We don’t need a new wave of feminism in America. We need a tsunami. I’m willing to sacrifice my lipstick and my eyeliner if I have to but I refuse to put down my vibrator and my pen.

The Hughes family, who live on Long Island, feel as much a part of Montauk as the reverse. They vacation there, every year, and have done so for well over a decade. I couldn’t imagine them anywhere else on Memorial Day weekend.

Recently:
   Fictionaut Five: Molly Peacock
   Front Page: May
   Books at Fictionaut: Giraffes in Hiding

I always hated the idea of the food chain. Everything is food for something. We are lucky that nothing usually eats us to death while we are alive. But when we die, it is another story.

For the most part the narrative comes out the way it comes out without revision. I read somewhere recently how essential it is for flash pieces to have a strong opening sentence, but for me they just start the way they start without prodding or poking.

When I wrote “Letters, notes, conversations, partings,” I thought I was at a crossroads. I wanted to be at a crossroads. I predetermined I was there, as a way of calling time. I thought four years was long enough for writing letters from my mother’s house. The lists in the story — if I can call it that — are written from the point of view of time starting anew.

The goal was to write the antithesis of a Valentine’s Day flash. No lovey-dovey crap allowed.

Susan Tepper:  Roberto, in your striking poem “Oh, dinner“ I was immediately swept up by the opening.  You write: Could have been the Geisha I drew with a blue crayon, the children and I shared a green and a blue one A man and his children drawing with crayons.  A simple enough act.  Yet right away, this seemed much [...]

Susan Tepper: You break up your stunning prose poem “Last Night On Oil Street“ into 3 distinctly separate yet linked stanzas: The Commune, The Ghosts, The Trees. In The Commune you write: Spray paint ecru to heat searing through my fingers I’m leaving this block of farce we’ve inhabited and lost: the rights to sleep facedown on [...]

Doreen and I were eventually married in June of 1965 and we’ve been married ever since. She died at home of cancer last May. This is part of a series of stories based on the facts of our life together which are still in progress.

Recently:
   Editor’s Eye: Meg Pokrass

I’ve loved movies all my life watching them on a black and white TV from the time I was very young. Philadelphia Story, It Happened One Night, Casablanca, Rebecca, these were the kinds of things I wanted to write. So I learned how to write from learning how to write scripts.

Recently:
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