Meet NUNUM's Contributor: Keith Woodruff

NUNUM

Blending Flash Fiction & Art

Interview with ​Keith Woodruff

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

Probably a picture book version of Old Yeller - which set the table for all the boy and his dog stories to come, and all the tears. Notably Call of the Wild. 

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

Oddly, it was 70s disaster movies. I was obsessed with Towering Inferno, Poseidon Adventure and Earthquake and started writing tiny tiny disaster stories. My first was Tidal Wave. Later it was Charlotte's Web, Of Mice and Men, and poets like Wallace Stevens and Wordsworth.

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

Not a craft book per se, but I would suggest diving into all editions of Best Microfictions and Best Small Fictions, and Grant Faulkner's Fissures, Lou Beach's 420 Characters and Nothing Short of 100.

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

I would say everyone I have read, though on the whole poets have influenced my flash more than any one flash or fiction writer because I came to love flash through my love of prose poems (Kathleen McGookey). I had a prose poem selected by Amy Hempel for Best Small Fictions and when I read my contributor's copy that was my intro to flash really and my heart started racing. I really am fairly new to flash. 

​Why write flash fiction?

When was in grad school poetry was my focus; that is all I wrote. The more I read around, I discovered prose poems and began playing with the form. I loved the blend of poetry, poetic language, in what looked like prose on the page and often had a bit of a story or scene in play.  In fact, the first flash pieces I ever published began as a haiku that I developed into a micro. Wigleaf picked it up. That pretty much set me on the path I am on now. So why flash? I just love the narrative compression, the challenge of it, the sexy marriage of poetic language with hyper short story, and all the amazing strategies I have seen it take: recipes, notes, emails, letters, minutes from a meeting, fake obituaries ....

What advice would you give someone who is just starting to send their work out to journals?
I would look for journals that describe their aesthetic in some way. That really helps me gauge where to send a piece and where not to. Though I am sure I often read these descriptions and hear what I want to hear and send work that is not actually a fit.  I love the description Does it Have Pockets? has and what Moon Park Review says. 

Also, when you finish a piece and you love it - try your best to sleep on it - for a week. I cannot tell you how many times I send out work only to see after the fact some angle or version of it I hadn't seen that I like even better. 

What kind of habits/practices do you have related to your writing process?

I love notebooks. The weirder the better. Collecting them is part of my writing process.  I usually write ideas I get in the margins of books as I am reading and then transcribe them later into a notebook. Specifically, I love writing with colored Precise V pens - hot pink, blue and black, and Dixon #2 pencils. Find a routine and your comfort quirks if you haven't yet. This probably won't come out right, but paying attention to these seemingly trivial things helps me somehow focus and get going - which is good because I am terribly undisciplined.

Keith Woodruff lives in San Antonio, TX with a backyard full of moody tomato plants. His writing appeared in lovely places like Wigleaf, Does it Have Pockets? JMWW, HAD and is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel and FlashFlood. Read him in BSF 2017 and 2019. He was awarded a 2018 Pushcart.

NUNUM

Blending Flash Fiction & Art