A conversation with Sherrie Flick, in which the author talks the mystery of bears, the art of joy in writing and life, and her new collections of stories, “I Have Not Considered Consequences” (Autumn House Press, 2025)

By Bill Lychack 

Bill Lychack: Hello, Sherrie Flick…

Sherrie Flick: Hi, Bill Lychack… How are you?

BL: I am well and can just start here by saying how much I was struck by the feeling of fun in your new collection. There’s this lightness and play in your stories. The characters may be struggling, the characters may be bearing their hearts (literally), but there is never a sense of doom or heaviness. Is this something you were thinking about as you wrote, or is this just you and who you are?

SF: It’s a good question. I think that sense of fun partially comes from the fact that the book was written during the pandemic. Particularly, the weird bear stories. Not that the pandemic was a light or joyful time, of course, but it was a time of isolation, a time to put energy into our work because we were all stalled or stopped in the world for a period. So, the collection started with the bear stories. I really didn’t know I had a collection until they were drafted. Those stories are joyful, in their essence, simply because I had the opportunity to use him as a character. The bear broke down a lot of stuff and made me feel like there was an ease to the work. I wasn’t necessarily thinking, oh, this is going to be a joyful book, but I do kind of know what you mean. It’s playful because the essence of it started with the bear.

BL: The bear gave you permission to experiment, it seems. The bear feels like a tap into some unconscious. Every time the bear comes back, it’s like dipping in and out of something deeper.

SF: I was working on the essay collection [Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist], and to procrastinate I would write these bear stories in my journal. They were handwritten. Throw-offs. I didn’t necessarily expect the bear pieces to have legs, but when I pulled them together, I was like, okay, now let’s think about non-bear stories. [laughs] And I did kind of always think of them as non-bear stories in my head, writing them to directly counter the bear stories that existed. I knew, for sure, there weren’t going to be any bears in these stories. (There’s a reference here or there—in one story, the woman says to her friend something like, “remember back then I was a bear.” So, yes, the work does bleed just a tiny bit into the bear stories. But that happened in revision, when I was putting it together as a full collection.)

BL: There’s real craft wisdom there—the contrast between what’s going on and that underlying sense of play. You can see a person who knows the craft and isn’t striving. You were just writing—how do I say this? You were just telling stories.

SF: Yes! And I was also doing it while I was working in a form that I didn’t know at all. I know fiction, but longform nonfiction is not my thing, so the short stories were a kind of release. They felt easier. If I was struggling with the nonfiction, the fiction was something I was not struggling with at all.

BL: Which reveals the play. This was your release.

SF: Right.

BL: Along those lines of craft, you’ve really immersed yourself in this world of fiction. You’re a huge part of the literary culture of flash fiction. You’ve published widely and often, you’ve edited anthologies, you’ve taught, you’ve done all the angles of the work. You should get some pleasure out of it at this point.

SF: Right, it’s not my first flash fiction rodeo. [laughs] It’s kind of weird to me at this point though. There’s that quote?—you have to put X number of hours into something before you master it. When it’s actually happening and you’ve put in the hours and get to that turning point, it isn’t always clear what that effort has created. But some days, it is clear and that’s an amazing realization. Connected to that, I was talking to my friends the other day about the idea of hindsight. You get to a certain point in a practice where you actually have it. You’re not pretending to have hindsight. [laughs] You can say, I see how all of this is built. You have a vista out toward the experience and the understanding of the form. And I think that moment opens a writer to experimentation, because you really can put a bear in there, and it’s not going to be cheesy, hopefully. [laughs]

BL: That’s really a great point. It’s totally true. You realize what’s true for you and what’s against your grain as a person and you start to trust that.

SF: It breeds a kind of freedom. As we get older, you give up certain ideals and start to inhabit who you are as a person and writer.

BL: Kafka was on my mind when I read you. There’s that sense of the allegorical. Who do you read to true your tires?

SF: That’s a good question. I do feel like Kafka was influencing this work. I haven’t reread Kafka in a long time. But Edith Wharton shows up right in the second story—I’ve read all of Edith Wharton’s work. Everything she’s written, believe it or not, all the biographies. It started in a graduate school seminar in 1994. And I’ve never used that information for anything. And suddenly I’m writing this story, and in walks this Edith Wharton scholar. I only mention that because it’s around the same time I was in graduate school that I was obsessed with Kafka. So, I don’t know if part of what happened is I had time for old influences and bigger ideas to step forward because we were all kind of contained in our homes. Obviously, I feel like the pandemic affected this book a lot because I keep bringing it up. [laughs] During this time, I was actually reading a lot of nonfiction, because I was working on the essay collection. I read this great book about Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo. I read a book about Lucia Joyce, James Joyce’s daughter. I read this super weird book about spiritualism and eugenics in the American West. I feel that reading broke open my characters in a way because all these people were weird and eccentric in real life. I don’t really have books I turn back to, though. I’m not a read-Moby-Dick-once-a-year person. I’m almost always moving forward with reading.

BL: That’s so admirable. I’m more a rereader than reader, it seems. Anyway, I also wanted to ask about something your editor, Christine Stroud, has talked about before—how closely the editing process is between the two of you.

