Christopher Bowen’s forthcoming flash fiction collection, The Things They Forgot to Tell Us When They Left from Cervena Barva Press, features twenty-five compellingly crafted and vastly different stories that all explore vividly realized settings across the American Midwest. Writing characters during moments of pain, loss, and self-realization, Bowen condenses a novel’s worth of storytelling within the span of one or two pages. The stories feature beautifully written, cinematic, and emotionally intense prose, knitted together by an overarching narrative that feels deeply human.

In this interview, Bowen and I discussed his approach to craft, structure, theme, characterization, and place within the limited space afforded by flash fiction. I was especially struck by his view of the writer-reader relationship, how he aims to play with a reader’s assumptions and employ techniques often used in film to imbue his work with cinematic purpose. We also explored how his personal struggles with mental health and his upbringing in the Midwest translate into his writing. 

 

—Shehrazade Zafar-Arif

 

Shehrazade Zafar-Arif: Is there a common thread running across the stories in this collection? How did you approach creating a sense of consistency of theme while still allowing each story to stand on its own? 

Christopher Bowen: A lot of my writing tends to be pretty heavy and melancholy in general, though some of that goes back to personal battles with depression. Broadly, the work tends to deal with heartache and loss, but pain as a precursor to growth and change. The characters in my fiction are down-and-out, forgotten people, but often through compromises and resolve, they are poetic, if not graceful. 

I was diagnosed with depression when I was twenty, and that’s something I’ve written about in other forms—I had a novella, When I Return to You, I Will Be Unfed, that was published and I’ve written some nonfiction on that topic. I’ve had a lot of readers of my fiction mention to me that they’ve come away feeling this deep sense of sadness, but I hope people will see it more as an opportunity for growth in their lives or the characters’ lives. So that’s where I’m coming from. 

 

SZ-A: How did you decide how to order the stories in the collection? Can they be read out of order or were you conscious of the ways in which a reader might move through them?

CB: I had to make sure the stories were not so overly heavy that they turned off the reader; I ordered them in a way that made sense thematically but also made it so the reader wasn’t constantly dealing with heavy topics. In that same respect, many of the pieces fell into place naturally and a good handful were published over the years as standalones. They definitely can be read out of order, but I wanted to tell an overarching story of the Midwest and its people as backdrop, like a pastoral painting. Think something like da Vinci’s The Last Supper. There’s so much to say about that painting and more still about the Midwest. So, consciously linking certain themes, such as family, death, or longing from story to story was important in ordering.  

As I began putting the collection together, I wanted to tell individual stories that stood alone, but I also wanted those individual stories to spark thematic conversations in relation to the other stories within the collection. When you look at The Last Supper, you can see individual conversations happening between disciples. So, I wanted my work to speak to itself, to communicate with other pieces in the collection, and paint a broader landscape of what it’s like to live in the Midwest. When you put an individual story with multiple other stories, it begins to take on a more complex conversation with the reader. 

 

SZ-A: In her blurb, Kathy Fish compares these works to short films that suggest a novel’s worth of story within a few pages. Each one captures the reader’s attention, and more importantly our emotional investment, in a short amount of time. Could you speak more to your technique in this respect?

CB: Yes, Kathy’s observations about cinematic purpose are important. There’s a number of filmmakers that I admire and I believe have influenced my storytelling—Darren Aronofsky and Terrence Malick to name two. I think that storytelling has a number of ways to function like film. Some of that includes using white space and building assumptions in the reader and can be further clarified with visual and descriptive authority, like in these lines from the collection, from “Her Alphabet”:

He remembered the first time he lost her, a blink of an eye, hummingbird wings, the speed of sound or light, something like that. He could see in the rearview mirror of every rental car of everywhere he ever went, the nearing of the end of the palm where the fingers began and exactly how long they hadn’t seen each other.

I also feel that most of my flash fiction should “punch the gut,” and when it does, getting that emotional payoff or reaction to the text from the reader makes everything worthwhile for me as an author.

I think that especially in the US, with the American dream, the way people look at their daily lives can be very cookie cutter, and highlighting everyday instances like screenshots from films and putting those in an order can create an overall cinematic effect. In writing I tend to build up stereotypes—like a white picket fence or someone mowing the grass, some menial task they’re doing, maybe grocery shopping—and I use those stereotypes so that readers will assume this is an everyday occurrence. But as they begin to read the work they see little inconsistencies in what’s happening, and then I can surprise them with that gut punch, pulling the rug out from under their assumptions. When you write, it’s like having a conversation with the reader, and you don’t want to mislead them. And in order to make that relationship with the reader more meaningful, it becomes a power struggle or a meeting of minds where their vision is different from your vision. So, it’s a matter of how to plant that into their minds without losing their trust.

 

SZ-A: Each story feels very much like a self-contained world. What was the process of creating these worlds and ensuring each narrator has their own unique and distinctive voice? 

CB: I think the answer to this goes back to some basics about writing and empathy—building a realistic world and characters that readers can empathize with. I truly believe how realistic or relatable a story seems is up to the relationship between the reader and the writer as they navigate the text together. There’s a symbiotic relationship there that creates something new or leaves space for interpretation, just like using white space in poetry or other forms. 

