Interview by Anne Anthony
A CONVERSATION WITH FIONA MCKAY, AUTHOR OF THE LIVES OF THE DEAD (Ad Hoc Fiction)
Based in Dublin, Ireland, Fiona McKay is a lawyer-turned-author who has become a prolific writer of flash fiction over the past several years. Since 2023, she’s published two novellas-in-flash as well as a collection of flash stories.
I first met Fiona during the 2025 SmokeLong Quarterly March Micro Marathon, when we were assigned to the same writing group. As with any online writing workshop, the quality of feedback depends on the writers assigned to the group. The feedback Fiona gave stood out because of how detailed and encouraging it was and how it inspired, rather than dictated, creative solutions. It came as no surprise she considers her ability to give feedback her “superpower.”
In a series of recent conversations, Fiona and I discussed her approaches to structuring short fiction and providing feedback to other writers, as well as how her life experiences have influenced her writing and process.
Anne Anthony: You mentioned in a SmokeLong Quarterly interview that you focus on two things when giving feedback: “1) getting into the mind of the reader to see what they see, and 2) figuring out what the story is really about.” Would you expand more on your feedback focus?
Fiona McKay: I feel that as a writer writes, there are two stories at play. The first is the “vibes story”—that shimmering idea that floats in the writer’s head, that the writer is trying to capture in something as fixed and formed as language, to recreate those vibes in someone else’s head, like some kind of teleportation. And then there is what appears on the screen or the page, propelled by the writer’s hands and brain.
As I write, when I read back that second story, I still have the vibes story floating in my mind, and sometimes, the two seem the same, making me believe I have captured the story’s essence. And then a reader comes to it fresh, and their feedback shows me that I have not captured on the page all the detail needed to transmit the story on to a reader. It’s like not seeing typos; our brains are always filling in the gaps, so we don’t see what is written on the page. When I give feedback, I will often give a summary of the story, so that the writer can see what I see when I’m reading the story on the page and what’s missing of the “vibes story.” It’s a process of clarification. The writer can come to see the gaps that their brain is skimming over.
Anne: That’s the hardest part of writing, isn’t it? Getting what you imagine in your mind down on paper? I’ve been surprised by how my story is read far differently than how I intended.
Now, for the second part in giving feedback, how do you go about figuring out a writer’s story?
Fiona: SmokeLong Fitness called it the “aboutness” of the story, and that, for me, is the understory—the layers of what the writer is telling the reader without explicitly laying it all out on the page. It is the opposite of the story on the page; it’s the story off the page, the story that shimmers in the white space of the page, hides in the gap between paragraphs, trails off in subtle hints that allow the reader to do the work of putting it all together, the satisfying work of seeing that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This is critical in flash fiction. That afterburn of the full story coming together and lingering in the mind is what makes it such a great form.
Anne: As we talked about doing the interview, you shared that you had been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism later in life. It made me wonder if your approach to offering feedback is intrinsically tied to your neurodiversity (ND). It very much echoes your first point— “see[ing] what they see.” Did learning you had ADHD and autism affect you and your writing?
Fiona: Such an interesting question. I found out that I’m autistic with ADHD when I was fifty-five. Of course, I have always been autistic with ADHD, but instead of knowing that, I thought I was “a square peg,” different, wrong. The diagnosis gave me permission to be myself, permission to write the way I write and stop trying to be someone else. Such a relief! I don’t know that my writing changed, but my understanding of both it and myself changed.
For example, I have a very strong desire to make sure I have everything on the page. Many neurodivergent people find themselves over-explaining to ensure they are understood, but in writing, I try to strike a balance. Like many writers, I write my way into a piece, and often I look at whether the first paragraph needs to be there or whether it contains valuable information that would be better off threaded through the subsequent paragraphs. I’m never offended if someone gives me feedback along those lines; I’m usually already thinking it. (I’m thinking it right now about a scene I wrote this week for my novel.) Different forms have different needs, so a novel or short story can allow for a little more exposition although writing flash can be a useful discipline for all writers because it hones writing.
Anne: As I read more about late-diagnosed autistic women, I discovered that they typically became experts at “people-watching” as a strategy to blend in, which ultimately makes them masters of observation. Does that resonate for you? Your writing certainly captures those delicate details that bring characters to life on the page.
Fiona: I reread another interview from a few years ago, where I said I like to picture what I’m writing, and interestingly, one of the things I discovered on my ND journey is that actually I don’t picture things at all. I don’t have a very visual imagination. (No, I cannot picture a shiny red apple if I close my eyes.) For me, picturing things is like getting a glimpse of something: if you can imagine being on a train, looking out the window, then the train is in a tunnel, and for that brief moment, you get an image of the inside of the train compartment reflected in the glass, and then it’s gone. That’s my visual imagination. When I am thinking of a character, I try to inhabit them. I put myself inside their body, inside their mind. I know that compared to some other writers, I am very much in my characters’ heads, experiencing life somewhat removed. That is how my brain works, and I can only lean into that. And maybe it is true that as an autistic woman I have spent a lot of my time working other people out, putting myself inside their heads. I think, if I hadn’t studied law, I would have liked to study psychology. People are infinitely interesting!
