a successful piece of flash? Who are some of your favorite flash fiction writers?

BA: Honestly, I’m not sure. I like compression of many kinds (especially poetry). Form can be all of a piece, but to me it isn’t an end in itself. Maybe it’s a place to start, like a sonnet, a villanelle, a sestina, an abecedarian and so on, a squashing of things in order to expand later. Today we have the luxury to think that way, namely, one doesn’t always want the big scroll of a Word document and the large space it implies. I keep thinking of the Japanese men and women who wrote tanka on tiny pieces of toilet paper, on any paper they could get, in the Internment Camps during the War. For them, imprisoned and driven by camp life into the necessity of some form of poetry, be it song or the written word, and lacking the actual, physical surfaces on which to write, a tanka, or a haiku, was a necessity rather than a luxury. It compressed emotion and took up very little space. The circumstances determined the form, there. Now, though, for me, compression sometimes addresses things that simply cannot or will not see the light of day in a clear way and must take a short form to be said, at all. And the flash form, if we’re really lucky, sometimes can give us the small window, for lack of a better way to say it, on pain and its many equivalents in humor, abstraction, mock-despair and so on. But enough of this…

As far as authors go, I’ve always liked the early French guys (Bertrand, Baudelaire, Rimbaud on the prose poem front), David Shumate, Sam Shepard (Motel Chronicles), Malcom Bennett (I, Brute! (one of the weirdest and most wonderfully compressed, bits of writing to come out of the English punk scene)), Djuna Barnes, Lu Xun (Wild Grass), Atwood (Murder in the Dark), Borges’s short work and also the epic/lyric poetry of Dorn (Gunslinger, Recollections of La Gran Apecheria  and others). But amazing writing, compressed writing, can be found anywhere. I keep thinking of the first paragraph of Stephen King’s novella, The Mist, which has been important to me since I first read it as a little kid. I idolized that guy, and still do.

SR: What is a perfect day like for Blair Austin?

BA: I would spend the day with someone to love who really loves me, have some food, a roof overhead, heat, electricity, some warm clothing, and would help other people to have the same.

SR: What can we expect next from you?

BA: Well, I’m working on a short story collection, entitled, Truckstop Chronicles, which is set in the Tomahawk Truckstop and along the highways of the Midwest. I’m also writing an abstract novel, entitled, In Syphilis Please, set in an imaginary city. Tonight, though, I’ll cook a Totino’s pizza, feed the cats artisanal, wild game-based food, and watch cage fighting. Maybe I will also pop popcorn, like my grandma did, on the stove with some salt and butter. Beyond that, I really don’t know.