Jennifer: You two have been working together for well over a decade, compiling six anthologies of very short stories together. What brought you to this work? How did you become an editing team? And what ever attracted you to very short stories? What about them has kept your attention over the years? Robert: James and I got interested in short-short stories independently. We came to know each other through a writing group in Salt Lake City in the 80s. When I offered the group some short-short stories of my own as well as some from literary magazines for discussion, James said he had been teaching them very successfully in his writing classes—so we discovered our mutual interest. James was really the initiator about doing a book. He really pushed us along. I did most of the research, although we both did everything else. We spent hour after hour together kicking ideas back and forth and of course many months gathering very short stories and debating our critical preferences.

Jennifer: Had you written or do you write very short stories? Have your experiences editing these anthologies affected your own writing? Robert: Yes, I write them.  Recently I won a national chapbook competition with a collection of seven short-short stories, called Motel and Other Stories. It was published by Predator Press and can be found under that title at Amazon. A short-short of mine, “Bare Ana,” was selected for the Best of the Net Anthology and will be showcased with five other stories throughout 2007 on the Best of the Net website. We write other kinds of prose, too—James has a book of longer short stories called Pictures, Moving, and my longer stories have been in Kenyon Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. Concerning the second question, yes, the anthologies have increasingly made me think in terms of short-short stories when I sit down to write. Yet I don’t write them often—partly because I’m a slow writer, partly because I’ve been writing a novel for several years between academic terms. James: Absolutely. Like Robert, short-short stories often come “suddenly” or “in a flash,” but then I tend to do a lot of revision to further craft them. Three of the very short stories I’ve written have been aired on National Public Radio’s The Voice of Fiction. Jennifer: There are so many writers writing short-shorts. And now literary magazines are more accepting of the form than ever before. With such a huge pool of work to choose from, how did you go about choosing stories for inclusion in the anthologies? Robert: We had the goal of reading every issue of every print and Internet magazine published in America in the last five years, as well as every book published in that period that had very short fiction in it. Of course it was a ridiculous goal—there’s far more published in America every year than we could even hope to know of. But we read a lot. We read stories quickly, but always tried to be careful and respectful. Since we’d done it before, we had a good sense of what stories were going to be contenders. James and I were constantly sending each other stapled mini-books of twelve to twenty stories we’d each photocopied from different sources for rating on a scale of 1 to 10. Over a couple of years there were well over a hundred of these mini-books. We discussed each one at length, then took the 9s and 10s to the next stage, where we re-read, re-rated, re-thought, and then made up trial anthologies of roughly 50 stories each and sent them to about 20 people around the country, asking for their independent ratings. We trusted our own judgment but wanted to test to make sure we hadn’t gone nuts. Actually, we wanted to get all kinds of views and all kinds of people involved (from a senior New York editor, a grad student in Arizona, a Detroit auto worker who loved to read, young, old, female, male, award-winning authors, new writers). And we did change our mind on some stories because of these readers. So we just did what most editors do except on a larger scale. Also, we weren’t concerned with any agenda or theme as editors of journal issues might be at times. We’re something like a “Best American” anthology, except our books cast wider nets over more sources and more years. A representative variety was our major concern. But really we only had one main idea—we wanted to find the best stories, whoever wrote them and wherever we could find them, whether in The New Yorker or The Mudrock Review. Jennifer: Here at Quick Fiction we always shoot for consensus in our decision-making. Did you and James use consensus as well? Have you and James ever disagreed on a story? As an editing team, how did you work it out? Robert: Yes, we’ve disagreed many a time, and yes, we try for consensus. And although we involve other people, it comes down to James’ and my decision. So we only have to work out a consensus of two. How do we work it out? Sometimes we don’t. In which case the story in question doesn’t get selected. We’re both open to the other’s views and sometimes we do convince one another to change. We make deals—if you agree to take this story that I really love, I’ll agree to that other one you really love. Of course this only works if both the stories are very good—and we usually agree on what’s good whether we like the story or not. And then sometimes things happen that take the decision away from us—I’m sure this happens for you, too. For example, we can’t get a reprint right. Or we happen to find another story by the same author and like it better than the one we were arguing about. But we may have an advantage over some journal editors in that we live with stories through a long process (years), and we read and encounter these stories so many times we simply have much more time to think about and work out our differences. But we do have vetoes—neither of us can make the other take a story he doesn’t really want. Jennifer: Your newest book, Flash Fiction Forward, was released last fall. Is there anything that sets it apart from your other collections?

Robert: Yes. Our latest anthologies, Flash Fiction Forward and New Sudden Fiction (January, 2007) are “all-new.” That is, all new stories all published in the 21st century. There are also new introductions in the books updating “flash” and “sudden” as subgenres or cultural phenomena.

As we said before, our research is wider than most “Best American” anthologies and this time we went even wider by researching and including work from the Internet. We were surprised that a lot of other recent anthologies hardly touch the Internet. Or anyway that’s how it seemed—but looking on the credits pages can be misleading. I know some of our Internet credits (or what would be credits) don’t show up if the stories first published in a zine were later collected in a book—let’s say the author’s own collection of short stories. Then it’s the book publisher that gets the credit in our anthology, not the zine. Jennifer: Do you have any other projects on the horizon for us to look forward to? Robert: We love doing Sudden and Flash books and hope to do more, but they  take a lot of work and a lot of time and we can’t say yet when the next will be.

Jennifer: Your next volume, New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and Beyond, is expected out in January, 2008. Can you give Quick Fiction readers a sneak peak about what to expect?

Robert: Suddens are longer stories compared to quick fiction; they average about 1,500 words. Still very short, of course, compared to standard stories. As we’re writing this interview answer, we’re about to have an evening of sudden stories read by actors and taped live before an audience at Symphony Space on Broadway in New York City. One of the readers is B.D. Wong, who plays the psychologist on Law and Order. By the time this interview goes to print it may be too late for your readers to go to the event, but the readings will be broadcast on National Public Radio’s “Selected Shorts.” We’re really excited about that. New Sudden Fiction authors will also appear in a January 2007 feature in the Internet literary magazine Narrative Magazine, which is published quarterly. Jennifer: Somebody asked me this question once, and I figured I’d start a tradition… What is the longest book you have ever read? How many pages was it? Robert: The abridged version of War and Peace. Or maybe it was the abridged version (a mere eight hundred thousand words) of Pamela. James: I haven’t really counted pages, but my three contenders would be Tristram Shandy, Don Quixote, and Moby Dick. They are also my favorites. As for Robert’s Pamela, how about Shamela?

Books edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas referenced in this interview include:

New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and Beyond

Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories [Read our review]