 

SZ-A: Could you unpack what you mean by the idea of “white space” in the context of your writing?

CB: White space is something people mention a lot in poetry. If you go with a minimalist sentence structure and you don’t overly describe, you allow the reader to visualise themselves into the writing, and that creates assumptions. There are points between the characters, the lines and words used within the text itself, that create moments where readers can pause and reflect, create a scene in their mind of what’s happening or what might happen. So, I look at these as opportunities—it’s a point where the reader gets pulled into the work. 

 

SZ-A: How does a sense of place, specifically the rural and post-industrial American Midwest, inform these stories? 

CB: I was raised in the Midwest and parts of Ohio. I think place has always shaped my understanding or interpretation of the world, even as I’ve traveled outside of the Midwest. For many years, I did readings out of state and even now in travelling to other countries, I am able to objectively look back and say, yes, that is inherently Midwestern—economic struggle, familial loss, a simplified view of how the world should work. I think some people may mistake that observation of simplicity and misunderstand it as uneducated or ignorant, when in actuality there is a large abundance of emotional depth and intelligence behind it, and even tradition, if you look hard enough. 

I live in the Rust Belt, which is called this because all these major cities used to be highly industrialized economically—Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh— but economic and trade developments in the latter half of the twentieth century caused that industry to disappear. Labor shifted away from the Belt, but there are still remnants from that era in the community; you see that in the people, their faces, and the infrastructure, bridges and factories not being used, they way the lines on their smiles can be somewhat hardened as if they, too, are rusting. 

When I’d just started culinary school, I lived in Rittman, a city founded on an old salt factory, and there’s people from that era of my life that I bring with me and who get naturally incorporated into my writing. Industry had left Cleveland, and there was a huge factory no longer in use, and no jobs for people, and high rates of opioid use and addiction. The struggle of the average person in the Midwest, even if the cost of living is low, can be really difficult. We’re also very close to the Bible Belt in the South, which has a lot of Christian institutions and fundamentalist viewpoints. Politically, parts of the Midwest, especially Ohio, can be seen as red states, but we’ve also got big cities that are liberal, Cleveland being one. 

People see Midwesterners as simple thinkers, as having a standard niceness to them, a hospitable demeanor, but there’s a lot more depth than that. I wanted to instill that in the characters I portray. I’m not sure I do that consciously, but expressing the fundamental undertones of the niceness and tradition—it’s hard to do that in a genuine way because there are a lot of stereotypes, but I wanted to show that while Midwestern niceness runs deep, there’s still a lot going on underneath it. 

 

SZ-A: Did you have a sense of where you were going when you crafted these stories, or were you sometimes surprised at where you ended up? 

CB: Most of the stories were developed over the last handful of years and while I don’t feel I was surprised, I do think the fact that they make an impression has made them invaluable to me. As I said before, I’ve had depression for twenty or more years and it often shows up in my writing to readers. It is probably more difficult for me to avoid it than to include it as an author.

Typically I’ll start with a basic vision. I’ll start writing a vignette, and as it develops I want to keep it short because I know I’m going to edit it down and make it even shorter. That’s something that attracted me to flash, the brevity, how cost-effective you can be with the text. You really have to have an economy to the words to make full use of the space you do have. 

 

SZ-A: You’ve written across a number of genres. What is it about flash fiction that caused you to return to it for this collection? Does it speak to you more urgently than longer genres?

CB: I’ve begun writing much more nonfiction lately, which is more to the point, but flash will always be such a beautiful form to me because of its brevity. The urgency is different in flash than in nonfiction or memoir in that every syllable, every word, and every sentence carries a much deeper meaning, very much the way I wanted to explore Midwestern life and attitudes. Everything counts. 

A lot of writers nowadays solely focus on flash. Coming from a recent retreat in India I’ve had some revelations, one of those being that I want to write a memoir. I’m switching gears on my writing a little, coming out of fiction and leaning more into nonfiction. 

I’ve found in that pivot I have these memories that pop up and I write vignettes of those; they look like flash fictions, but they’re not, they’re usually shared family experiences, inside jokes or scenarios that have been retold over the decades. I’m going to incorporate those into a standard memoir outline for a “collection” I’m going to make hopefully. I’ve started working on viewpoints, but I just want to get the general plotlines down first, and then use those vignettes to go through different parts of my past.

 

---

CHRISTOPHER BOWEN is the author of the chapbook We Were Giants, the novella When I Return to You, I Will Be Unfed, and the nonfiction Debt. He was a semi-finalist in the 2017 Faulkner-Wisdom Novella Competition and honorable mention in the 45th New Millennium Writing Awards in the non-fiction category. His short story collection, The Things They Forgot to Tell Us When They Left, is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. 

---

SHEHRAZADE ZAFAR-ARIF is a British-Pakistani writer and theatre critic based in London. She is an editorial assistant for interviews and craft essays at CRAFT. Her short stories have been published in Fiery Scribe Review, Stanchion, Peatsmoke, Untitled: Voices, FEED, FeelsZine, and the Grimm Retold anthology. She previously interviewed Deni Ellis Béchard and Peter Mountford for CRAFT. Find her on Twitter @ShehrazadeZafar.