This month, Michelle Elvy talked with the 2025 Best Small Fictions Guest Editor Robert Shapard, whose new collection, Bare Ana and Other Stories, won the W. S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collection. Robert Shapard is known for co-creating the Sudden and Flash Fiction anthologies that had a groundbreaking effect on American short fiction.
Michelle Elvy: Kia ora and thank you for sharing with us this month, Robert! Let’s begin with your new book, Bare Ana and Other Stories. After decades of your significant contributions to the flash fiction form, you are now seeing your own stories appear together for the first time in this volume – and we congratulate you on winning the W.S. Porter Prize with this collection. How did it come about – and why now?
Robert Shapard: Thanks for the interview, Michelle. Why a collection of my stories now? I wanted to make one from the time I first began writing in graduate school. But I was already an older student, involved with teaching, editing, writing long fiction, along the way fascinated by the odd little fictions I was finding and joining James Thomas to create Sudden Fiction and the Norton sudden and flash anthologies, which was an entire occupation itself. But from the beginning I always liked writing stories, managed to publish a few in journals, and to win a national competition for a story chapbook. After I left the university, I was so happy to find stories coming back to me and I started to think of a collection again.
But it was a mess – old stories and new, very long ones and very short ones, some from online journals and some from print journals that needed to be scanned and proofed. And then what? Just a big stack of pages and no theme to tie them. So I made some decisions. I threw out long stories in favor of shorter. I asked questions like, Is this story good enough? Does this one relate somehow?
The irony is it was almost like I was researching myself, the same way I researched stories for Sudden Fiction, except it was for a single-author anthology that came to be called Bare Ana.
ME: Your stories are held up by conceptual frames, while also being cinematic. Pamela Painter notes that ‘Motel’ would make a great film. We wonder: Do you begin with an idea, or a character, or a scene? Do you see the story visually (in cinematic views), or do you start with a concept – something you need to say?
RS: My stories come from all of the above. The seed of one might be a memory, or a fragment of memory, a bit of news, a factoid. Most seeds fade but if one sticks around it might be something I need to say, but I don’t know what, or how to say it. So I go to the next stage, which may be to think of a person, real or imagined, who might be interested in this factoid or whatever it is. As the character fleshes out, he or she may have a problem, small or large (people often do) and this may become clear in dialogue with another character – and if they’re in some continuous action together, that’s a scene, which could be part of a film, as Pamela Painter says.
But a lot of writers say language or voice is the essence of flash, what drives it. I have to agree with them. Many of my stories exist less in scene than inside a character. Inside is where whole worlds exist, where decisions are made. In my story ‘Julie Elmore’, making decisions is fundamental to people as it has been for all life on Earth including ancient sea creatures, ‘pteropods, crawlers, floaters … each with their own cranky, surprising motions and brilliant colors, all of them evolving instant by instant through their own urges and choices’. I like to think my characters evolve, not in the sea but on the page – and how else except through language?
ME: The book has been praised by Stuart Dybek, Robert Olen Butler, Tom Hazuka and others. Among them is also Christopher Merrill, who says: ‘I love how these stories seem to configure doors and windows that open onto scenes we recognize from some deep part of our souls and then go places we would never have imagined.’ Can you tell us more about the views you take in your work, how you imagine peering through windows, or stepping through doors – especially interesting with the theme ‘windows’ for this issue.
RS: I see Chris’s entry points to the stories – his ‘doors and windows’ – as the traditional reader orientation points of place, time, character and maybe some problem or decision that needs to be made. I like to lay those things out quickly, plainly, to invite readers in and make them comfortable. But when we go inside the characters, these orientations can change and we “go places we would never have imagined”. Time is no longer Eastern Standard but personal; the decision to be made becomes not what’s for lunch but whether to ride in a fiery cloud across the harbor. I hope readers care enough, this far into the story, that they can’t help but follow.
