I Have Not Considered Consequences
by Sherrie Flick
Autumn House Press (April 15, 2025)
Paperback: 196 pages
ISBN-10: 1637681046
ISBN-13: 978-1637681046
$19.95
What do you get when you compress a short story to under 1,000 words? If you are Sherrie Flick you get a crystalline look into a very specific moment in the lives of her characters, a peek into the window at a moment of meaning that echoes as you turn the page.
Her latest collection, I Have Not Considered Consequences, you also get a world where bears tend bar and work alongside humans with no fuss at all, trees bark and people float, a world of whimsy that offers up meaning alongside the absurd. Flick talks about the creation of her latest book and her development as a writer.
AUTHORLINK: Tell me about your apprenticeship as a creative writer. Did you have a mentor who offered advice that you can share with us?
FLICK: I’ve been writing short stories for a long time, so sometimes I feel a little creaky trying to remember the beginning. Back when I started writing flash fiction (stories under a 1,000 words) it wasn’t even called flash fiction yet. We called them short-shorts, and they weren’t popular in my undergraduate academic workshops. A small group of us started workshopping on our own—at people’s houses and in laundromats and cafes. We were all writing some form of experimental work and these covert workshops really formed me in ways that a regular class never could have. A bunch of us moved from Portsmouth, NH to San Francisco and we kept up the weekly workshops for a long time. So in many ways my apprenticeship was DIY. In grad school Marly Swick took me under her wing and eventually convinced me to start writing longer pieces that led to my novel Reconsidering Happiness. Hilda Raz kept all of us afloat with her excellent life advice and reminders about the importance of making art.
Advice-wise—one of the best pieces I’ve ever gotten came from Tim O’Brien at Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He said let your characters look around. It’s so simple, but it’s what I needed to hear to get out of my head and into the story—to stop and remember my characters need to be able to see and move and feel.
AUTHORLINK: Did you write the stories in I Have Not Considered Consequences with a collection in mind or did you realize you had stories that would make a good collection?
FLICK: There are a bunch of stories about bears in the collection. Sometimes they’re real bears and other times it’s someone who is mistaken for a bear or a home inspector who wears a bear suit or the bear is a bartender or mid-level professional. They’re a little absurd. I wrote those stories during the pandemic. They came in fits and bursts and I had zero cognition that I was pulling together a collection. One day I decided to put all the bear stories into one document, and I realized—wow, okay—my brain has been working toward something.
After that I started writing stories with the idea of a collection in mind. There are also stories in the book that aren’t about bears. Hahaha. They came in the second stage of drafting.
AUTHORLINK: What short story writers influenced I Have Not Considered Consequences?
FLICK: Hmmm. That’s a good question. I guess Kafka in his way. And probably Russell Edson, too. Perceval Everett, Virginia Woolf. The longer stories in the book probably pay some homage to Ellen Gilchrist. I was actually reading a lot of nonfiction while I wrote these stories because I was also working on my essay collection Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist. Reading nonfiction opened me up to ideas in a way that was refreshing. I particularly loved reading Brenda Wineapple’s Sister Brother, about Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, and also Carol Loeb Schloss’ Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, about James Joyce’s daughter Lucia. I also read Roxana Robinson’s biography of Georgia O’Keeffe during this time. As I remember these titles they somehow resonate with the story collection. I was reading about a lot of real, weird, creative worlds and I think I took that into my fiction. It felt new and exciting to me.
AUTHORLINK: You create worlds in this collection that have different rules, bears who are midlevel managers, barking trees and floating people. Talk about how you manage to balance whimsy with stories that are deeply meaningful?
FLICK: Thank you for saying they’re meaningful! That’s the goal, for sure. I have a history of writing absurdist stories—a guy named Lenny who sells suits out of a van, mafia farmers selling corn in Nebraska. Now all these bears. The key for me is that the story shouldn’t be absurd for absurd’s sake. There’s no reason to write it if the point is a bear bartending. I try to keep the internal logic of the story intact. I set up the premise: bear as bartender and then it’s real, not a joke. The story looks at what it means to stay in a place and what it means to leave, how what you say and what you name has an impact, ultimately, on place. But also, the bear makes a mean gimlet.
AUTHORLINK: What was your greatest challenge in developing I Have Not Considered Consequences?
FLICK: The collection had many titles and the stories were placed in many different orders. I talked with my editors about the bear—is it one bear or many bears? If it’s one bear over time—should we try to showcase that arc? If it isn’t do we need to make that clear? There was a lot of bear talk.
Since the bear showed up as a kind of muse, I wanted to keep the bearness intact. The bear is an idea, not a single bear. So, yeah. That just took a lot of time to think through.
AUTHORLINK: You’ve written a novel and short story collections. Do you prefer one form over another? If so, why?
FLICK: I feel like each book informs the next in ways I can’t predict. They feed off each other in content, structure, and form. My first love is for flash fiction. I wrote it exclusively for a decade, but then I was challenged (by Marly) to write a novel and in doing so I learned so much about setting and expanded sentence structure. I then took that knowledge back to my flash fiction. And then eventually took my understanding of the longer arc into longform nonfiction.
AUTHORLINK: I’m wondering what advice you offer to apprentice writers about either craft, or staying encouraged in the face of rejection, or both.
FLICK: Learn point of view. Really, really learn it. As time passes I feel it is the key to writing good fiction, to having control over your story. David Jauss has a fantastic essay on point of view that changed my life. Don’t ignore setting. Hone sentence-level writing. Also—learn how to correctly punctuate dialogue. It’s so important.
Rejection is constant, right? I try to have a lot of work and applications out at once so that when a rejection comes in I know it isn’t a finite end to things.
AUTHORLINK: What do you hope readers take away from reading I Have Not Considered Consequences?
FLICK: That’s a hard question! I hope readers see the world anew in some way.
AUTHORLINK: Discuss what you are working on now.
FLICK: I’m co-writing a nonfiction craft book with Ladette Randolph and Heather Lundine. It’s under contract and should see the light of day in 2026. Fiction-wise, I started drafting a second novel last February, and I thought I would be working on that now, but instead I’m writing stories on 3 1/2 x 5” Post-It Notes. Hahaha. I’ve been threatening to put together this Post-It Note manuscript for years and I think the time is now. We’ll see how it goes.
Sherrie Flick is the 2025 McGee Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing at Davidson College. She received a 2023 Creative Development Grant from the Heinz Endowments and a Writing Pittsburgh fellowship from the Creative Nonfiction Foundation. She served as co-editor for the Norton anthology Flash Fiction America and series editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018 (Braddock Avenue Books). Her third story collection, I Have Not Considered Consequences, was published in April 2025 with Autumn House Press. Her other works include, the essay collection Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist (University of Nebraska Press), Thank Your Lucky Stars: Short Stories (Autumn House), Whiskey, Etc.: Short (Short) Stories (Autumn House), and Reconsidering Happiness: A Novel (University of Nebraska Press). She lives in Pittsburgh.