SF: Aw, I love Christine. A really good editor likes to geek out with me because I’m into making decisions about everything in the work. Christine reads through and gets a sense of the rhythm of the manuscript and then we refine it together on the granular level. It’s really fun, actually, to go back and forth so intensely. Hattie Fletcher joined in for the final rounds of editing on this one. In those final rounds of copy edits, Hattie was like, “Sherrie, this word—’sledgehammeringly’?—that’s not a word. Should we change that?” [laughs] And I’m like, “No, no. Stet.” I make up a lot of words.

BL: But at least you become conscious of it. It’s now totally a choice.

SF: Yes, exactly.

BL: How do you approach ordering a collection? There’s such a strong sense of flow in this book.

SF: I first order the manuscript in a Word document, just cutting and pasting roughly. Then I print it out and lay the pages on the floor. I highlight repeating objects and words. I note themes in the margins of each page to try to achieve a balance in the reordering. Another technique I use—and I did this with the two anthologies I edited as well—is I try to consciously have the last line of a story lead into the first line of the next story. I try to connect the stories in that way. I want the reader to be propelled forward. I think of the book as a cover-to-cover read. I know people tend to hunt and peck in short story collections, but I think of it more like a record album. I present it as a whole.

BL: As a reader, this felt more like a set list for a concert. Here’s a longer ballad, here’s a short rocker, here’s the drummer singing.

SF: I like that, yes. Like a great set list is going to take you through all the emotions, and you’re going to be like, wow, I just saw a great show. The emotions in this collection had to be controlled, curated. It’s short, but it’s really complicated. At first, I was like, wow, it’s so short compared to my other books. But I think there’s way more shoved into it.

BL: How else does this collection compare to your previous work?

SF: I feel like this book has a more balanced mix of micro, flash, and long stories. Putting it together as a manuscript was a different kind of creative challenge. There are four, maybe five long stories in this collection in a way that my other collections really haven’t had. It’s a different kind of animal. With Whiskey, Etc., my first collection, it was mainly flash. So, ordering that required a different rhythm. With this collection I had the different forms, plus the bears to balance. I do feel like with the completion of this collection, I have a body of work in a way that maybe I didn’t before? Maybe there’s a sense of closure—not that I’m done writing short stories, but it feels kind of like a culmination.

BL: You’re working presently on a craft book about revision.

SF: It’s a niche book, but I think it fills an important gap. You know how you write your first draft and you’re like: “This is done! This is so perfect!”? Everybody has this euphoria with the first draft, I think. Sometimes people try to hire a developmental editor after writing that first rough draft, and my co-authors Ladette [Randolph] and Heather [Lundine] often field manuscript queries where they have to say: “This just isn’t ready for developmental editing.” So, we started calling that [rough draft] the zero draft. It’s not a draft—it’s a negative draft. This book we’re co-writing walks you through four drafts that get you to your true first draft.

BL: Most writers don’t want to talk about how long it takes them to write work.

SF: That’s part of the problem, I think. Most books, if you research them, take ten years. You read interviews and the authors say, “this took three years.” But then you actually do some research and it took ten years.

BL: For me, it’s more like: I’ve rewritten this first sentence 200 times. Here you go. It’s a great sentence. [laughs] That’s all I’ve got. People would lose all respect for me if they knew how much work went into the littlest achievement.

SF: Yes, this is the cycle. We reach Genius Mountain, and then look out upon the Valley of Despair. [laughs] We go forward, walk through the Valley of Despair, ripping the draft apart so we can get to Genius Mountain again. It’s a cycle of euphoria and utter non-euphoria.

BL: And you have another project as well, I bet.

SF: I do. I think I’m going to pull together a manuscript of just post-it note micros. I have some classroom exercises where I use 3×4 post-it notes as a constraint in story writing. I wrote a bunch of these around 2010, transcribing them and getting some published. It’s kind of cool drafting with the post-it notes because you can stick them onto a wall in a grid, which can be helpful to see how they connect, what they look like as one big thing. I’ve started writing them again, so we’ll see.

BOOK LAUNCH! Sherrie Flick, “I Have Not Considered Consequences: Short Stories” (w/ Sarah Shotland) Thursday July 10th, 2025 @ 7:00PM – 8:00PM

 

Sherrie Flick is the author of three short story collections, all published by Autumn House Press. They are Whiskey, Etc.,Thank Your Lucky Stars, and I Have Not Considered Consequences. Her recent awards include a Creative Development grant from the Heinz Endowments and a Writing Pittsburgh fellowship from the Creative Nonfiction Foundation. She is co-editor for the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Americaand a long-time senior editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. An essay in her collection Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist, was notable in Best American Essays 2023.  In spring 2025 she served as the McGee Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing at Davidson College, and she recently joined the low-res MFA faculty at West Virginia Wesleyan. She lives in Pittsburgh.

Associate Professor of English and former Director of the Graduate Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh, William Lychack is the author of seven books, including Cargill Falls and The Architect of Flowers. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and on public radio’s This American Life.