Stuart Dybek grew up in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago and most of his stories are based there. In our discussion, Stuart shares with us his views about Pilsen, and about Prague, where he just returned from teaching in the Summer Writing Program through Western Michigan University. We also explore flash fiction and its many faces, and the difficulty of writing prose, short or long.

VR: I found the stories in I Sailed with Magellan to be a portrait of the quintessential American experience. While you were in Prague this summer, did you gain a different perspective of America? What did it look like from there? How has it changed?

SD: I’ve been teaching in Prague since the late 90’s, and this was the 11th summer that I had the privilege of spending in that beautiful city. The neighborhood where I grew up in Chicago, which is the setting for much of my work, is still called Pilsen, although today it is one of the largest most vibrant barrios east of East LA. It is called Pilsen because back in the 19th Century it was the landing point for a substantial Czech migration. They were free thinkers, and the neighborhood was a center of political and labor reform and unrest. I was struck when I first went to Prague by how often I saw something in the original there that reminded me of the Americanized facsimile I grew up seeing but not fully comprehending. What often struck me as aspects of a magical fairy tale immigrant presence in the context of Chicago, was part of everyday street life in Prague. That city, a decade ago, was still trying to figure out capitalism, still shrugging off the gray (literal and figurative) years of “communism”— i.e., Soviet imperialism—and the spirit of Haval and the intellectuals who were in the forefront of the Velvet Revolution was still very much in the air. The dollar at that time was powerful next to the Czech currency and Prague was the destination for young American bohemians, as it was so affordable. It was a time before 9/11, before BushCheney, before the fall of American currency, etc. Since then Prague has become a prosperous looking city: it has had a glorious face-lift and its colors now gleam. One feels the presence of capital in the new hotels, restaurants, renovations, etc. Here is where the subjective part comes in: from the perspective of a city that in such a short time has pulled itself out of political confusion and economic turmoil, the US seems in a sad state, still reeling and gutted from eight years under Bush, a country in which the least common denominator of know-nothing so-called conservatism and religious fundamentalism has compromised that status the USA once enjoyed as a leader of what was called the Free World. That Free World and the leadership of the USA were at one time something that countries like the Czech Republic looked to for hope and inspiration. That is no longer the case. The memory of it—say, of jazz on the Voice of America—still exists in Prague, but it exists now as nostalgia.

VR: Mark Twain wrote: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Why is it so difficult to write good short fiction?

SD: I have long been intrigued by the notion of compression in prose, of what defines it, what is its measure, and how is it achieved. I have “taught” forms classes on the subject at places such as the U. of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but the ”teaching” was more of a personal investigation into the subject. It isn't a subject that much has been written about. The best book I know on it is by a Japanese author writing on haiku, called Traces of Dream. So, that said, I don't know that—keeping it short—I really have any succinct answers. For starters, despite the lovely Twain quote, I am not sure I’m comfortable with the implication that short is more difficult to write than long. They each pose different challenges so far as form, invention, etc, and each offers different satisfactions. For instance, I don't know that the study of character can ever be as effective in a short piece as it can in a sustained longer work. I think it is simply difficult to write anything “good”—short, long, prose, verse, fiction, nonfiction...

VR: Do you discuss flash fiction with your students? What do you suggest to them regarding the length of a story—and when it's time to end it?

SD: My students are generally pretty interested in flash fiction. It is fashionable right now. I don't actually subscribe to the notion that it is some kind of new genre. I am distrustful of how fashionable it is, suspicious even though I have long written in the “form”—if that word even applies. For me it is yet another manifestation/development of the tale, the prose poem—I know people want to do some Aristotelian thing about figuring out what is a prose Vestal Review #34 28 poem and what is flash fiction. Personally, I could care less. What interests me is that they are both about compression in prose, and that nearly automatically opens up the notion of the relationship between the lyrical and the narrative. One might argue that, by making that distinction, one can use the flash fiction “genre” to redefine what story is. But that idea ignores the way the narrative is expressed in the prose poem (which is supposedly about expanding the definition of what a poem is). The other thing I am interested in is the idea of fragmentation. In France, rather than flash fiction, one name they have for these little pieces that have been called so many things— short short, vignettes, microfiction, etc.—is fragments. That, I find far more interesting than calling them flash fiction. I think the current urge to see flash fiction as a new form and genre onto itself, which then demands that it is defined by superficial notions such as word count, is far less interesting to me than seeing flash fiction as a symptom, a manifestation of an ongoing tradition that has to do with compression in prose, the counterpoint between the lyrical and narrative, fragmentation, and the redefinitions of both story and poetry. One of the things that intrigues me most, and also where I think the best work is done using short form, is in sequencing the fragments. When people talk about flash fiction, that idea of sequence is too often overlooked. The name flash fiction steers one to thinking about it as a single self-contained piece. It leaves out a genuine masterpiece like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

VR: Mark Twain also said: “To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself... Anybody can have ideas—the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.” By this, should we consider Twain to be the Godfather of Flash? He seems to have a perspective on verbosity vs. economy of words.

SD: It is certainly another beautiful quote. I don't think Mark Twain is the only writer who valued being succinct. Hemingway, whose short fiction at its best lives up to that quote, credited Twain with being the starting place for American fiction. If one wants to credit him with godfather status for something, I think one is on a little safer ground looking at it that way.

VR: Is flash fiction a strictly American phenomenon? It's popular here among writers, and I worry that we, as a culture, are so busy trying to be picture-perfect that we have lost the need to write deeply and read deeply. Have we been reduced to flash fiction? It is truly a viable art form?

SD: As my answer to your third question pretty much indicates, just because someone comes up with some snappy name like “flash fiction” doesn't mean the idea of writing short prose stories emerged without precedent from American soil. Right now, so-called flash fiction is in the air, and it is something that writers are trying on to see if it fits, the way writers get in line to try on any number of fashions: minimalism, maximalism, post mod, magical realism, etc. There will be a few people who make a lasting contribution, whose particular talent finds a good match in the short form. The rest will move on to the next craze. I wouldn’t want to draw too many conclusions about what flash fiction says about culture in general, although I certainly worry about the dumbing down of American culture. But flash fiction as a measure of that, overlooks far more worrisome things. As for it being a viable art form, the exciting thing about it at this point is that the jury is still out. It is possible to write a great sonnet. Yeats’ Leda and Swan, for instance. Writing in sequence, Calvino produced an equally great book out of short prose fragments. I think there are pieces, such as Kawabata's palm of the hand story, The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket, that are at that level, too. Will there be a body of pieces at that level? Still to be decided.