This LA flash-fiction star thinks novels are 'saggy.' Her own debut proves her wrong

There are no wasted words in the fictions of Venita Blackburn. Her stories are quick as lightning; her sentences, entire lifetimes flashing by. A clause might pierce a character's frailties, a word might tip the analysis into absurdity.

A young man in one story is "sticky from adolescence." A woman in another carries a purse "too small for all her shame and addictions." In "Easter Egg Surprise," originally published in SmokeLong Quarterly in 2019, a father remembers his recently dead mother: "She was a junkie and a liar and owed me three hundred dollars, but she was good with my kid."

"I consider myself a sentence writer," says Blackburn, tending to a cup of tea in her Fresno dining room on an overcast December afternoon. Each sentence, she says, "needs to exist all by itself."

Over more than a dozen years, Blackburn has sharpened her sentences to razor points in short-short," published in 2017, and "," which appeared four years later. In these pieces characters grapple with the fallout of abandonment, unrequited queer desire and ill-conceived crimes.