Mardi Louisell, a regular columnist for iPinion, recently published a piece of flash fiction, “Any Friend of My Friend,” in the Smokelong Quarterly, one of the oldest and most prominent online publishers of flash fiction.

Smokelong liked the story so much they did a fun interview with her. Read it here and see why you’ll want to read much more of her work.

Mardith Louisell

Mardi’s collection of flash fiction, Beside Myself, is now being considered by a major press. In the book, a funny, neurotic and well-meaning narrator struggles with death, relationships, disorder and everything that doesn’t work in the modern world-–computers, poverty, boyfriends, bureaucracies, and her own obsessive thoughts.

Immersed in an internal monologue, entrapped by her boyfriend’s habits, saddened by deaths and felled by entropy, the narrator ekes out a tentative identity, and occasional happiness, by keeping magazines from dropping into her boyfriend’s toilet, searching for the perfect chocolate chip cookie, cleaning counters, and measuring sorrow through a wool coat good to thirty below.

It’s required reading for anyone who’s ever been in a relationship.

Mardi has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, has taught creative writing, and is the editor of your dreams. Her essays and stories have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Solstice Literary Magazine, Sleet, Redwood Coast Review, Minnesota Magazine, South Loop Review, and in anthologies, most recently, Best Travel Writing 2012.

You can reach her here.