portion of the artwork for Curtis Smith's fiction
Curtis Smith’s Comments

These stories, along with the twenty-five or so flash pieces that will be part of my next collection, share the same origin. I’ve been writing for twenty-some years—and during that time, I’ve saved all my old notebooks and journals (I always write my first drafts longhand). About two years ago, I was cleaning out the basement, and I was getting ready to pitch the boxes that held the notebooks. I guess I had about thirty or forty notebooks, but before lugging them out, I paused and started leafing through them. I recognized bits and early incarnations of old stories I’d published. And there were other stories which hadn’t seen the light of day—and some I didn’t remember at all—but here and there, I found an idea or sentence that still appealed to me. At the time, I was reading and enjoying a lot of flash fiction, so I had an idea: I’d go through the notebooks and salvage the images I liked. From them, I wrote new flash pieces. These are a few from that cycle.


Return to Archive




FRiGG: A Magazine of Fiction and Poetry | Issue 36 | Spring 2012