Cathy Ulrich is the founding editor of Milk Candy Review, a journal of flash fiction. Her work has been published in various journals, including Black Warrior Review, Passages North, and Wigleaf and can be found in Best Microfiction 2019, 2020 and 2021; Best Small Fictions 2019; and Wigleaf‘s Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2017 and 2019. She lives in Montana with her daughter and various small animals.
Randal Eldon Greene: Hello, Cathy Ulrich
You and I have been "bumping" into each other online for quite some time now as we've published our stories. Eventually we ended up following one another on Twitter, which is just great for me because I'm always being informed when a new Cathy Ulrich work is out in the world to read. Like me, you've published a lot of flash fiction. In fact, you founded Milk Candy Review, which exclusively publishes flash fiction. What draws you to this terse form of fiction?
Cathy Ulrich: Hi, Randal.
The other day, a friend of mine and I were discussing dreams, and how they seem so much longer than they really are because your brain creates an entire universe for you to inhabit in the space of a few minutes. Isn't that so cool?
Flash fiction is like that, for me: building universes in the tiniest moments. I love how spare and thoughtful it must be to be effective. I love how it asks the reader to fall into this universe, how it asks the reader to believe. And doing that in the space of a heartbeat? That's like magic.
Randal Eldon Greene: I actually read many years ago about how the brain is constantly dreaming, even when we're awake. This is why as you're drifting off to sleep, sometimes you'll find yourself suddenly in a dream that seems to be in medias res, somehow already in the middle of the action. Not only are dreams like the microcosm of condensed fiction, there's probably a lot of material we draw from the dreaming realm while we are wide awake, scribbling away at our manuscripts. Where do you get the material for your diverse and sometimes surreal fiction?
Cathy Ulrich: This is always such a hard question to answer—there's material everywhere. In what I read, what I see, what I hear. Sometimes these things become a story, sometimes they don't. Once, when I was driving my daughter to her piano lesson, I saw the silhouette of a person standing alongside the road, but they looked wrong, like an ostrich. So I said to my daughter, "I need to write a story about fighting an ostrich." Her reaction was basically, "You don't need to say everything that pops into your head, you know," but also "Good luck."
Later, because I'd seen a person and thought it was an ostrich, I wrote "Wobble of Ostriches," which appeared in Blue Fifth Review.
So I guess what I'm saying is a lot of my material comes from bad eyesight and a weird brain!
Randal Eldon Greene: If only all our stories could come from bad eyesight and misinterpretation. I'm guessing your collection, Ghosts of You, has a much darker origin.
Cathy Ulrich: You're right about that—the Murdered Ladies series was definitely inspired by how dead women in fiction are treated as something to "set the plot in motion" rather than as actual people. Even in real life, there is a tendency to focus on the murder itself and not the victim. So these stories come from a place of "these are real people, they had hopes, they had dreams and now they are gone."
Randal Eldon Greene: I see. So this is why all the stories in Ghosts of You have the same format: "The thing about being the murdered [female] is you set the plot in motion," substituting "female" for politician, mother, mermaid, etc. While the victims may set the plot in motion, these stories are not about the plot, but are character studies as you say. Though you give us more characters than the dead. You also give us a sense of those around the murdered women. Sometimes we end up knowing the survivors better than the dead at the end of these tales. I'm wondering if you've ever been the survivor, or the survivor's aunt, neighbor, friend?
Cathy Ulrich: Yes, I know (knew?) three murder victims personally: My uncle, an ex-boyfriend, and a girl I worked with who was just killed this last summer. As hard as it is to lose someone, it's so much worse when someone took them away from you on purpose. It's utterly devastating, one of the worst feelings. I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
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