Shane Kowalski: On Vibes, The Importance of Going Off the Rails, Sounding Like Yourself, and His Flash Fiction Collection ‘Small Moods’
There’s been a lot of talk online these days about vibes. Good vibes. Bad vibes. Vibe shifts. What exactly is a vibe though? It’s a feeling, an aura, a mood— something unnamable but viscerally felt. I got my hands on Shane Kowalski’s flash fiction collection Small Moods (Future Tense Books) at the height of the vibe discourse and as I read the 95 flash fictions that comprise this compact collection, I couldn’t help but feel as though I was being guided from one vibe (or mood, if you will) the whole way through.
While the title (and length of stories) suggests smallness, there is no sense of scarcity in Shane’s writing. He is the type of writer whose stories make you wish you could see the world just as he does (and the true gift of the book is that for a time, you can). There is a sense of slowing down, of taking it all in, of looking where others don’t. Small Moods is full of big feelings and even bigger questions — “How do we stop ourselves from stopping ourselves from being gentle?” and “What will we be reduced to?” At times it veers into the absurd and irreverent, but Joycean one-liners like, “Be a helpful and considerate employee or bad things will befall you,” evade irony and get at the heart of contemporary dilemmas. It is a collection that lingers long after the last word.
I spoke with Shane about flash fiction, the elements of story, how to sound like yourself in your writing, and his book Small Moods.
Shelby Hinte: Can you talk a little about how Small Moods came to be?
Shane Kowalski: Small Moods sort of came about accidentally. I have over 2,300 very short pieces that I've written over the years. I started a tumblr in 2011 and would just write something new every day without any serious revision or pretension. It was (and still is) kind of freeing. Fast forward 10+ years and I ended up having a lot of little weird stories and fragments that I could tinker with and edit, etc. My original intention was to try collecting them in little chapbooks. I liked the idea of them never being collected fully together. Fast forward again to Kevin Sampsell opening up submissions for Future Tense Books a couple years ago. I sent him a 30-page chapbook called Stories About Sex Or Power Or Just Simply Objects. He got in touch with me and said he wanted to do something longer, but to 86 the title. So I went back in and went through the stories and fragments and tried to see which ones seemed more alive to me. With some smart input from Kevin and co-editor Emma Alden, we got to the 95 stories that make up Small Moods.
SH: I am so glad you brought up your tumblr. I just started reading your stories/posts a couple weeks ago and I think they are so great. I have been feeling a lot of fear-paralysis around writing lately and so I think it is so badass that you write and post so frequently. Do you ever experience self-doubt or fear around putting your work out online like that?
SK: Thanks, Shelby. It's weird—I don't really fear putting my work out online. I feel like I should though? I guess I have doubts, depending on the day, about whether or not I should put stuff up online—but then I always come to the thought that I've already posted so much online, what's one more tiny embarrassment? I kind of conceived of the tumblr to just have a fun way to keep myself writing every day, under the concept that I wouldn't revise—just write. And then it became kind of a challenge to see how far I could go with it. I told myself I'd stop posting after 1000, then 1500, then 2000 stories...but I've always gone back, and continue to go back. Maybe it's a sickness at this point? Or a ritual I'm possessed by? In any case, it's a good bedfellow to writing more sustained work, and very fun as well.
SH: I often see writers debating over the issue of whether writing should be plot-centered or character-centered. The stories in Small Moods fall on both sides of this “issue” but maybe more than being concerned with plot or character, they focus on embodying a mood or "vibe." How do you go about capturing a mood when you write? Is it intuitive or something more conscious?
SK: I've had to really think about this question. Which makes me believe that a lot of my process is intuitive. I'm not totally sure where I'm going most of the time. If I feel like a piece of writing is going off the rails, I let it. You can't really go back and edit "going off the rails" into a piece. You lose some of that spontaneous magic of "uh oh." I don't know... Maybe that's what really great writing is though: being able to swerve away from the accident and still making it seem like an accident happened? I do know that usually I want to be able to write some very small part of the story—perhaps just a single image or one line of dialogue or something like that—and the rest of the story is just a nice adequate stage that justifies that small part. And in turn, that small part I wanted to write in the first place transforms the nice adequate stage—or at least agitates it into a more heightened state of narrative. And I think that's something like how a mood or a vibe works? There's something ambient that happens. Everything gets surrounded, touched, changed. In a way, I think plot, character, mood, vibe, etc. are all really the same stuff in any given story. Or can be? In a really good story it's sometimes hard to tell what the animating element is—and that's a mood.
SH: It's interesting what you say about not being able to plan for going off the rails and I feel like this really comes across in your more surreal stories. The stories in Small Moods range from a sort of pure realism to surrealism (some even feel a little absurdist to me, but I don't want to be presumptuous!), but they all feel uniquely you, which I don't think is always the case in collections that have such a wide range. I guess this is about your voice in some way and how it feels so distinct. How do you think a writer develops a distinct voice?
