Salvatore Difalco’s Comments

I’d been working intensively on flash fiction for a couple of years, and writing in many styles and on a variety of themes. After writing a bunch of stories that were very personal and perhaps overly fraught, I turned to more adventuresome works, detached from my own reality, and freer creatively. I started riffing and came up with some exotic and bizarre stories that were quickly accepted. This gave me confidence to be as free as I wanted to be. I started as a poet, and often turn to poetry for inspiration. Even though I don’t write it anymore I keep my favourite poets close at hand. John Ashbery was always a favourite and over the years I find myself returning to him to refresh my language. I reread “Daffy Duck in Hollywood” (a mad brilliant vertiginous piece of writing) that triggered my own juices flowing. Now, in no way would I try to replicate Ashbery’s verbal pyrotechnics (a path to embarrassment), but the conceit of a cartoon figure being animated in a poem or creative piece of writing appealed to me. And since I was working in the flash form I went ahead and wrote a series of these with mixed results. Not all experiments work; or at least not every attempt. But a few ballsy failures often lead to a few gems. I think these three were the freshest of the group of these cartoonish fictions, and they surprised me by what they revealed. They speak beyond the parameters of their conceits and I always like when this happens. <

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