Interview with ​Jacqueline Doyle

Meet NUNUM's Contributor: Jacqueline Doyle

3/6/2026

NUNUM

Blending Flash Fiction & Art

Interview with Jacqueline Doyle

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

My father’s hardcover collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. I remember reading The Borrowers series, too, which featured miniature people who borrowed from human households to furnish theirs. I still like tightly constructed, very short stories and tiny things.

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

I became a writer very late. After years of scholarly writing, I shifted to creative nonfiction, partly inspired by The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, edited by Lex Williford and Michael Martone (Touchstone). I loved the freedom and variety of the essay form. I can’t remember whether there was a book of flash that influenced me to become a flash writer. It’s likely to have been online zines, maybe Tattoo Highway (local, now gone) or Wigleaf or matchbook or Brevity.

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

A brand new one: Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante, The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genres (W.W. Norton, 2025).

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

I’m not sure I have one writing style. Two masters of the flash monologue (my form in NUNUM) whom I admire: Jamaica Kincaid (her story “Girl” in The New Yorker) and the poet Diane Seuss (her one-sentence story “I hoisted them, two drug dealers, I guess that’s what they were,” in Brevity).

Why write flash fiction?

It’s such a challenge and also so much fun! I think it’s more difficult than longer forms. Joy Castro said it beautifully in her essay “On Length in Literature” in Brevity: “Small doesn’t mean insignificant or reductive. Think atoms. DNA. Brief pieces can explode.”

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

Read the journal before you send anything! Get some idea of what they publish and whether you are a good fit.

What forms of writing do you particularly enjoy?

I’ve published in NUNUM twice, and both pieces were flash monologues, Monologues start with a voice, not an idea or character or situation. I love how the voice takes over after the first few words come to me. In creative nonfiction, I enjoy fragmented lyric essays, moving the pieces around, deciding what fits and what doesn’t, what picture is emerging. I have a variety of kinds of writing in my forthcoming flash and essay collection The Lunatics’ Ball, including lyric essays; flash memoir; braided essays as I combine memoir with the lives of over thirty “lunatics”; expository essays because there was a lot of biographical information I wanted to include about them; and even some fictionalized flash monologues of historical figures, as I tried to imagine the lives of women who had been silenced.

Have you read any flash collections recently that you’d recommend?

Yes! Quite a few in fact! In the order that I read them: Meg Pokrass, First Law of Holes (Dzanc Books); Allison Field Bell, Edge of the Sea (Cutbank); Kathryn Kulpa, For Every Tower, a Princess (Porkbelly Press); Claire Polders, Woman of the Hour (Vine Leaves Press); Patricia Q. Bidar, Pardon Me for Moonwalking (Unsolicited Press); and Grant Faulkner, something out there in the distance (University of New Mexico Press), which combines flash and photography. All from great indie presses.

Do you draw on autobiography in your flash fiction?

Probably because I write creative nonfiction and flash nonfiction, I rarely draw on personal experiences in my flash fiction. I didn’t have a big wedding. I don’t have a sister, and I’ve never given a wedding toast. It was fun to imagine both.

Jacqueline Doyle is the author of the flash fiction chapbook The Missing Girl and forthcoming hybrid essay collection The Lunatics’ Ball. A former contributor to NUNUM, she has published flash in numerous journals and anthologies. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Find her online at www.jacquelinedoyle.com.