Meg Pokrass

Meg Pokrass writes flash-fiction, short stories, and poetry. Damn Sure Right is her debut collection of flash fiction. Meg serves as Editor-at-Large for BLIP Magazine and before that for SmokeLong Quarterly. Her stories, poems, and flash fiction animations have appeared in nearly one hundred online and print publications, including Mississippi Review, Gigantic, Gargoyle, The Nervous Breakdown, HTML Giant, Wigleaf, The Pedestal, Keyhole, Annalemma, Smokelong Quarterly, elimae, Prime Number Magazine, Women Writers, and Joyland. Meg creates and runs the popular Fictionaut-Five Author Interview Series for Fictionaut, and consults with Writing MFA programs about online publishing. Meg lives with her small, creative family and seven animals in San Francisco, where she edits and teaches flash fiction privately. Visit Meg's website at www.megpokrass.org.

Sample Story

Scraps

Ma says, “stand back,” while she strikes the match, lighting the Wedgewood stove. There is an end-of-the-world whoosh as gas and flame mate—"omelets out of scraps are keen,” she says, sucking a Menthol—arranging button mushrooms as eyes, red onion slices into tight little smiles. At dinner, my sister’s hair hangs like a thick curtain around her face. Sometimes I’ll poke through it, whispering, “how much for your last three bites?” “A dollar,” she’ll say. Ma can even make a piece of cooked cow look lovely, we both agree, trying to raise two children on her own. My sister excuses herself for the bathroom after dinner. Mom and I look at each other as the sink hisses, then the angry toilet joins the music. We pass the time by inventing situations, playing two truths and a lie.

Praise for Meg Pokrass and DAMN SURE RIGHT

Meg Pokrass writes like a brain looking for a body. Wonderful, dark, unforgiving.

—Frederick Barthelme

Meg Pokrass' flash fiction conveys entire worlds that are touching, haunting, funny, moving and strange in the most beautiful ways.

—Jessica Anya Blau, author of Drinking Closer to Home

Meg Pokrass is the new monarch of the delightful and enigmatic tiny kingdom of micro- and flash fiction.

—Brad Watson, author of Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

Meg Pokrass is the brew master of flash.

—Sean Lovelace, author of How Some People Like Their Eggs

No one this side of Amy Hempel is more capable of saying more with a handful of well-chosen words... and no one is better at stretching language into such brilliant new hallucinatory shapes.

—Grant Bailie, author of Mortarville

Read Damn Sure Right, a collection of miniature tales sure to ruin your waking hours the way you'll want them ruined.

—Kyle Minor, author of In the Devil's Territory