Little Fortified Stories: Interview with Barbara Black

Little Fortified Stories, Caitlin Press, 2024. Click on image for publisher site.

The Ekphrastic Review: Congratulations on many impressive awards and acclaim for your stories. Before we talk about Little Fortified Stories, share with us a bit about your award-winning short story collection, Music From a Strange Planet. In what ways did the response to these stories influence your new ones?

Barbara Black: Thank you! The fortified stories started before Music from a Strange Planet. I wrote the first port stories in Lisbon while attending the Disquiet International Literary Program on a scholarship. Later I added more spirits, and then put the work aside to write Music from a Strange Planet. Because I’m a natural miniaturist, the short stories in that collection were on the shorter side than most. I decided to trust the reader to make inferences about material I left out or only referred to briefly. Amazingly, many people who said they didn’t normally like short stories, really enjoyed them. It’s only a tiny hop, skip and jump from short short stories down to even shorter flash fiction and micros. I took the skills in concision I learned from the short story genre and applied them to flash and microfiction. I also allowed myself to slip into magical realism.

Barbara, why don’t you introduce our readers to your book? Your work is an unusual collection of flash and microfiction inspired, in part, by different kinds of prompts. Tell us about the ways in which this eclectic collection came together.

This collection of 90 flash and microfictions came together from many angles: an exploration of visual art, an attempt to articulate dreams and foreign cultures, a conjuring of voices from the past, attempts to articulate grief. It often felt like I was writing into a very small container, trying to tell a story in an intense, yet minimalist way. Stark and yet somehow rich as well. Intimate. I wanted readers to feel both instability and resilience, the beauty of holding yourself within mystery. I wanted to create worlds that came from a deep place.

Many of the stories in this book are prompted by beverages, music, and more. But there are quite a few inspired by visual art, too. Can you tell us something about your relationship to visual art? As a writer, how does art speak to you?

I’ve always loved viewing art. It can provoke more varied reactions than the written word can. Unlike art, the written word can’t be “viewed” in one glimpse. You have to engage with the meaning of words in sentences to absorb meaning. I love art because it speaks to you immediately. It doesn’t have to explain itself. For me this is an ideal starting point for freewriting: beginning with images that evoke—not define—something and then out of that inchoate plasma comes a raw kind of language that is the underpinning of a startling, original story.

What kind of ekphrastic process do you have? How do you choose the works of art that inspire a story?

Mostly I choose art that immediately provokes a reaction or emotion in me. Sometimes I have to sit with that artwork for a while, let it follow me around and keep freewriting to let something come forth, but more often a line enters my head and the story writes itself. Careful revision and fine-tuning that don’t destroy the integrity of the work come later.

Lisbon and Portugal are infused throughout the Port stories at the beginning of the collection and in the Fado songs that end the book. Tell us more about your relationship with this culture, and its effect on your creativity. 

Once I stepped into Lisbon, I felt a strong affinity for the culture. What clinched it for me even before I got to Lisbon was fado music. Just as I have wide-ranging tastes in art, I have wide tastes in music, too. Especially foreign music. Fado grabbed me by the heart and showed me how loss, nostalgia and longing could be expressed in poetry and set to music most simply with a powerful, emotional voice and a 12-string Portuguese guitar which seems to be a voice of its own and not just a form of accompaniment. This is music from the emotional depths of the body, mostly lamenting, but sometimes joyful, too. It articulates the trials we feel in our lives. The port stories gave me an opportunity to highlight Portuguese artists, such as writer Fernando Pessoa, painter Paula Rego, and poet Maria Teresa Horta and to reference places in Lisbon such as Avenida da Liberdade and the Algarve. The Fado Songs which complete the book were inspired by the intensity and poetic beauty of fado lyrics from some of the great Portuguese poets including David Mourão Ferreira, Jorge Fernando, and Moniz Pereira.

Which of the art-inspired stories in this is your favourite? Can you share with us the journey from spark to completion?

My favourite is “Daughter of the North Wind.” The first spark was viewing Kim Dingle’s painting Cloud of a little girl in a fluffy, feather jacket and patent shoes tumbling down from the sky. A line dropped down to the page: “Bunnykins came to them in a blizzard.” At this point I didn’t know who the “them” was. But as it appeared to be some kind of miraculous circumstance, I chose a couple who’d always wanted a child. However, because the girl came from the north, the crux of the story would be that she could not tolerate heat and so after a time the family moved to the arctic, first with good results then….won’t spoil the ending!

Was there an ekphrastic story that was particularly challenging or difficult? Tell us about these obstacles, and how they affected the outcome of the piece.

There’s a story that never made it into the Ekphrastic section but that I will never give up on. It’s a photo of a Seri woman in Mexico in a heavy traditional skirt. She’s scurrying over a hill grasping a portable radio, in the distance is the vast Sonoran plain. It started when this character spoke in my head: “The voice came to me and no one else.” I tried several angles into this story but it remained fragmented. But now, by addressing this question, I’ve suddenly reactivated my need to complete this work and instead of forcing it into story form, let it find its own shape. It’s always a delicate process to figure out what is the best form to use to let the story unfold.

Tell us about some surprises in writing this collection.

The greatest surprises are the stories that birth themselves into my brain and introduce me to new worlds and unique character voices. I almost never plan these creations. They always come from freewriting sessions where I write without prejudice or correction and make room for ideas and linkages that will populate the story, sometimes in only subtle, subterranean ways. Another surprise is that once I finished the collection, I saw threads and themes—mothers and daughters; climate change; fertility; female agency—that had apparently arose from my subconscious.

What does flash fiction mean to you? In what ways does the small story liberate you or limit you as a writer?

Flash fiction is an opportunity to experiment. It both limits and liberates! The limitation on word count challenges me to use words economically. As I already mentioned, I’m a miniaturist so I find this a welcome constraint. Constraint=Increased Creativity! Although the stories are brief, I want them to resonate for the reader long after reading.

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Barbara Black writes short and flash fiction, poetry and libretti. Black’s writing appears in The Cincinnati Review, Geist, The Hong Kong Review, Prairie Fire, and CV2, and in anthologies, including Bath Flash Fiction Award 2021, and Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page. Achievements include: Fiction Finalist, 2020 National Magazine Awards; Nominated for the 2019 Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize; Winner, 2017 Writers’ Union of Canada Short Prose Competition; Winner, Federation of BC Writers Contests (Prose Poem) 2018 and (Flash Fiction) 2021/2022; and Shortlisted for the 2023 Edinburgh Flash Fiction Award. She recently won First Prize in The Plaza Prizes Microfiction Contest 2023 and also placed Second in the Flash Fiction Category. She is the author of Music from a Strange Planet (Caitlin Press, 2021), which was the winner of the 2023 Sunshine Coast Writers and Editors Society Award for Fiction, and a finalist for the 2023 International Book Awards, the 2023 Canadian Book Club Award and the 2021 Miramichi Reader's Very Best Book Awards. She lives in Victoria, BC, where she gardens and rides her trusty Triumph motorcycle​