ME: Several of your stories in this collection are the names of characters: ‘Thomas and Charlie’ (the opening story), ‘Bare Ana’, ‘Mayumi and Kenzo’, ‘Delbert’, ‘Julie Elmore’ (the closing story). Sometimes the named characters are at the centre of the story, and always they impact and change the lives of others. Yet other stories are not named with the character in the title – ‘At the Back Door’, for example, might have been called, simply ‘Hoffpauer’, while ‘Delbert’ might have found a different title for what is a complex story. When and how do you land on the right title?
RS: I had fun with this. The truth is I’ve always had trouble with titles. I blame it on a long-gone TV show that was sort of like Saturday Night Live. One recurring skit character was a bartender who always had a story to tell with some lurid, preposterous title he was sure would be a bestseller. The title was all he ever had so it was comically obvious what a total amateur he was, to have a title with no story except a few gags. So when I began writing, I blocked titles out of my mind until a story was done. But then I could never think of one! Anyway, not a good one. I’d permanently shut that part of my brain. So I had to crib.
I looked to The New Yorker, specifically Raymond Carver’s story ‘Errand’. It’s a great story (about the death of Chekhov), with a title aggressively short and bland. Or trendy? Like an anti-title. In emulation of it I gave my story ‘Delbert’ its original title: ‘Messages’. After it was first published I realized the title, while not horrible, was not exactly trendy either. Mostly it was just meh. When I put the collection together, I asked a friend and he suggested changing the title to ‘Delbert’, because the character is weird and so is the story. Now I see Carver’s New Yorker story as an anomaly.Some of his best titles elsewhere come from dialog lines in the stories. A couple of lines in ‘Delbert’ that might work are ‘Looks Good, Don’t It?’ and ‘That’s What She Wants’.
ME: We admire the micros in this collection as much as the longer stories. These offer a glimpse into life – ‘Deep Green Lake’ or ‘Turtle Creek’, for example (both watery, both hovering over a fleeting fragility). And ‘Glyph’, the shortest in the collection, paints a picture of a life in just 100 words. Do you know when you begin a story that it will be a micro, or a longer one? How do you shape as you go? And does the shape of the story (form) come sometimesbefore the narrative itself (content)?
RS: Often when I have a story idea I want to go micro and end up expanding to a flash or longer, but a few stay micro.
‘Glyph’ is the only story I’ve written to a specific length. ‘Turtle Creek’ may look like I targeted exactly 200 words but it just happened to land there. I tried to push it longer, because I was having trouble making the story work. I added story lines for some of the characters. For the couple who smashed into the bridge, whose bodies were never found, I gave them a future. For the high school characters I created a kind of ‘Class Notes’ with news of what they have done with their lives – who got sent to prison, who became ambassador to France. That was fun.
But none of it related much to the original draft of the story. I worked on that again, the kernel of the story, just exploring a better image, a better word, a better sentence. And the story grew from within, even though it stayed the same length.
‘Deep Green Lake’ came from my plunging into one when I was a youth. Yet the character at the center of the story has nothing to do with me. Except parts of me? All of us have been young. Maybe we’ve known somebody like her. We recognize drugs, booze, loneliness, even if they’re not us. But I feel for her completely.
About that 100-word story you mentioned. Your previous question about story titles has me thinking ‘Glyph’ isn’t the right title either. As is, the story is about hieroglyphs = images = poetry. But I see now the real story is the college kid with the Ducati motorcycle and how his girlfriend and poetry change him, yet he doesn’t even have a name. If we gave him one and made it the title – let’s say ‘Joe’ – it would be a better story.
ME: And related to this, do you ponder where the stories of these characters might go, even after the last sentence has reached its end? I’m thinking of Delbert or Mayumi, for example. The beauty of the short story is that everything we need is there on the page, but so often the reader is left with a sense of wonder, or a set of questions. What questions do you have for your own characters?
