We worked together during an online gurkshop to blackout words from Jessica Bennett’s “Why We Love to Watch Women Brought Low” published in the opinion section of The New York Times on May 20, 2022.
Check it out along with the other amazing revolutionary work in this issue!
As with every year, I had a great time writing and submitting to The Write-In on National Flash Fiction Day! It was especially lovely this year as a much-needed distraction over the weekend.
I’m thrilled that 5/5 of my submissions were published! I’m sharing the links here, along with the prompts to give an idea of the guidelines/constraints.
I’m thrilled to have a 75-word story at Paragraph Planet today. (The link takes you to the author archives, where you can click on my name and read my piece!)
I wrote this piece in a gurkshop with Janet Dale on 1/29/2022. It was originally a freeform prompt using the words “edge / balloons / contusion / words / kindness / breathing / crow / pulse / shapes / taste” – so you can see how I have worked it to death and then brought it back to life again.
In June 2021, I took part in Jami Attenberg’s 1,000 Words of Summer. I wrote at least 1,000 words per day for two weeks, and those pieces included all nine flash stories that eventually ended up in Green Light: A Gatsby Cycle. (The first few days of writing were something else entirely… but we won’t go there.)
Janet had already found her poems. In fact, her idea of using the first page of each chapter is why I used a sentence from the first page of each chapter to start a flash story. But we didn’t collaborate. It wasn’t until later that we put it all together and realized… hey, this works!
We sent Green Light out into the world—to nine publishers total! The last submission was to Alien Buddha Press. Red loved the book but had never worked with two authors on one project before, so he encouraged us to each submit our own books instead. And we did! (Janet published ghosts passing through and I published Won’t Be By Your Side.)
However, as the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby grew closer, we knew we needed to get this book out in the world. With all the excitement celebrating that centennial, it would be perfect timing! So we reached out to Alien Buddha Press once more, hoping that Red would be willing to work with us as a duo since he’d worked with us individually. And he agreed! We streamlined things for him (I hope!) and marketed the hell out of the book for six weeks leading up to its publication date of April 10, 2025 – 100 years after the original Gatsby!
Just for fun, here are photos of my original handwritten drafts of the flash in Green Light.
And for even more fun, here are the word counts – then and now:
Chapter 1: 1057, now 738 Chapter 2: 1008, now 729 Chapter 3: 1064, now 694 Chapter 4: 1013, now 700 Chapter 5: 1126, now 732 Chapter 6: 1023, now 714 Chapter 7: 1002, now 705 Chapter 8: 1117, now 712 Chapter 9: 1074, now 668
Want to find your own poetry from pages of The Great Gatsby just like Janet Dale? She created a PDF of the last page of each chapter of the book so you can find poems.
I’m thrilled to announce that Green Light: A Gatsby Cycle, my hybrid chapbook written with Janet Dale, is out today!
Green Light: A Gatsby Cycle offers a striking reimagination of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, told as a collaborative chapbook of found poetry and flash fiction. Using only the first page of each chapter from the novel, Dale and Renner craft a fresh meditation on the classic story—one that explores a boy’s struggle to break free from the place that made him, questioning the very notion of the American Dream.
The authors create a seamless dialogue with Fitzgerald’s work, transforming familiar passages into something entirely new. Each flash fiction piece and poem reflects themes of ambition, yearning, and the pursuit of freedom, while offering a thoughtful exploration of the literary masterpiece.
You can buy a copy directly from me and get it delivered in a shiny green mailer along with a book cover postcard and sticker.
In the meantime, add it as “Want to Read” on Goodreads and The StoryGraph, then share your thoughts when you’ve read it.
You can now purchase signed copies of my book directly from this site! (I mean, you still have to go through PayPal, but you can avoid Amazon, so it’s still a win.)
If you buy a copy (or multiple) of Green Light: A Gatsby Cycle, you’ll also get a book cover postcard and sticker!
If you buy a copy (or multiple) of Won’t Be By Your Side, you’ll also get a custom bookplate!
I wrote this piece in a Sarah Freligh workshop (surprise surprise!) in November 2023. It was a particularly windy week – I didn’t remember feeling wind like that before, unless it was during the typical Memphis in May tornado season.
I have been trying to find a home for it since, and am so happy to have it with Ink In Thirds… and even happier that it was published during another week of unseasonably wild winds.
You can take a peek at the issue online and grab a digital or print copy for yourself to read it all, along with the other amazing words and art in this issue.
I’m excited to announce that my second fiction collection is coming out April 10th!
Does that date sound familiar? It might to literary nerds (me) and English majors (also me)—it’s the 100th Anniversary of The Great Gatsby! Since our upcoming book is inspired by that classic, it only seemed fitting to release it on that landmark publication date.
The book is now in public domain, so Janet Dale used the first page of each chapter to create found poetry (aka blackout poetry) and I used a sentence from the first page of each chapter to write an entirely new flash fiction piece.
We’ll share some more insight and glimpses behind-the-scenes in time, but we can’t wait for you to read the finished product in just six short weeks!
Allison Renner Writes 