SK: I really appreciate this. I think about voice a lot. You could probably throw that in the mix with character/plot/mood/vibe as being an animating element to a piece of fiction. I honestly don't know what makes a voice distinctive over another. If I had to guess I would think it has to do with authenticity. Not that you've had to live or embody or experience some aspect of the voice necessarily, but that you are true to the voice that's telling the story. It takes a while to uncover that voice, I think. When I teach creative writing workshops I always put as the epigraph on my syllabus this quotation by Miles Davis—I'm not exactly sure where it comes from and it's in fact very likely that maybe it's apocryphal—but it goes "Man, sometimes it takes a long time to sound like yourself." And I think there's something true about that, in all aspects.
SH: That’s great. Which writers have been most influential to your own writing?
SK: This is a hard question because there've been so many! Lydia Davis, Jane Bowles, George Saunders, Jamaica Kincaid, Robert Walser, Diane Williams, Chelsey Minnis, Cesar Aira—writers I can name off the top of my head right now. I feel like specific books have stayed with me and influenced me, too, like the great story collections Dogwalker by Arthur Bradford and Getting Jesus In The Mood by Anne Brashler. The short story "My World of the Unknown" by Alifa Rifaat. Yoko Tawada's The Bridegroom Was A Dog, too. Arthur Russell's music has been quietly influential to me. But if I go further down the music hole, I'll never stop answering this question.
SH: What is it about flash fiction that makes you interested in writing in the form?
SK: The very short fiction form feels limitless. It's strange that they call it flash fiction because it lingers so long after. There's something really interesting to me about a very small thing taking up so much space—it feels very contrary to real life.
SH: I've been thinking about this idea you mention — "flash fiction" lingering long after — and I think I agree with you. I personally am so drawn to very short stories and I sometimes (unfairly) approach them with an attitude of "okay change me" and I think, in part, that is because some of the stories that have stuck with me the longest and changed my perspective the most are those that fall somewhere in the 1,000-word range. What do you think it is about these very small things that allow them to take up so much space?
SK: There's a line from the old movie, The Night of the Hunter, that goes "It's a hard world for little things." I think about that line a lot, especially when I think about short fiction. There's very little space or proper respect for small things—if something is small, it's usually treated as "cute." A tiny teacup puppy. A small, yawning baby. A little personified loaf of bread that's smiling. A little pink blob from the planet Blob-Blob who just wants to dance. All small things that can be cute, sure. But I think small things can also be profound. Cute and profound is a good way to exist in life. But they very rarely let you! This is all to say, I think it's based on their being small that very small things take up so much space. It's a necessity of their survival. Otherwise the page gets turned.
SH: We've been talking a little bit about elements of story in this conversation and that is something that can be a little tricky to identify in so-called flash fiction. Some flash is barely a sentence long, some flash reads like poetry, and so I often wonder, what makes something a story? Like, as a writer, how do you "know" when something is a story?
SK: I've been teaching this fiction workshop at this college at night, and I try to ask this question a lot. I usually start with all the traditional components of "narrative"—like plot, setting, character, conflict, etc.—and begin to take them away. How far can you deprive or deny a narrative its satisfying elements and still call it a narrative? So far, I think, it's pretty far. Why I think that is mysterious to me though. I'm not sure if I ever know when something is a story. I guess calling it a story is the best way. If you call something a story, it's up to other people to either accept it or try and prove you wrong. I find most people are too busy to try and prove you wrong.
SH: I know from your bio that you work for the United States Postal Service. There is a long history of writers who worked day jobs that were not overtly writerly and I am curious if you could talk a little bit about how your job impacts your writing and how you make time to write.
SK: When I joined the Post Office, it was pre-Pandemic, right on the cusp of the 2020 election cycle, and they had just sworn in a corporate vampire as the new Postmaster General—so it was (and has continued to be) a pretty tumultuous period. But I've found if there's any institution that can effectively absorb the traumas of life, it is the Post Office. It's weird—you can be having a terrible personal day but if you are out and about, in the mail truck or in uniform, people will almost certainly smile or wave or offer you a cold beer. I don't think there's been a day when I've been out delivering and someone hasn't waved at me. So, in that way, the job really never depletes. There's always something happening at the post office, it's never boring...which is good for writing. If you find yourself out there, in life, lacking stuff to write about, a good writing prompt is to join the Post Office. You'll never need another writing prompt! As for when I find time to write...honestly it's just whenever I can. I always try to, one time a day, sit down and write something. And it's easy enough to do usually. When it doesn't happen, it's no big deal—I just wake up the next day and go back to work.
Shane Kowalski lives in Pennsylvania. He has an MFA in fiction from Cornell University. He works for the United States Postal Service by day and teaches a fiction workshop at Ursinus College by night. Small Moods is his first book.
About the Interviewer
Shelby Hinte is a bay area writer and educator. She has led writing workshops at San Francisco State University, The Writing Salon, and in the community, including teaching creative writing to incarcerated adults and youth on juvenile probation. She is a contributing writer and interviewer with Write or Die Tribe and a prose reader for No Contact.. Her writing has been featured in ZYZYVA, BOMB Magazine, Hobart, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Follow her @shelbyhinte
