Recently, I’ve been talking about short fiction (just a little, here and here.) Also, June 22nd was NZ’s National Flash Fiction Day and one of NZ’s foremost exponents of the short fiction art, and flash fiction in particular, is undoubtedly Frankie McMillan.

So there seemed no better way to round off the short fiction posts than to tell you about Frankie’s collection, My Mother and the Hungarians. (Hungarians, for short. 😉 )

Just to get to the most important things first, I really enjoyed reading it. My Mother and the Hungarians is flash or very very short fiction, in many ways a Siamese twin to prose poetry. In this case, though, themes run through the collection, to the extent that it works together as a cohesive whole.

Frankie McMillan has a ‘voice’ that I’ve always found particularly distinctive. In the spirit of Emily Dickinson, she has a slantwise take on the world and people in it, a take that picks out the curious and downright strange, oddities and absurdities—to the extent that I always think of her work as subversive: not so much in a political sense but in terms of received wisdoms and traditional ways of looking at the world.

For me, Hungarians really worked in terms of its keen observation, humour, and pathos, as well as a sequence of connected short fictions. Clearly, I’m not alone in my appreciation either, since it was longlisted for the Ockham National Book Award in 2017.

If you like (very) short fiction and a slantwise look at the world, I recommend My Mother and the Hungarians. I know it’s still available in good book shops because I purchased my copy in Unity, Wellington. 🙂

Frankie MacMillan

I also note that an interview with Frankie appeared in the latest edition of Takahe magazine. The interviewer was Zoë Meager.

By way of the usual disclosure, yes, Frankie and I really are on first name terms. 😉 I also esteem her creative voice highly. Because of this, I have featured her work on my blog several times, so you might like to check out:

Out Of The Blue, 28-9-2010

My Father, The Oceanographer (17-01-2012)

Cathedral of the Poor (21-5-2013)

The house on Holloway Street (23-8-2016)

I also featured Frankie’s work on The Tuesday poem blog:

“Hourglass” and “at night my dead mother appears wanting soup” (17-3-2015)