Flashes of Memory: Exploring the Emotional Breadth of Short Form Writing

An Interview with Davon Loeb

By Arielle Bernstein

Davon Loeb

In his memoir, The In-Betweens, Davon Loeb writes lyrical essays that explore family, identity, and culture. I was particularly struck by Davon’s embrace of the short form and had the honor of speaking with him about his choices in crafting this beautiful and powerful collection.

Arielle Bernstein: Your short, lyrical essays are so poetic—what is exciting for you about the short essay form? What unique possibilities does that it offer?

Davon Loeb: I love writing short essays, which was something I learned from reading poetry, especially writers like Ross Gay, Patrick Rosal, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Iain Haley Pollack, and so many others who embrace the narrative form, but emphasize the lyric. In my early attempts to create The In-Betweens, I wrote prose-style poems and envisioned this as a collection of poetry rather than a traditional memoir. However, many of the chapters demanded longer storytelling, so I married these two forms and structured the memoir as a series of vignettes with varying lengths. I think there’s such power in writing that is equally narratively and lyrically driven.

AB: How do you decide the length of a particular passage?

DL: Sometimes retelling a story only allows for flash-length passages because the memories themselves vary in length. If I only remember a feeling, a sensory detail, an image, nostalgia, my memoir wants to replicate that, as well as honor the authenticity of remembering through these variations in the storytelling. The decision to write flash essays versus longer-form essays is simply driven by the memory itself, which is why the chapters later in my memoir are longer. In those chapters, the memories are clearer, and the writing reflects that certainty. Developing The In-Betweens towards a full-length book was motivated by creating a union between self-discovery, the lyric, and a conventional memoir. 

AB: Something I really admired about your book is how you demonstrate empathy for every person you craft as a character—how do you approach this type of character exploration in a shorter form? 

DL: Writing characters is really challenging. How do you create a round and dynamic character if the very real person you remember was flat and one dimensional? Memoir is truth-telling, so it is incredibly difficult to build these people and show them wholly, especially in short form writing because of the page time and the narrator’s perspective. In short form writing, you have to utilize every word with economic precision, so my descriptions of characters are always direct and indirect characterizations—that each detail builds a picture of who they are, mentally and physically, as well as what they contribute to the essay, to the entire memoir. You have to be intentional about the details you include. Can you demand empathy from your reader in a flash essay? Yes, absolutely, but only if your details, when describing your characters, are intentional and are working for you. 

AB: Will you continue to explore the short form as you work on new projects?

DL: I’m currently working on a collection of essays about parenting and fatherhood. I recently published a piece, “The House Fire by the Lake” at Gulf Coast Journal, which uses the braided structure and is written as a short-form essay. I’m really interested in embracing this structure but using my poetic muscles, the lyric, with the same economy as my word count. As a parent, to young children, writing about parenting, I really don’t have the time to pursue essays longer than 2,000 words, and to be honest, I don’t want to write longer pieces because I enjoy the constraint of language.

AB: Something I love about lyrical writing is that it allows for the reader to connect to your emotional experience in a way that feels nuanced rather than didactic. Why was it important for you to resist the “neat” ending?

DL: Life is not neat. In writing creative nonfiction, there is this push to end with neat reflections, but that doesn’t interest me, at least, not from a craft perspective. There are examples of didactic reflections in my memoir, but I use a braided structure to mend personal narratives, the first strand, to ethics, to culture, to race, the second strand, while arriving at meaning, the third strand, throughout the essay rather than saving it for the end of the chapter. I prefer this form because it allows readers to experience this understanding alongside the narrator, which feels realer to me–that we don’t reflect at the end of any given experience in life, that the learning comes in flashes, or sometimes, not at all.  
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Davon Loeb is the author of the memoir, The In-Betweens, a Lyrical Memoir (West Virginia University Press) and is an assistant features editor at The Rumpus. He earned an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University-Camden and has had work published in the Sun Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Slate, Electric Literature, Catapult Magazine, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Joyland Magazine, Gulf Coast Journal, the Best American Essays Anthology 2022, and elsewhere. Davon is a husband, father, and teacher located in New Jersey. Learn more at linktr.ee/davonloeb. 

Arielle Bernstein is a writer and cultural critic who explores how social media and digital communications shape human expression, interaction, intimacy, and empathy, as well as the impact of artificial intelligence on our emotional lives. Her work has been published in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Millions, Salon, AV Club, and many other publications. She teaches writing at American University in Washington, DC, where she also co-directs the MA in Literature, Culture, and Technology. She is writing her first novel.