In this episode, Julia F. Green and Ralph Walker welcome Heather Sweeney to discuss Casey Mulligan Walsh’s Still, a micro-nonfiction published in Split Lip Magazine.

Read: Still by Casey Mulligan Walsh (learn more about the author here)

Nearly all one sentence, this 500-word flash is a breathless rush that captures the unthinkable loss of a child and conveys staggering emotion through the clever use of the word still. This conversation explores how the smallest forms can be the most challenging, the author’s choices about what details to include and exclude, and the power of imagery and repetition.

Prompt: Write a 1,000 word flash piece, either fiction or nonfiction. Then rewrite the piece in 500 words. Rewrite it again at 250 words. Then 100 words.

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Guest Bio:

Heather Sweeney is the author of the upcoming memoir Camouflage: How I Emerged from the Shadows of a Military Marriage. She writes about divorce, life as a military spouse, parenting, and women’s health, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, HuffPost, TODAY.com, Newsweek, Business Insider, Good Housekeeping, Healthline, and Military.com, among many others. She lives in Virginia with her boyfriend, two college-aged kids, and their geriatric Labrador retriever.

Her forthcoming memoir Camouflage: How I Emerged from the Shadows of a Military Marriage is about a woman’s journey from being overshadowed by her husband’s military career to rediscovering her identity as a single mother entering a new stage in life, when she learned that the hardships of military life—the forced independence, frequent loneliness, required adaptability, and fierce resilience—had trained her for life after divorce.

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Writing in the Dark is co-hosted by Julia F. Green (Substack, Bluesky, website) and Ralph Walker (Twitter, website) and edited by Aaron Fyler, with cover art by Jarmusch.

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