• In this issue of Serving House Journal, we are pleased to feature:
“The Quiet Kind”
which is just shy of 5,000 words and the longest story in a collection of very short
stories which our Founding Editor Duff Brenna calls “an adept achievement,”
saying further that the stories are “united with a deceptively minimalist
style that out-Carvers Carver.”
Read Duff’s full review...
At Amazon.com, Timothy J. Bazett proclaims, “Flash fiction at its best.
Painstakingly researched, perceptive, and poignant.”
Reviews may be found at
author’s website as well.
• Also in this issue:
Press Kit, with critical praise and media reviews
Press Release: Flashes of War Wins Military Writers Society of America’s
Gold Medal for Literary Fiction
•
Morning Edition talks with Katey Schultz on 6 September 2013
•
Jessica Henkle of Bookslut interviews Katey Schultz in May 2013
A snippet from their conversation:
JH: The book consists of twenty-four pieces of flash and seven
longer stories. Did you know that you wanted the collection to contain both when you
began writing?
KS: When I started writing the book, the only thing I could
do was write flash fiction. I simply didn’t have enough knowledge about twenty-first
century warfare, Iraq, Afghanistan, or the U.S. military in order to pull off anything
with much length. I found that the flash form got me very far, however, because
I was interested in the personal moments in war, not the wham-bam-action and gore,
so to speak. I wanted to know how an ambitious Afghan woman could purchase a notebook
or how a U.S. soldier went to the bathroom in the middle of a war zone—the
human aspects that, no matter how gruesome the fighting is, never really leave us
behind. These moments were very small and short, and the flash form lent itself
well to capturing them.
Early on, I wasn’t doing anything on purpose, flash-y or otherwise—I
wasn’t thinking about a book, I wasn’t thinking about being politically
correct, I wasn’t thinking about making anyone in particular happy. I was just
writing, which is exactly what I love to do the most. About a year or so into the work,
I wrote my first full-length piece, and at that time, I remember feeling hopeful that I
might eventually amass enough pages to publish a book.