Anne: I’d like to shift now to talk about your most recently published novella-in-flash, The Lives of the Dead. I could not put your book down—read it cover-to-cover in a day. The plot of a wife controlled by a husband isn’t an especially new one but your idea of braiding it with “reworked fairytales” made it unusually fresh and engaging. Where did you get the idea for the structure?
Fiona: I’m glad you found it compelling. In terms of structure—I’ll actually be teaching a Novella-In-Flash workshop this summer at the Bath Flash Fiction Festival. I’ll be talking about structure quite a bit at that. But to put it simply, a novella-in-flash is not just a novella with chapters under 1,000 words; there has to be something more. Much of flash is about finding the story in the white space, and the fairy tales acted as a kind of white space in the novella—a moment for the reader to pause in Kate’s story, read something seemingly unrelated, but which adds to the understanding of that story when the reader goes back to it. I chose fairy tales because I’m a little obsessed with them. They provide points of reference that most readers can access from memory—characters, tropes—so they work well for flash, as those pre-existing reference points cut down on the need for exposition. Fairy tales were warnings. They lend themselves so well to feminist interpretations in our modern world. I have a particular love for Red Riding Hood and have written it a number of times, including the flash, “The Pack,” in this book, where I invert the character traits and upend a lot of the expectations.
Anne: When we talked, you mentioned that you’d been writing since childhood but never seriously until family events—the birth of your daughter, the decline of your parents—required you to take a break from your fifteen-year career as a litigation lawyer. That break evolved into a complete career change though, didn’t it? How did you finally decide: I just want to write. That’s what I want. Forget that law degree?
Fiona: I had always wanted to be a writer and had wanted to study English. I was persuaded that law had a clearer career path, so I studied that instead. But writing was always there, under the surface. As my life priorities shifted, that career path became less clear. When my father died in 2017, I spent a lot of time caring for my mother, which became a full-time job even though she was in a nursing home. She wasn’t a very happy person and needed a lot of support.
Before the pandemic, I was writing novels, mostly in a vacuum. No writing partner, no writing groups, no writing workshops. I had no writing curriculum vitae, biography, or publications. I thought I had no talent or ability to write short fiction. When the pandemic happened, nursing homes were locked down, and I couldn’t visit. For the first time in a decade, I got to think about what I wanted. I read an interesting book called How to be Everything: A Guide for Those Who (Still) Don’t Know What They Want to Be When They Grow Up, by Emilie Wapnick during the summer of 2020 and realized what I wanted was to write. Just that—write.
Interestingly enough, while searching for online learning opportunities for my daughter during 2020 while homeschooling her, I came across the Writers Headquarters community.
Anne: Would you mind talking more about the Writers HQ community for readers unfamiliar with the group?
Fiona: Writers’ HQ is a great community of writers who were amazing during the pandemic, offering free access to one of their courses each month. They run a free online flash space called Flash Face Off, where there is a prompt each week, and writers have a limit of 500 words. There is a monthly online reading where four or five writers get to read their work. You have to sign up for an account, but it’s free for Flash Face Off. I recommend it highly!
I carved out time for myself to do some of the WHQ courses and found I could learn how to write short fiction. There is a workshop space for these stories with peer feedback; this is where my work received feedback for the first time, and I started to learn how to give feedback myself. My plan at the time was to edit a novel, but these courses unlocked something in me. I became a paid member, allowing me to do a course called Short Fiction with Friends—an asynchronous online course where we had coursework and gave each other feedback. Then they had a new course about Flash Fiction, and though I was meant to be editing the novel, I thought, Sure what harm could a little one-week course be about this thing called flash fiction? Ha! I became addicted to flash, and within a couple of months, I started getting publications, which was mind-blowing to me. I was able to build up a bio, and in 2021 applied to the Arts Council here in Ireland for funding. When I received that email that I’d get the funding, I cried in my car and immediately changed my Twitter bio to Writer. I owe WHQ everything!
Anne: Your life experiences as a wife, mother, and daughter of aging parents is one familiar to many writers. How do you find time and space in your life to make room for your writing? Or am I asking the wrong question? As a writer, how do you make room in your life for your family?
Fiona: I love how you phrase that question two different ways. My brain pinged with the idea that the first question is the one women ask themselves and the second would be how men look at it! Maybe that’s unfair? But in terms of the expectations on women, especially those not working outside the home, I feel that being a writer is seen as taking away, whereas the person going out to work is out of the house for twelve, thirteen hours a day, without question.
