Patricia Q. Bidar’s Wild Plums was published earlier this year through ELJ Editions. In this interview, Joanna Theiss talks with Bidar about writing imperfect characters, the motivating power of deadlines, and Bidar’s coming of age as a writer.
Given Patricia Q. Bidar’s talent for writing flash fiction, it is no wonder that her novelette Wild Plums (ELJ Editions, 2024) opens on a scene that tastes like a spicy bite of flash. Restless Maya and her much-older boyfriend, Isaac, have just arrived in Marionberry, Oregon, where Isaac will be teaching at the local college. The family across the street is observing their move-in from folding chairs, reducing Maya and this significant moment in her new life down to an afternoon’s entertainment. But unlike flash, which often leaves us with, as Bidar puts it, a What the hell just happened? aftertaste, Wild Plums’ length means we can step past the moment and travel with Maya as she swings between holding herself apart from other women and yearning for connection to them. The result is an edgy exploration of female relationships in a world still largely directed by men, as snackable as flash and as flavorful and complex as a novel.
Joanna Theiss: Patricia, you are one of my favorite flash writers, and your flash has been included in Best Small Fictions and Flash Fiction America, so other people obviously agree with me. You also have a short fiction collection coming out next year, but Wild Plums is forty-seven pages long. Can you talk about the difference between writing “long” and writing flash?
Patricia Q. Bidar: When it comes to length, I’m proud to consider myself ambidextrous. Back in my graduate program at UC Davis, and for a while after that, I wrote novelette-length short stories. It’s a form that seems insanely long by flash standards! Like flash, longer short stories have focused moments and insights, but the narratives are like houses, with scenes like rooms.
I’m interested in how much readers’ attitudes toward Maya’s choices might play into their sympathies. I have to admit I sympathized more with Isaac’s ex-wife Hannah than with Maya, and then I chided myself for demanding that Maya be “likeable,” that dreaded standard we apply to women. In writing Maya, were you concerned about readers’ perception of her as the younger woman?
Not really about her as the younger woman. I worried more about the way she judges other women so harshly, which is why she thinks nothing of upending Isaac’s family. But Maya knows Naomi, Isaac’s teenaged daughter, sees through her, and dislikes her. At first, she convinces herself it doesn’t matter. I do want Naomi’s looming visit to feel like trouble. I think it does!
It certainly does. Maya’s concern with the condition of their house and her desire to be settled, while also intentionally sabotaging herself, is a theme that runs through Wild Plums. Were you drawn to writing about Maya’s distance from other women, both physical and emotional? Or did it derive organically from the story?
I was strongly drawn to writing about this theme. I wrote this story when I was thirty-six and a new mother in a new place. Women and friendships were very much on my mind then, and we’d just spent two years in a new region when my husband was getting his MFA. I was quite lonely, in spite of trying very hard to forge friendships. Maya has lost her mother and has no friends. I think she recognizes her own need to be anchored in a life – but has no clue how to begin building that. She is no closer to her ideal at the story’s end.
In general, the themes of my work are the themes of my life are the themes of my upcoming collection, Pardon Me for Moonwalking (Unsolicited Press, 2025), as well as the themes of the collection I’m sending to publishers now. Often, those stories consider the ways that people without means and who lack strong family bonds keep striving for love, keep living days and nights of significance. Some, like Maya, are way off-base. I love those characters best.
I appreciated the contrast between the college town of Marionberry and the more working-class Fairview. Is Fairview based on a real place?
Fairview resembles some towns in Oregon that I got to know while my husband and I lived there. I worked scores of temp jobs in my twenties and early thirties. Every milieu gave me a fish-out-of-water feeling. I was very judge-y.
You nailed the law office in Fairview where Maya works, especially with the line “we represent the good guys.” How much research did you do into this?
Some of my temp jobs were in law offices of one kind or another. I even looked into various law-associated jobs and learned about the many types of practices that are out there. I’m thinking that for someone to enjoy working in one of the more adversarial practices, they’d feel intense loyalty toward “their” side. Maya is very young and knows nothing about any of this when she starts working at the office in Fairview.
I’m curious about your writing habits. Can you tell me a little about them?