RS: I don’t exactly have questions for my characters but I do wonder about some of them, even worry about them. What will happen to Mayumi? It ends with a snapshot of her cradling her dead husband’s head. The word that always comes to me about her in that moment is ‘free’, which is strange, because nothing’s going to be easy for her. A better word might be ‘uprooted’. And she’s acted decisively, so I have hope for her. In ‘Delbert’ I have little hope for the young husband – although he’s the main character, he’s not the title character of that story. It’s like he’s been displaced. And he’s a blunderer. My question is, Can he keep his wife? I hope so because he loves her. In ‘Lobster’, the young woman at the end may have a lifetime of questions, but I have none for her. Maybe that’s because of what Dinty Moore said: “What I love about exceptionally brief stories is the way that they often bring me to a point of recognition … then leave me there, absolutely suspended. There is no gentle letdown, no winding down, no expulsion of air—just that wonderful moment.” (See here.)
That ‘sense of wonder’ is essential to Ruchi Nagpal, a young professor who came to Austin last autumn to research the Harry Ransom Center flash fiction archive. She’s back in India now but I emailed her to ask if she would participate in this interview and she gladly accepted. “This sense of wonder that the readers are left with is a prime characteristic of flash,” she says. “It’s like catching a train in the middle of nowhere, not knowing where it is coming from, and jumping off it before it reaches its destination. The reader always leaves with a sense of wonder and that’s what stays with the reader, more often than not.” For her, “This is the beauty of flash.”
ME: One of my favourites in this collection is ‘Big Bug Love’ – it’s the ending that really gets me. This story carries a lot of weight, despite it feeling light, even frivolous in some places. It’s the attitude and voice of the narrator that brings this wonderful blend of tension and insouciance. Can you address how small fictions carry such power – the ability to address big topics while appearing to be something else? Is that the power of them, do you think?
RS: I like what Richard Bausch says about this. “When a story is compressed so much, the matter of it tends to require more size: that is, in order to make it work in so small a space its true subject must be proportionately larger.”
How do we make the true subject larger? Bausch may be talking about a dramatic situation. But I also like what Jayne Anne Phillips says in her essay ‘Cheers’, that in a great flash, every image is ‘firing on multiple levels’.
For her most prose is ‘innocent’, simply information the reader takes it in without question. I would add that most novelistic prose is also innocent, its seemingly random images merely describing things that support the reality of a story, whether it’s the rain outside or the lamplight in the parlor. As Phillips says, “We read the lines; the words enter us.” But the images in a flash often do double duty – they can be ironic, paradoxical, metaphorical – a kind of poetry that is ‘secretive, subversive’. This ‘poem inside the paragraph is a mainlined image: it shoots right into the vein, into the blood, so to speak, of meaning, and the reader takes it in before arming himself or herself against it’.
Even genre conventions can make a flash larger. Sherman Alexie’s story ‘Idolatry’, in Sudden Fiction International, seems a traditional moral tale, meant to convey wisdom, but humor and emotional pain expand the story exponentially.
When I think of my collection, Bare Ana, I see in the very first story the word ‘lost’ refers to a wrong turn a highway but also in a larger way to every life in the story.
ME: Going back to the beginning, let’s revisit the years you spent gathering short short stories for the first anthology. What were you hoping to find, and how did the results surprise you? Can you tell us something about the enduring power of that first collection of flash fiction (even before we had the term)?
RS: James Thomas and I just wanted to find really good stories. At the time most established writers and critics were dismissing these ‘strange little pieces’ as some sort of marginal, passing, quasi-avant-garde thing – basically not worth reading. We wanted to say, Hey, look, whatever they are, these things are intriguing, moving, entertaining (okay maybe vexing to you) and worth reading because they’re really good.
That meant we couldn’t just call for submissions for a few months to make a book. That might bring a few good ones but not many. Instead we researched stories already published over the last five years in mountains of books and journals, some highly respected, others obscure. We didn’t care whether the authors were well known or unknown and even blacked out the names. We copied stories by the thousands, made manageable booklets of them to circulate among writers, editors, any dedicated volunteer readers, including lawyers and grocery store clerks. Every story got ranked and re-ranked, with the best going to a higher-level booklet, in a pyramid of rankings.
