Interview: Grant Faulkner
Grant Faulkner, who will serve as our guest judge for the CRAFT 2025 Flash Prose Prize, recently told me that he dislikes conventional bios and prefers to find something odd on the internet about writers he’s asked to introduce. So maybe I shouldn’t tell you how much I enjoyed Grant’s craft book The Art of Brevity, or his fiction collection, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide, or his advice book Pep Talks for Writers, or his collection of 100-word stories, Fissures. Or that he co-founded one of my favorite magazines, 100 Word Story. Maybe I won’t mention his weekly podcast Memoir Nation, his weekly Substack, Intimations: A Writer’s Discourse, or that he was Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month, better known as NaNoWriMo, because a lot of you probably already know that. Instead, I’ll point out that he has a very fine faux leopard coat that he sometimes sports in author photos. Also, an impressive Viking helmet with horns that he wears in others. Also, that he once dressed as a cowboy for a job as an elevator man at a furniture convention.
Grant and I often cross paths in the writing world in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is a particularly active literary citizen. He was generous enough to conduct this flash interview about his experience with flash through email with me.
—Jacqueline Doyle, Associate Editor, Flash Creative Nonfiction, CRAFT
Jacqueline Doyle: You have written in many genres throughout your writing career—short stories, poetry, essays, memoir, novel—but have always written flash. You open your craft book The Art of Brevity with an intriguing question: “How did a writer immersed in a lifelong training regimen to be a novelist find his aesthetic (and find himself) in brevity?” Can you give us the short answer to your question?
Grant Faulkner: I think most fiction writers are essentially brought up to write novels. Novels are more valued both artistically and commercially in our society, and there’s this seed that is planted in many fiction writers to write a “Great American Novel.” In America big things are more revered than small things, unfortunately.
But I find that anything resembling the Great American Novel isn’t a good fit for my aesthetic sensibility. I see the world in fragments, shards, snapshots, wisps. I love the short form because of how it opens up a different aesthetic experience of life, a different experience of life in general. It’s my poetry. It allows me to capture what the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment.” Our lives are made up of a collage of decisive moments.
So I was very fortunate to literally stumble on the 100-word form one late night on the internet when I was beleaguered with a doomed novel I’d been working on for ten years. I became entranced by tiny stories. I became addicted to them. Thinking about them formed a new aesthetic, a new window into the world. Thank God I clicked on that one random link on Facebook that guided me to them.
JD: I love the serendipity of your life-changing discovery! In addition to writing flash, you frequently teach flash workshops at conferences and retreats. Do you have any tips for flash teachers? Would you be willing to share a prompt that you’ve found particularly successful?
GF: My general tip is that flash is perfect for teaching because a class can be creative generatively—depending on the duration of the class, my students may complete three to four pieces—and wonderful in the more academic sense of reading and discussing stories. And then there’s time to read and share stories! One teacher told me she turned to 100-word stories because they fit perfectly on a Zoom screen.
My favorite prompt involves the six-word story. We read a handful of them as prep and discuss if or how you can tell a story in just six words, and what a story even is. It’s good to discuss what a story is because I think flash challenges traditional forms, or reinterprets them.
Then I give students five minutes to write their stories. My principle is that once you’ve written a six-word story, you’ve learned everything you need to know about writing flash:
- Telling a story with hints
- Telling a story with omission
- Inviting the reader in as co-writer
- Using constraints to enhance creativity
- Writing toward the mystery, the breath of a story
JD: Our contest includes both flash fiction and flash nonfiction and always attracts a large variety of forms, from narrative to reflective to lyric to hermit crab flash (utilizing different “containers”). Given this range, are there certain things you look for in all good flash?
GF: I think what makes good flash is what makes good stories in general. Capturing the decisive moment with arresting detail. Writing to the questions, not the answers. The ability to create a mood, an intimacy, a connection that seems to go beyond the page. The ability to evoke. The ability to use the shadings of words, the nuances of language. The mot juste. And then I think the ending tends to be more important in flash stories than in longer forms. You have to stick the landing.
JD: As a creative nonfiction writer and flash writer, I’m particularly interested in your two newest ventures, Memoir Nation and the Flash Fiction Institute. (I’m excited to be teaching an online workshop for the institute in October!) Could you describe those new projects?
GF: Eight years ago, when my father died, I thought, “If he would have written only 10,000 words, that would have been more precious than anything he left behind.”
In that moment, the idea for Memoir Nation was conceived—and then I was fortunate enough to have my podcast co-host Brooke Warner join me to bring it all to fruition.
Memoir Nation is equal parts movement, support group, educational center, community, accountability engine, and fountain of inspiration. It’s for every type of writer, no matter if you want to write 10,000 words of your life story or 100,000 words, no matter if it’s just your story for friends and family or if you want to publish it traditionally.