I have no real routine. What I do have after working way too much for too many years is some free time at last. I’m still grappling with how best to use it. I wrote Wild Plums, then there came a very long period when I had no community or bandwidth to write, and certainly not to submit anything. I first published a story at the age of fifty-eight. The collection I’m shopping around now will be my second full-length book. As Sarah Freligh says, “I’m grateful for every minute of time I get to write because it’s one less minute I have to sell to someone else.”
How do you motivate yourself to write?
Deadlines are great motivators. Deadlines for submissions can definitely provide fuel for revision. Workshops, classes, and writing groups do, too. I began writing flash fiction in 2017 in one of Meg Pokrass’s classes. I recently participated in a very early morning daily writing session called The Ungodly Hour Writing Club (West Coast Edition), put on by the Writing Co-Lab and hosted by Brian Gresko. Sarah Freligh teaches wonderful flash classes, Francine Witte offers pop-up write-ins, and SmokeLong runs a fabulous community called SmokeLong Fitness/SmokeLong Summer, which provides rather breakneck deadlines among extremely talented and motivated flash writers. It’s a real phenomenon.
Now that I’m older, my internal clock provides the ultimate deadline: I really am doing all this with an aim to legacy, even if at a very small level. There’s an urgency now.
Absolutely. There’s an urgency in your work, too, a demand to be heard. You mentioned that your writing went through a fallow period, but now you’re publishing so regularly. Do you think you needed those years to mature as a writer?
Well, Wild Plums was written in 1996 or so, and I think I had some things to say. For me, anything before thirty was more in the way of practice and learning. I was thirty-two and thirty-three in grad school and I think I was off to a good start. But in the twenty-five intervening years, I gained an enormous amount of perspective. I just had an essay in Past Ten on my life a decade ago, compared to now. I conferred a lot with my husband, read old journals, and basically lived and slept for weeks with that concept. It’s a real head-twirler! My point is: we’re always growing.
Thank goodness for that. What is your preferred length to read?
Flash fiction, short stories, and novels, though I read novels much less often now, because of a lack of time and sadly, attention. I happen to be reading a great novel now, Euphoria by Lily King. It’s a fictionalized account inspired by a year in the life of the anthropologist Margaret Mead, who helped upend the cultural blindness of early anthropological research. There’s some big drama coming—and a love triangle! And I’m eagerly awaiting my library’s copy of Miranda July’s All Fours. But mainly my reading settles most happily these days into the short story form and length. I likely spend the most time reading flash fiction. It’s the water I swim in, in classes, groups, on Twitter/X, and as a prose editor for SmokeLong Quarterly.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
I grew up in a refinery town, a port town that also abuts a federal prison. In my youth, San Pedro, California was also the site of a naval base and a major shipyard, both now shuttered. I’m from a family of bookworms. I’d read and loved Rudolfo Anaya, José Antonio Villarreal, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. In graduate school, Tillie Olsen, Edna O’Brien, and Raymond Carver opened doors in my head: you didn’t need to attend private school or live in Boston or New York to write. Time is money and money dictates choices. The world of literature has blossomed and telescoped out in magnificent ways, and we need to keep going. Art is the way we humans connect with the humanity in others.
Interviewed by Joanna Theiss
Joanna Theiss is a writer living in Washington, DC. Her short stories, interviews, and poetry have appeared in Chautauqua, Milk Candy Review, Peatsmoke, Best Microfiction, and elsewhere. She is an associate editor at Five South Lit. Previously, Joanna worked as a public defender, an international trade attorney, and a matchmaker, but not all at once. For more of her writing, please visit www.joannatheiss.com. Twitter: @joannavtheiss Instagram: @joannatheisswrites
Patricia is a Western writer from the Port of Los Angeles area. For most of the past four decades, she has called the San Francisco Bay Area home. Patricia is an alum of the UC Davis Graduate Writing Program, where she taught creative writing to undergraduate students and earned an MA in English. She also holds a BA in Filmmaking. Her writing has appeared in The Pinch, SmokeLong Quarterly, Atticus Review, Wigleaf, and Moon City Review, among many literary journals. Patricia’s stories have been widely anthologized including in Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton, 2023), Best Microfiction 2023 (Pelekinesis Press), and Best Small Fictions 2023 (Alternating Current Press). Patricia serves as a Submissions Editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. Apart from fiction, Patricia works as a freelance editor and writer for nonprofit organizations improving our world. She lives with her family and unusual dog outside of Oakland, California.