Yes, that Corey Flintoff! When we came across the recently retired NPR reporter’s flash fiction story, “Dream of the White Worm,” we were of course intrigued. Then we discovered that with an honest, unassuming domestic scene, he’d managed to capture the disconnect between people who may love and care for each other deeply, but never fully understand the fears and challenges the others face. It was pretty cool to talk to someone whose voice we could hear in our heads… and to get to use the word “phallocracy.”
Erin McReynolds: Most people know you as an NPR correspondent, based in Moscow. Have you always written fiction on the side or is this a relatively recent development?
Corey Flintoff: I’ve been writing fiction since I was in high school, but I was never confident enough to send much of it out. Becoming a reporter satisfied my storytelling impulses for a long time, but I eventually learned that there are some truths that can’t be expressed as reportage. It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve returned to trying to deal with this in fiction.
EM: Who are some of your biggest influences in fiction?
CF: Flannery O’Connor is a major one. I encountered her work in grad school, and it inspired me to drop out and try to write seriously. Even though O’Connor deals with big theological themes—sin and redemption—her stories are very down to earth. You can read the writing and see how it’s done, how she achieves her effects. [She] makes it look easy, and that lures you into the trap of trying it for yourself. I felt the same way about Flaubert. You can read Madame Bovary, and even when you’re caught up in the story, you’ll be thinking “oooh, look what he’s doing now.”
Joyce Carol Oates has always been a hero of mine. I like that she always seems to live so fully in the dream of each story, and I like that she’s so promiscuous about genre—[she] writes literary stories and mystery, fantasy, sci-fi, and leaves it to other people to try to put labels on it.
EM: We love JCO. She’s in our current issue, too! Do you think you might write non-fiction someday, as well? I’m a thousand percent sure I’m not alone in thinking your insight on Russian-U.S. affairs would be very well worth the read. Or perhaps a memoir?
CF: I thought at one point that I had said everything I needed to say in my reporting, but lately I realize that I never wrote about how my experiences connected me to the people I was reporting about. Not the foreign-policy stuff, but the wars and revolutions and disasters. They affected me profoundly, and I think I need to find some way to talk about that.
EM: I could see that being a wonderful and much-needed book. Would you divide it up into shorter standalone pieces, like a collection of essays?
CF: I think it would have to be a series of episodes, because that’s the way I experienced my reporting career, as new stories in wildly different settings, different characters, different kinds of crises. Then you come back to base or back home so each experience is isolated from the rest, like a bead on a string. I imagine that any memoir of mine would be more like a short-story collection than a novel.
EM: You sent “Dream of the White Worm” to us back in 2016, before the election and before #MeToo. On its surface it’s a subtle, realistic, and tender moment of disconnection in a marriage between two middle-aged people, and yet we couldn’t help but read it as an allegory about the limits of what men (even well-intentioned ones) can understand about the female experience in a, well, phallocracy. Did you know that’s what you were writing?
CF: I thought I was writing mostly about the man’s misapprehension of his wife’s dream, the way he attaches his own anxieties, his feelings of impotence and social isolation to her story. I didn’t realize until later that her narrative is all about being smothered and hemmed in by this phallic creature, her fear of making a false move that could trigger the creature’s malice.
EM: I love when you’re surprised by a story as you’re writing it. When you were reporting, was there room to be surprised in the same way?
CF: Absolutely. In fact, my friend Ira Glass, the genius behind This American Life, likes to say that you don’t really even know you have a story until it surprises you, until it turns out to be something you didn’t expect. I always used to try to imagine my stories in advance, so I’d have questions in my mind and a line of inquiry to pursue, but the best stories rarely turned out to be what I’d imagined. That’s why good reporters ask open-ended questions and allow lots of time for people to reflect on their answers. How did you feel then? How do you feel about it now? Do you think your experience changed you? And finally, is there anything else you want to say? In fiction, those are the same questions you should ask your characters.
EM: I don’t think I’m alone in saying that the calm, cool collective voice of NPR reporters such as yourself has soothed us over the years, but especially in this anxiety-flooded time of “alternative facts” and fearmongering and social media hysterics. What do you, after a decades-long career in journalism, make of this?
CF: My years in Russia showed me how successful the Kremlin could be at presenting blatant propaganda in formats that resembled regular news programming, especially television and cable news. That’s exactly what’s been happening in the United States, with the advent of Fox News. Fox normalized the idea of hyper-partisan “news-like” programming, and successfully helped shift the Republican Party further and further to the right. Now it’s too easy for news consumers to spend all their time in partisan echo chambers that just reinforce the same views. I’m not sure how we can reclaim those readers and viewers and listeners for news outlets that try to be objective.
EM: Now, to your point… Is there anything else you want to say?
CF: Yes, but I want to try to say it in fiction.
Corey Flintoff is a former foreign correspondent for NPR. His assignments included Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Ukraine. His most recent posting was as NPR’s bureau chief in Moscow, where he and his family spent four years. Flintoff’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Glimmer Train. His story Early Stages won first place in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Contest in 2017. He currently lives in Maryland.