One guiding mission for me is how memoirs have changed our culture by destigmatizing so many “taboo” subjects like addiction, sexual abuse, mental health issues, sexual orientation, and more. Memoirs have opened up national discussions that have led to greater connections, greater care, and even policy changes—so Brooke and I want to help people unearth their stories and put them into the world to change the world.
The Flash Fiction Institute is somewhat similar. Despite the much-talked-about “rise of flash” and all of its emerging popularity, flash has always been on the margins of the publishing industry and academia. It’s taught as a one-off class, if that. This is the reason we—Meg Pokrass, Tavia Stewart, and I—wanted to build a central hub for flash fiction education—the Flash Fiction Institute.
At the Flash Fiction Institute, we offer virtual classes with accomplished authors, craft articles and coaching support, curated calls for submission and literary journal listings, and monthly newsletters with prompts to stir the imagination.
This is a soft launch. We’re working on some whiz-bang online community spaces; expanding courses into an MFA—a Master of Flash Arts; and finding new ways to help people write these tiny wonders.
JD You have always been interested in ekphrastic writing. 100 Word Story publishes the best 100-word story written to their photo prompt each week. You include fascinating photos in your Substack newsletter Intimations: A Writer’s Discourse, which you encourage readers to use as writing prompts. And now you have a book forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press with photos by Gail Butensky accompanying your narrative-in-flash. Could you tell us more about something out there in the distance?
GF: Of all of my stories, this one might just be my favorite. I worked with my good friend, the fantastic photographer Gail Butensky—“the girl with the camera,” as she was known on the punk scene in New York in the 1980s—who I’ve been friends with since we waited tables together at Radio Valencia in San Francisco in the early ’90s.
I loved Gail’s photos of punk bands, which she’s widely known for, but I especially liked her road trip photos. She gave me a bunch of her photos from various road trips in the Southwest, and I wrote little stories to each one—little flash fictions—but all of the stories are linked into a larger story.
I think of this as a “flash novel.” Except it’s also a photo book. In fact, the University of New Mexico Press, our publisher, decided to make the book into an art object unto itself.
The writing process for this book was so fun because I didn’t plan the story. I started writing the story of one photo, and it became the first photo in the book, and then, as if shuffling a deck of cards and selecting random cards, I wrote stories to each photo, and I watched as two characters, Dawn and Jonny, began to have adventures and yearnings and despairings as they drove and drove and drove.
JD: Could you disclose a little-known biographical fact here for the next person invited to introduce you?
GF: Oh, I love this exercise, and I appreciate your mention of my prized faux leopard coat. It’s like a bio scavenger hunt. Or a game of telephone. How about two things?
My first kiss was in the baptismal tub of my church with the preacher’s daughter. It was a sacred kiss, yet forbidden at the same time, and I felt God watching. I detasseled corn in Iowa for six summers, starting when I was twelve and could barely reach the top of the corn. Detasseling corn is one definition of hell. I can’t believe I did it for more than a day. So…a story of heaven and a story of hell.
GRANT FAULKNER is the co-founder of 100 Word Story, the co-host of the Memoir Nation podcast, the co-founder of the Flash Fiction Institute, and an executive producer on America’s Next Great Author. He has published three books on writing: The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story; Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo; and Brave the Page, a teen writing guide. He’s also published All the Comfort Sin Can Provide, a collection of short stories, Fissures, a collection of 100-word stories, and Nothing Short of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story. His “flash novel,” something out there in the distance, a collaboration with the photographer Gail Butensky, is coming out in January 2026. His stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including Tin House, Southwest Review, and The Gettysburg Review, and have been anthologized in collections such as W. W. Norton’s Flash Fiction America; New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction; and in several editions of the annual Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction anthologies. His essays on creativity have been published in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer. He publishes a weekly Substack newsletter, Intimations: A Writer’s Discourse. Find Grant on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @grantfaulkner.
JACQUELINE DOYLE lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her flash has won first place in The Black River Chapbook Competition, in the 1000 Below: Flash Prose and Poetry Contest at Midway Journal, and in the Essay Contest at Sunlight Press; has been has been longlisted several times in the Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions; longlisted in theSmokeLong Grand Micro Contest; and has received numerous Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations. Her nonfiction flash and flash fiction have been published in Wigleaf, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, Ghost Parachute, The Pinch, CRAFT, 100 Word Story, and elsewhere. Her flash chapbook The Missing Girl is available from Black Lawrence Press. She is the associate editor for creative nonfiction flash at CRAFT. Find her on Facebook, Bluesky (@jacqdoyle) and Twitter (@doylejacq).
