KD: You seem to be really interested in the effects of playing with form in your flash fiction, especially in stories such as "He Calls Me Patchouli and I Get Upset," where you dissemble typical narration structures through irregular punctuation. You work with form freely and playfully, which makes your stories incredibly immersive. How much focus do you give to form within the writing process?


GG: When the boy called me patchouli (and I got upset) I wanted only to be something stronger to him, to be addictive, to be heart-racing, to be high-inducing. I wanted him to read me the way I ended up structuring that piece to be read. It's almost one big long sentence with the way I skip the spaces between the first letters of the sentence and the punctuation and so when you read it (either aloud, or in your head), it's really loud and manic and chaotic. I channeled everything I wished I was in that moment into the way I arranged the words because words are the strongest things I know.

My favorite book is The Orphaned Anything's by Stephen Christian which uses form in a way that makes the narrator feel more relatable, that makes the story more accessible. The book is fictional, but it has autobiographical elements, and I love the way the form blurs these lines. "He Calls Me Patchouli and I Get Upset" is non-fiction, but it feels a little like fiction. On the other hand, playing with the form of some of my fictional stories lends them a more realistic feeling.

In a similar vein, I think it's really interesting to look at what form of writing the story in your mind needs to be written in. Does this real situation that happened want to be the basis of a fictional story or is it a personal essay? Is this idea a novel or a short story or flash fiction? Are you writing a movie or a stage play or a book? I have one poem that was originally written in stanzas and when I put it into paragraph form, it finally worked. My first draft of a novel started out as a short story.



2.

KD: I see that you live in Nashville. That may factor into the emphasis on sound in your writing. Yes? No? How do you think your present environment as a writer affects your writing in general—especially since some of your work is semi-autobiographical?


GG: For the past few years I've been working for an incredible non-profit in Nashville called Southern Word. We promote literacy around Nashville through creative writing and music production workshops in classrooms and community centers, and our main focus is spoken word poetry. I've always called myself more of a page poet, but the longer I've been teaching spoken word and the longer I've been around both my amazing students and my incredibly talented coworkers, I've noticed rhythm and sound becoming important in even my page poetry, fiction, and essays.

You know how they say that you can't dream of people who you've never actually seen in real life? I think writing works in a similar way, for me at least. Fiction is my love, and weird, science-y, slipstream-y fiction is my truest love and even that kind of writing stems from what I know and what I have experienced and who I am. I am always writing about the people I know and the places I've been and my loves and my fears; sometimes I just warp them and disguise them and funhouse mirror them until they look like something completely new. Or sometimes, I just straight up creative non-fiction them.

And I think it's really strange and fun to rediscover pieces that I wrote when my brain was in a different place. When "Patchouli" was published, I very literally and dramatically cried rereading it because that reckless, desperate place where I thought I was going to die of heartbreak because a boy didn't love me doesn't exist for me anymore. It's a literary version of those little marks on the wall that show how tall you used to be. That existence was so real once, but now it's this pressed flower in pages that you can look at and remember without it having to be alive anymore.




2½.    

KD: Wait, what?


GG: It was only a lowkey kidnapping by a Spanish DJ in Valencia, Spain who lowkey held me hostage for twenty euros but took me to get Greek food at 2 AM and then when he took me safely home I washed my white clothes with a red dress and they turned pink.

I knew a boy who wore white t-shirts. I had a dream I saw him on a bridge wearing a pink t-shirt.

I swear I'm always careful, but I fell into all of these and I turned them into fictional pink clothes.


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Read Gabriela Gonzales' story.

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