The third season of Just Buffalo’s COMMUNIQUE Flash Fiction series begins Thursday, November 1 with Deb Olin Unferth reading from her debut collection, Minor Robberies. The reading takes place at Rust Belt Books at 7pm and is free to the public. Diane Williams, the author of It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature (Fiction Collective 2), will open the reading for Unferth. Copies of both authors’ books will be available for purchase.

Minor Robberies, recently published by McSweeney’s as part of an adventurous trio, brings together many of Unferth’s short fictions that have appeared in journals such as StoryQuarterly, Notre Dame Review, Columbia, Fence, and Denver Quarterly, which I had the opportunity to ask her about in an email interview.

One Hundred and Forty-Five Stories is a special box set featuring your Minor Robberies with collections by Dave Eggers and Sarah Manguso. How did the idea for bringing these three books together come about? Dave Eggers’s design genius. One thing I admire about him is how he is able to look at a model and reimagine it. Instead of publishing independent books, he wanted to put three books of short shorts into a slipcase. What an elegant and generous idea. His ideas usually seem to involve collaboration, physical beauty and uniqueness. I don’t know how I managed to get included but I am very happy that I did. They’d had my manuscript for quite a long time. I had mostly forgotten about it. One day out of nowhere this email popped up in my box asking if I would be interested.

Now that you’ve seen the concept of the whole set, how do you feel this collaboration works—thematically or otherwise? This is a lot of flash fiction between three different authors for the reader to absorb. Dave talks about his collection being an homage to Lydia Davis—I feel like that could said of the whole set. It’s like we each got a little hum in our hearts after reading Lydia Davis and this is the perfect form for that homage: three neat, pretty little books in a box. The very physical product looks like a Lydia Davis story. Also, as in her stories, there is an artful balance between symmetry and lack of symmetry in the collections. Our visions for our books differed and so the rhythm and mood and length and the voice coming up from the pages is very different for each one, and yet they have echoes of each other.

I think this homage to Davis, needless to say, is a very worthy one. Looking back at the start of your writing career, how much has changed regarding your initial impressions about flash fiction because of her? Gosh, career! What a word to use. I never think of it as a career. It’s more like a hole I dug myself in that I’m still thrashing around in. I don’t think my idea of “story” has changed much since I started writing. I always had a formal idea of it. I think Lydia Davis was one of the writers who gave me permission to think that way. Her approach resonated with me rather than changed it.

What do you consider to be your most important stylistic development in the flash form since you began publishing these stories? Well, that question strikes terror in my heart because I’m not entirely convinced that I have developed stylistically. That’s the great fear, right? That we only have one thought that we keep going over again and again and again. When other writers lament to me about that, saying they keep writing the same thing over and over, I tell them, “You’re in good company! Proust! Kafka! Beckett, Austen, Ware, take your pick!” But, of course, when I apply it to myself, I think, yes, but there are also all the bad writers who do it, too. In one place I lived, there was a man in the apartment next to mine who had written sixteen books, he was very proud of it, all unpublished, and they all sounded the same. He and I lived side by side, each in our lead-paint squalor with our miserable stories. It’s pretty bleak.

I can’t vouch for your former neighbor’s work, but Minor Robberies doesn’t seem so miserable. Are you concerned, then, whether your pieces transition the uneven relationships and human starkness into something palpable for the reader? I guess I would like the stories to make people see the way that I do for a few minute, to hear the rhythm and the sounds in my brain, to follow my flawed logic and come to the same wrong, broken-hearted conclusions I do. Why? Like most people, probably, I’ve always felt pretty alone.