Perhaps money and capitalism accounts for some of it? Although, for the past three years, I have been lucky enough to be part of a pilot project here in Ireland—Basic Income for Artists—where we were paid €315 per week to pursue our artistic goals. It was amazing! That feeling of actually being paid to create—I don’t think there’s a better feeling. Historically, artists have had patronage, and I think art should be divorced from capitalism as much as possible. Otherwise, we are just producing widgets for “the market,” and that is not what art is about. That pilot project was limited to a lottery of 2,000 people from those who applied, and the scheme is now being made permanent at that level. So, I will have to apply again and hope.
The pull of family is strong. My mother died in 2023, so I’m no longer in that “sandwich” generation. But my daughter is a teen, and teens need as much time as younger kids but often later at night! I do a lot of driving. I asked her just now if I give her enough time. She said, “Well, some people don’t see much of their parents at all,” which is true. I’m there in the morning before school, I take a break when she comes in from school, and we spend dinnertime and the evening together as a family. I do end up working seven days a week most weeks because I need to catch up on weekends, and sometimes I do get burnt out. I’m a bit of a workaholic; it may be the whole ND trait of locking into a task and not being able to stop once I’ve started. I have many alarms set on my phone for things because otherwise I would just keep working and forget. I guess it is a constant juggling act.
Anne: The manuscript for your novella-in-flash, Her Permanent Collection, was recently Highly Commended in the 2026 Bath Flash Fiction Novella-in-Flash’s competition. Jude Higgins, in her judge’s report, wrote that it “is the story of Grace, whose mother is deeply critical of her, (particularly about her physical appearance) from an early age and whose husband becomes critical during their marriage.” Do you struggle with writing especially emotional passages? Do you ever need to take breaks from your writing for that very reason?
Fiona: Actually, no—although I have cried when reading them back after the whole project is finished. But not while writing them. I think the work of writing—the necessity to make word choices that convey the feelings or emotions in a way that the reader experiences them, all the while showing the reader rather than telling—that distracts from the feeling of the emotion itself. Maybe again that’s being autistic? I can be very detached from emotions, very logical in how I approach things, and then the emotions can pile up and hit me together. I have learned not to reread my novellas in public places: I did this preparing to meet with an online book group that focuses on novellas-in-flash and ended up crying in a shopping-centre café.
Anne: I keep a list of “golden gems” shared by writers or workshop facilitators. Do you have writing tips you’d like to share?
Fiona: Over the years, I’ve learned that the tips I’ve given other writers when reviewing their work have become the same tips I follow, the guiding lights to my own writing. For example, flash fiction writers are cautioned against too much exposition, and while I allow myself to write my way into a story, I am extra-critical of the first few paragraphs, question whether they contain details that can be woven into the story’s fabric, or whether they were only necessary to get me started—sort of like training wheels for the piece so that I could get my writerly balance. The same is true of the final paragraph. I ask myself if it is there to tell an ending that has already been shown. If so, then it goes, even if I love the sentences. Writers must trust the reader.
I also strongly advise writers to give their work to someone else to read before calling it finished. Readers sometimes find parts of a story that don’t make sense, and this can either be because the writer hasn’t fully captured the story in their head or has gone down the rabbit-hole of a metaphor and lost sight of where the metaphor and the story coincide. It is valuable information to know that the reader is not getting the point. I try to be open to how to put just enough on the page for the reader without telling too much, but that can be a very fine line, and this is where feedback from beta readers is invaluable—seeing how the story lands.
And finally, the twin engines that power a story: what is the story about, and what is the story REALLY about? I am always asking myself these questions, as I write, as I edit, and as I give feedback to others. They are the underpinnings of every piece of fiction—narrative and layers. Good flash is all about getting these in balance.
The Lives of the Dead by Fiona McKay was published in July 2025 by Ad Hoc Fiction.
Fiona McKay is the author of the novellas-in-flash, The Lives of the Dead (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2025), The Top Road (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2023), and the flash fiction collection Drawn and Quartered (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). She was a SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow in 2023. Her flash fiction is in Gone Lawn, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, The Forge, Ghost Parachute, trampset, Fractured Lit, and others. Her work is included in Best Small Fictions 2024. She lives in Dublin, Ireland. Find her on social media: X @fionaemckayryan, Bluesky @fionamckay.bsky.social, and Instagram @fionamckaywrites.
Anne Anthony credits her steady diet of comic books as a child for her ardent belief in superpowers. Her gritty, tender, and amusing stories feature compelling but flawed characters. She has most recently been published in Ghost Parachute, Remington Review, Gooseberry Pie Lit Magazine, Cutleaf Journal, and elsewhere. In 2019, she released a short story collection, A Blue Moon & Other Murmurs of the Heart. Her story “It’s a Mother Thing” was nominated for Best Microfiction 2024 by Cleaver Magazine. Her novel-in-flash will be forthcoming in early 2027. Find more of her writing here: https://linktr.ee/anchalastudio.
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