Just One Thing with brandon brown

brandon brown’s flash “Faultline” contains a ball in the dirt, smoke in the lungs, two people in the backseat of a car, an opening. Here they share just one thing about the piece:

“I wrote ‘Faultline’ earlier this year, in response to a prompt that primarily encouraged me to “write several sentences that open with the same subordinating conjunction/subordinate clause.” If you’re like me, that made my head spin at first, but it turned out to be a fruitful vessel. I need vessels, you know, always have. This one helped me capture an old feeling, I think: although “Faultline” is very new, it reminds me of the writer I was about ten years ago. I was in undergrad then, working on my thesis. I remember a workshop where my teacher, near the end of her remarks on a piece that’s never seen the light but will someday, said something like, “I can’t decide how I feel about this.” Is it silly or melancholy, she seemed to wonder, does it carry meaning, does it cohere at all. Some young writers might have been hurt by this, but I was thrilled. Thrilled, of course, because I only sort of had answers for her. The piece did not cohere, but it almost did. Its constituent parts mingled in the same space, only tangentially related. They were vibing, right? I didn’t exactly understand the piece myself and my teacher’s giddy, frustrated response mirrored my own feelings about it. In fact, this was a gift—an offer to stave off resolution and definition. I have resisted both ever since, for good and for ill. I’d like to say I have a better handle on the technologies at hand, but I only occasionally let that pin me down. (Another time, she said my work carried both the grotesque and miracle. ‘Faultline’ certainly has these, too.) And before I go, I want to thank everyone who helped me puzzle out this unruly creature (in the workshop and in the snowy cabin), and especially to Tess Lloyd, who provided the prompt.”