In this article, we interview Chad Frame, WINNER of the April 2024 Not Quite Write Prize for Flash Fiction. Chad has been with the Not Quite Write Prize from the start and prepared for his win by also placing 2nd in the January 2024 round of the competition.
Hi Chad, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your experience with writing?
I wrote a lot when I was younger, pretty much full-steam through school and up through undergrad, and then just sort of hit a wall and had nowhere to go from there. Going to a huge university (Penn State) made me feel like a drop in a bucket, and I had no one with whom I could discuss things like submitting work, applying to grad school, or careers in the field. So when I graduated, I fell into a rut of working retail job after retail job and essentially quit writing for a decade.
And every day, I felt absolutely awful about it, like a limb had atrophied. Finally, once I’d saved up enough and paid off undergrad, I decided it was time to go for my MFA so I’d have no excuse but to write—and write a lot.
Mind you, all I’d written to this point was poetry, and so I’d kept up with it through my MFA. Immediately after, I was named Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, then went on to become Director of the program. I founded an annual poetry festival, joined several high-profile workshop groups and reading circles, published in journals, then published three books, taught classes and workshops, was interviewed and performed at the Library of Congress, and then had my work sent to the actual moon. I guess you could say I got back in the swing of things quickly.
You’re well known in flash fiction circles, regularly longlisting, shortlisting and placing in competitions around the world. What’s your secret?
I hadn’t written fiction at all until the pandemic lockdown in 2020. Amid standard doom scrolling, I came across an ad for NYCMidnight and thought, Sure, why the hell not? My first was the 100 Word Micro that year, and I did well with it in the opening rounds, but didn’t place in the final. Then I finished third in the Flash final, and by then I was hooked.
But none of that is a secret, is it?
Okay, ready for it?
The secret to success in writing is simple:
Do the goddamned work.
Read everything. Watch everything. Try your hand at everything.
Study craft. Study genre. Try different forms outside your comfort zone. I’d never written fiction before I signed up for a fiction contest. I’d never written a screenplay before in my life and still signed up for a screenplay contest and had to immediately learn, sink or swim. I still placed fifth.
Treat this less like a hobby and more like a career. Beyond the fact that there’s money involved in these contests, both paid to enter and given when won, it’s also something that deserves every bit of effort and pride of accomplishment as whatever you do to actually pay the bills. (If not more so.)
And that’s how I treat it. I have 47 browser tabs of research open whenever I write anything because I’m not only the weirdo who finds research fun—I’m the weirdo who wants to get every detail right.
So that’s it, really. But I’ll gladly repeat it for anyone who’s just joining us mid-broadcast:
Do the goddamned work.
Can you tell when one of your pieces will do well in a competition?
I can tell when I want it to, but I can’t predict it. I’ve definitely had my share of upsets. We all grow attached to our darlings. And, also, on the flipside, I’ve had slapdash things I really wasn’t proud of do exceptionally well. That feels almost just as bad, in a way.
When reading your competitors’ entries in forums, what draws you to a story and makes it a contender in your eyes?
Some kind of innovation. I’ve read all the same tropes you talked about in your recent podcast episode (shout out to said wonderful podcast episode!), and there’s nothing wrong with that. As you said, we all write them, and they’re tropes for a reason. But ultimately, you have to ask yourself if you’re really adding anything new to the conversation. If you’re creating art or laying down tracing paper. And there are so many ways to innovate. I’m constantly amazed and delighted by the work produced for these contests, and there’s so much talent out there. Not only that, but so much support for one another. There are way worse things to be hopelessly addicted to in life than writing contests, and I’m so happy to have found this ragtag group of devotees.
Did that answer the question? Probably not.
Just be original. Really try to find a unique take on whatever the prompt may be.
Poetry is a passion for you, but it’s a field often criticised for being “elitist”. Where do you sit in that debate?
With poetry, there’s a higher focus on craft, so I suppose I can see how people arrived at a label of elitism, even if I disagree with it. With any art, accessibility should be a concern. We poets have a bad rap for essentially writing poetry just for one another, that only poets show up to poetry readings, only poets buy one another’s books, and only poets really read (non canonically forced down their throat in school) contemporary poetry at all.
And to an extent, that’s true.
But I’m definitely working to change that. My performance troupe, No River Twice, takes an interactive approach to readings, involving the audience by letting them dictate the flow of the work. I’ll be plugging this later in the place where I’m supposed to plug things.
I use a lot of narrative in my work, which I think makes it more accessible. Whether I’m doing it in poetry or prose, I’m telling a story either way, and that comes first for me.
And when I teach, I try to make the lessons accessible to anyone, too. I teach poetry workshops geared towards established poets, intermediate, and beginners alike, and wrangle prose writers into joining. I teach a class on found poetry, too, which is much more accessible to beginners. But yes, that’s right—plugs come later.
I’m a mid-career poet who’s been lucky enough to do some high-profile things, but I absolutely loathe elitism. I’m as happy to read in a dive bar as I am on stage in front of thousands. I’m as happy to translate Ovid or Catullus as I am to recite a bawdy limerick (and please, ask me about the overlap there, because it’s hilarious).
People need to get over themselves.
You often enter prose poetry into flash and microfiction competitions. What’s your view on the intersection between poetry and prose?
I’m so glad you asked, because I’m teaching a class on exactly this right now. Plug to follow below.
I did mention narrative was narrative, right?
And beyond that, most of the forms these contests focus on are hybrid, which a lot of people don’t even realize. The line between flash fiction and prose poetry is arbitrary. Both are a marriage of the conventions of fiction with the craft of poetry—in this case, almost everything except line breaks. Flash and micro- and nano- and whatever other qualifiers and prefixes people will invent are focused on using the cadence of poetry, the metaphor-rich language of poetry, riddled with resonant particulars, along with the formatting and syntax of prose to tell a story.
But for the record, what I entered and won second with in January wasn’t prose poetry—it was a straight-up narrative poem. Actual prose poetry looks identical to flash, usually (but not always) in one block without paragraph breaks. Check out Charles Simic or Amy Lowell or Charles Rafferty or Carolyn Forché or Simon Armitage or… well, you get the idea. The only real difference is if we’re talking about a prose and poetry chocolate to peanut butter ratio, one leans just a little more towards chocolate, and the other ever so slightly towards peanut butter.
Can you share any words of wisdom with our Not Quite Write Prize hopefuls?
Well, now all I can think about is chocolate and peanut butter.
But I think that’s always a wise choice.
About Chad
Chad Frame is the author of Little Black Book, nominated for the Lambda Literary Award, Cryptid, and Smoking Shelter, winner of the Moonstone Chapbook Contest. He is the Director of the Montgomery County Poet Laureate Program, a Poet Laureate Emeritus of Montgomery County, a founding member of the No River Twice poetry/improv performance troupe, and the founder of the Caesura Poetry Festival. His work appears in Rattle, Strange Horizons, Pedestal, Barrelhouse, Rust+Moth, on iTunes from the Library of Congress, and is archived on the moon with The Lunar Codex.
You can connect with Chad at:
Twitter @chadryanframe
Website: Chad has paid for a domain on Wix for four years and never bothered building the site. Sorry not sorry.
But check out Chad’s workshop offerings at River Heron Review (www.riverheronreview.com/writing-workshops), his group No River Twice, who do frequent readings in person and online (www.norivertwice.org), the website for the Montgomery County Poet Laureate Program (www.montcopoet.org), and just generally Google him, I guess.