Interview with ​Dawn Huddlestone

Meet NUNUM's Contributor: Dawn Huddlestone

11/3/2023

NUNUM

Blending Flash Fiction & Art

Interview with Dawn Huddlestone

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

The Secret World of Og by Pierre Burton. I didn’t pick it (it was a gift), but it’s the first book I remember devouring on my own, over and over. My now-ragged copy still sits on my bookshelf.

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

All of them. I may have been born with my nose in a book and lived in my head a lot as a child, telling myself stories. While it wasn’t until many years later that I realized I could be a writer, the magic of books had me spellbound from the moment I could decipher the words. Now I get to be a magician, too.

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

There are many, but I’ll keep it to three:

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. Because: Anne Lamott. (Love her.)

The Art of Brevity by Grant Faulkner. Even long-form writers can benefit from his advice for making writing more compact.

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. This is a book I dip into regularly on those days when Resistance gets the better of me. It’s even flash, in its own way.

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

I’m not sure I have a style. I write what interests me, so it’s all over the place.

Why write flash fiction?

Because it’s fun! But more than that, it’s a challenge to capture a moment concisely. Flash forces me to carefully consider how to convey meaning in the fewest number of words while still (hopefully) engaging readers.

Also, I seem to naturally gravitate toward brevity – even the novels I’ve written aren’t very long – and I find playing with form in flash easier than in longer works.

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

Persist. That’s common advice, with good reason. A ‘no’ doesn’t mean your work isn’t ‘good,’ only that it hasn’t found the right home. Make your story the best it can be (bonus advice: revise, revise, revise, and when you’re sick of it, revise some more) and keep sending.

What was your inspiration for this story?

I was standing on a street corner in Toronto amidst a crowd of people waiting for the light to change and got to thinking, “Who are these people? What are their stories?” This was the result. (Though there were, thankfully, no lecherous hands anywhere that I could see.)

What’s the most difficult part of writing for you?

Describing a place unless it’s somewhere I know well. I have aphantasia (a blind mind’s eye), so I can’t visualize a made-up space (or any space, for that matter). This is likely why my first drafts tend to be dialogue and/or action-heavy.

Do you have any odd writing habits?

I walk, muttering through plot points, character traits, etc., as I go. Something about the movement helps. This is fine when I’m at home, but more than once, I have been busted talking to myself while out walking the dog. (The advent of AirPods has helped remove the weirdness of this … as long as no one notices I’m not actually wearing any.)

Dawn Huddlestone lives in Muskoka with her husband and a very large dog. She is a freelance writer/editor and a printmaker who mostly explores the magic of historical photographic techniques. When not hiking or paddleboarding, she crafts both words and images into things that please her (and hopefully others).