Interview with ​Brandon McNeice

Meet NUNUM's Contributor: Brandon McNeice

10/3/2026

NUNUM

Blending Flash Fiction & Art

Interview with Brandon McNeice

What was the first book you remember picking up and reading by yourself?

Brian Jacques's Redwall, the first of a series I fell in love with. An abbey of mice defending their walls against a rat warlord, and a novice who has to grow into a hero he doesn't feel like. Jacques taught me that a writer makes you care about a place by caring about its smallest particulars.

What writer(s) or which book(s) influenced your decision to become a writer?

John Steinbeck's short novels, Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, and Tortilla Flat. They treated people in bunkhouses and cannery shacks with complete seriousness without ever announcing it. And they proved a real book could be short. Of Mice and Men is barely a hundred pages and has never once felt small to me.

Is there a writing craft book that you would recommend to new writers?

John McPhee's Draft No. 4. It's about nonfiction, which is why fiction writers skip it, and they shouldn't. McPhee's real subject is structure, and he is honest about how bad early drafts are. The title is the lesson. The version worth reading arrives several drafts in, and his advice on cutting is the entire discipline of flash fiction.

Is there a writer who has influenced your current writing style?

Claire Keegan and Denis Johnson. Keegan's Small Things Like These holds a whole town in very few pages, and none of them announce their importance. Johnson's Train Dreams leaves out almost everything and still lands its full weight. From both I've learned to trust the reader and cut what a scene already shows.

Why write flash fiction?

Because the form forces you to decide what a story is actually about. One situation, one turn, one image the reader carries out the door. I run a K–8 school in Southwest Philadelphia, and most of my stories start as something I saw on the block. Flash is the size of a thing witnessed. It doesn't resolve, it closes, which is closer to how lives feel than a plot is.

What advice would you give someone who is just starting to send their work out to journals?

Fit is most of the game. Read journals until you know their editorial interests the way you know a friend's taste, and when you have a piece you feel is ready, be intentional about where it goes. Also, don't discount the inspiration in a specific journal's open call, or in immersing yourself in what it publishes. Some of my best stories were written with a particular journal in mind.

You're a school leader by day. Does that job feed your writing, or compete with it?

Both. But the job gave me my subject. Nearly everything I write these days comes from what I've seen or overheard within a few blocks of the school. I'm not a native of the neighborhood, so I try to write as a guest, paying close attention and not explaining people to themselves. Readers and editors have told me I write children well. That is obviously not a coincidence. Running a school also means writing constantly, and the sentence you can't finish is always the place you haven't done the thinking yet.

You're Canadian by birth but live and work in Philadelphia. Do you think there is anything about your perspective that has helped you see and comment on the American experience?

I think so. I've moved back and forth across the border my whole life, as a child and as an adult, and I've lived in each country long enough to feel like I belong to it. But I've never lived in either long enough to stop noticing it. Things Americans take as normal still register with me as choices.

The scale of the promises, the scale of the gaps, the way a shutoff notice or a fourteen-dollar debt can stand in for a whole system. I don't think that makes me a better judge of America. It just means I'm a part of the place and still paying attention to it.

What are you working on now?

I've just completed an essay collection, The Grief and the Gathering, which will be out this fall. And I'm working away on a short story collection, where "Bottle Return" will eventually appear, and a short novel, all deeply focused on place and the neighborhood in which I work.

Brandon McNeice is a Philadelphia-based writer and educator. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review, Terrain.org, and Hunger Mountain. His work has been longlisted for the Ploughshares Emerging Writers’ Contest, the SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction, and nominated for Best Small Fictions.