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Ava Chin is the editor of the anthology Split (McGraw-Hill, 2002.)
Her fiction and poetry appear in Dick for a Day, It's
Only Rock N Roll, and Listen Up! Spoken Word Poetry. She has been featured
on National Public Radio and performed at Woodstock ‘94,
the Whitney Museum, and the Knitting Factory in NYC. Her articles
have appeared in The Village Voice, SPIN and Time
Out New York,
among others. As a lyricist, she contributed lyrics for the alternative
rock band Soul Coughing on El Oso (Warner Bros.) She received her
master’s degree from Johns Hopkins and currently is a Ph.D.
fellow at USC in Los Angeles where she is working on a novel.
Question #4: Susan Maxwell writes, “The
poem furrows a way out of the white by running over it, while still
white underneath ink.” Brian Kitely composes “postcard
stories” that are, quite literally, started on the back of
postcards that are then mailed to friends and family, after which
the stories are rewritten and revised. And Bin Ramke finds that, “the
necessity to make the tiny announcements that are line-ends in ‘standard’ verse
becomes sometimes, often, annoying, arbitrary, and ultimately misleading.” Why
do you write pp/ffs? How are your stories and poems brought into
the world?
I first started reading flash fiction when I was working crazy
sixty-hour work weeks for a major national magazine. While I waited
for page proofs to come across my desk long after midnight, I discovered
that the only fiction I could concentrate on were short shorts.
Their jarring method and brevity, their element of surprise, lent
themselves well to my shortened yet heightened attention span.
Now that I'm working on a novel, my day job has been replaced by
the long form. If I need a break from that fictive world, flash
fiction is the literary equivalent of a hand-job. "Enter At
Your Own" was one of the first pieces I wrote after moving
to Los Angeles.
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