More than a year later James Thomas and I were excited, even enchanted, as we reached the top to make final selections. What surprised us? Almost everything. The selections were wildly various yet there were commonalities, deriving from length alone. With no critical establishment talking about them we asked the authors themselves if this was a new form. Almost all said Yes and many of their spontaneous answers have endured. We polled them to find a name for both the form and the book. They chose Sudden Fiction, though Flash was already coming up, too, in the running. When the book debuted we were surprised by the wealth and reach of the reviews, many of them raves, from legendary places like The New York Times, London Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Publishers Weekly. Only one was negative, by a young reviewer in an academic journal who, because of the author comments in the book, accused us being an in-group publishing our friends. That wasn’t true. All we wanted was to find good stories.
ME: You edited several volumes of flash fiction. We wonder if you can tell us a standout story from each one, and why it matters still.
RS: ‘Mother’, by Grace Paley, in Sudden Fiction. She was a leader in micro and flash fiction before they had names. Also in Sudden, Charles Baxter’s ‘The Cliff’, because itmakes fantasy real. I especially want to mention Sudden Fiction Latino, which has the least sales of our anthologies –due, partly, to the title being not quite right. A better one is Sudden Fiction America and Latin America, because half the authors are from the US. It also has a wealth of micro and flash. In that book I never tire of ‘The White Girl’ by Luis Alberto Urrea (US), ‘The Lord of the Flies’ by Marco Denevi (Argentina), and ‘Insomnia’ by Virgilio Piñera (Cuba). In Flash Fiction International, ‘The Waterfall’, by Alberto Chimal, is a chaotic, wonderful jazz riff; ‘Esse’, by Czeslaw Milosz, is the original of what’s become a classic cultural meme; and ‘Barnes’, by Edmundo Paz Soldán (Bolivia and US), never fails to make me laugh. Among my favorites in New Sudden Fiction are ‘My Lawrence’ by Claudia Smith Chen and ‘The Rememberer’, by Aimee Bender. In Flash Fiction Forward,one I always come back to is ‘Currents’ by Hannah Voskuil, which unlike many experimental pieces is emotionally moving and matters deeply. Sudden Fiction (Continued) has many great writers but I love Stephen Dixon’s brand of magical realism in ‘Flying’ and Ricard Pau-Llosa’s critique of religion in ‘The Unlikely Origin of Metaphor’.
ME: We spoke in 2020 about the flash fiction collection at The Ransom Center. Can you remind new readers about the significance of that collection, and give us an update?
RS: The Ransom Center is wonderful, in some ways like a glorious attic that includes the world’s first photograph, the original manuscripts of Gabriel García Márquez’s novels, Einstein’s unpublished notes on general relativity, Jack Kerouac’s notes while writing On the Road, Frida Kahlo’s most iconic self-portrait and, just announced, the archive of the NBC TV series Saturday Night Live. I don’t know if the flash archive being in this company makes it an officially recognized cultural phenomenon but I think so. Megan Barnard, Associate Director, calls it ‘an extensive and enduring resource for the study of flash fiction that will be enjoyed by researchers, students, and readers for generations to come’.
ME: In Sudden Fiction you said, “As opera was to Italy, the short story was to America.” Since then, you have edited volumes of international flash fictions and we’ve seen an explosion of interest in the short short story around the world. What do you notice about the different approaches to the form? The voices? The topics? The concerns?
RS: Ruchi Nagpal, whom I introduced a few questions ago, may be one of the best people in the world right now to answer this question – especially vis-à-vis India and South Asia. “The flash fiction series by W.W. Norton have very remarkably covered the western part of the globe,” she says, “but the flashes from the East are so very different in terms of ideas and flavors. Writers like Saadat Hasan Manto, Alfian Sa’at, Suniti Namjoshi, and Sa’adi of Shiraz, who all belong to different centuries and the other side of the globe have catered to different audiences and have lived in different cultures.”
