I write mostly personal essays or memoirs, so my work bends toward the lengthy; it isn’t unusual for an essay to run fifteen pages. When I started doing public readings, it took about twenty minutes or more to read one piece, but this was not an issue as I would either read alone or with someone else who would do all their work at once and then I’d do mine, block style.

But then my dear friend, poet Tim Seibles, suggested we read together, that is, on stage at the same time, alternating pieces. We did a series of twelve readings for roughly two-hundred people each time at the now defunct Jewish Mother in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The Jewish Mother Sessions forced me to write short pieces so that when we alternated on stage, he didn’t read a four-minute poem followed by me reading a thirty minute essay; we’d have been there all night.

So I took fragments of long pieces, and then I started to write dedicated short work a la Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour.” I’m not a poet, but I threw a couple of lame attempts in there as well later in the evening after the crowd had been drinking a while. As a writer, I loved the exercise of telling a story, or more often just a piece of story, in a flash. Hence, “Flash non-fiction” entered my world, and since then many were collected in my book, Fragments: Flash Non-Fiction.

The individual pieces had been picked up by some journals, including Kestrel, Matador, Sand, and more. I wrote about animal names, about health conditions, about 911 and art. A few pieces got some legs, like “Instructions for Walking with an Old Man at the Mall,” originally written for our readings, picked up by Kestrel, reprinted in Fragments, and then anthologized several times. This piece, “Small Talk,” is one of my favorites for self-explanatory reasons. I’m certainly more comfortable after a glass of cab in front of a few hundred people who have had several gin and tonics than I am in front of a small camera in a small space. But as my mother says in a phrase she is convinced she coined, “It is what it is.”

I learned from Tim to STFU and just read. So, here, from my office at Old Dominion University a few years ago, is “Small Talk.” Thank you for tolerating my face and voice for a few minutes.