Who are your favorite flash fiction authors?

Gustave Apollinaire, Lydia Davis, Sherrie Flick, Francis Ponge.

How does your proficiency at poetry and illustration inflect your fiction?

Some poetry lessons: lyricism, referentiality, trusting the image, thinking about consciousness as an idea of economy, starting strong, getting out.

What gave you such an inventive idea for Bingo Bango Boingo?

I’ve long been interested in hybrid forms, game theory, and narrative weirdities. That combo became a thing when I re-discovered a blank Bingo card on my desktop—at a moment I was making text-and-image cartoons, so my brain was in the process of being tuned differently.

How do the Bingo cards in the book dovetail with the intervening narratives?

Each is a discrete story, but the pedagogy of the Bingo cards—learning to read constituent elements in rows—helps understand the flash. Vice versa? I like to think that the details of flash can be read in combinatory ways.

Who are the characters here, and what do they accomplish?

It’s a pandemic book, rife with life-changing post-epiphanic decisiveness (I made that silly phrase up), and Bingo cards that offer characters choices as chosen by the reader. Also, importantly, when I wrote this book, people had just begun again to go outside again: so do my characters, figuratively. Or inside, if that’s where they need to learn what they want.

And the structure?

The “YOUR TURN” Bingo cards have titles and a few boxes with text, but are largely incomplete, that is, made available for play. I like the idea that readers can contribute to Bingo Bango Boingo by learning how to make their own stories too.

Who’s your ideal reader?

Someone committed to interpretation as an act, rather than a result. I don’t need people to pick up and eat all the breadcrumbs, but being hungry helps.

What’s your next project?

I’ve been cartooning for a few years—the work’s at www.ampydoocartoons, and on Instagram @Ampydoo—and learning to draw. I like the Internet as a medium, and how cartooning has become so DIY (brushtool, shares, memes, etc.). Something in that ecosystem makes sense to me, although I haven’t discovered how to get paid for it.

You’re also the author of four novels. Which form appeals to you more, long or short?

I love the short forms in Bingo Bango Boingo and the long forms that have taken over my brain for years. For a writer, what could be more fun than form? Allow me to answer with a little allegory, despite a deep-seated distrust of that form.

What’s your favorite food?

Mine might be the perfect BBQ rib in a feisty little sauce, or the first shot of tequila, or the Michelin-starred five-course extravaganza someone else pays for, or a skewer of bacon-wrapped scallops with my dear ones at the beach, or maybe three perfect chocolate-covered almonds as payment for a shite day. Are all of these eats delicious? They are. Which also means why choose?