Alfian Sa’at, noted above, is living now, in our own century – in fact is a relatively young writer in Singapore.
“Any story,” Ruchi goes on, “always, is an interaction between a person and his/her society. An anthology of flash fiction writers from the eastern side of the world, when juxtaposed with the flash writers from the west would explicate the point evocatively. Hopefully, we shall see this anthology soon and that shall answer this question for many.” I look forward to Ruchi putting it together.
ME: And finally, can you tell us about the experimental nature of micros? Do you think a smaller story might by necessity need to do more, because of its intense brevity? And how do you see the rules and parameters being challenged by writers – or by yourself?
RS: I emailed Tom Hazuka yesterday. He’s one of the original editors of Flash Fiction and knows micros as well. To your question, he says from the beginning both have been wide-open, expansive genres ‘without any real “rules and parameters” except the word count. That restriction encourages experimentation, though always with a focus on making each word matter’.
Ruchi, once again, has a new, different angle. She, and others in India, use ‘flash’ as a broad term to include micros and even shorter works, which she sometimes writes herself. “Flash can challenge anything and everything under the sun because it allows the hierarchies to be shifted vis-a-vis the author and the reader. In India, especially, with the proliferation of flash fiction through Instagram pages and other online platforms, the very idea of the supremacy of the author has taken a back seat. Not everyone can write a novel but every individual can try and compose at least one flash fiction in their lifetime and therefore, this genre has dismantled the hierarchy where the author sits at the top and the reader below. With this genre, the idea of the author has been extended to everyone, which makes it revolutionary and challenging at the same time.”
For me, yes, I do think micros need to do more because of their brevity. As Tom puts it, “If the limited number of word don’t pull a lot of weight – do ‘more,’ I suppose – the story will leave the reader thinking, so what?” We saw many ways of doing more in the experimental days of Sudden Fiction,which included micros, and in the trend back toward traditional realism we see the ‘more’ in ever inventive ways, the way jazz uses traditional instruments to continually explore. And with new flash genres like sci-fi flash, speculative flash, flash horror, flash romance – it seems flash and micros are the lab of fiction these days.
Stories from the collection
Glyph Joe
He’d loved hieroglyphs ever since Indiana Jones twisted one, a stone temple figure, and the walls rumbled open. Now he was just a guy with a sputtering Ducati motorcycle, taking business classes, who fell in love with a girl and took a poetry class to be with her. He learned that all glyphs, hiero or otherwise, were images, which could take form in any of the senses, so her scent in bed was a glyph, her touch was sometimes a glyph, and between her lips, when she said goodbye, though he pleaded for her not to, his name was a glyph.
Turtle Creek
At midnight the rain had stopped. We all heard the bang of impact. Then the police were at the door. Some people panicked and ditched their drug of preference, oxy, molly, special K. On the front porch somebody said they heard a scream before the impact, someone said it was a girl on a scooter, and another said a guy was holding on behind her. We walked downhill to the bridge, which spanned the creek at the end of the block. The wreck scene was strobing like red and blue disco lights. Fire truck, EMS, police cars. A halo of plastic and metal bits glittering where the scooter hit the bridge. The crushed remains of the scooter were there but no girl or guy. Probably they’d flown over the rail into the creek and been swept away. We never knew who they were. The creek was thundering. It was the end of summer. A lot of us went on to college, which a lot of us didn’t finish. Years later, the drowning was all some of us remembered from high school. The thundering creek, the cops, the strobing lights, the drugs, the summer rain starting again, washing us all away.
For more, find the book here.
Robert Shapard’s Bare Ana and Other Stories won the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collection. Individually his stories have appeared journals such as Kenyon Review, New World Writing Quarterly, Juked, Necessary Fiction, New England Review, Typishly and Bending Genres. As an editor he co-created with James Thomas Sudden Fiction and many of the W.W. Norton sudden and flash anthologies. He has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. He lives in Austin, Texas.
You can find Robert at robertshapard.com or robert shapard facebook.