Salvatore Buttaci Flashes His Shorts - Interview

PDB) Can you pitch me your new book in 25 words or less?

Sal) Flashing My Shorts is a collection of 164 flash-fiction stories running the gamut from humor to horror. The perfect smorgasbord of tasty treats for everyone!

PDB) When did you start writing?

Sal) When I was nine. I had written a poem to my mother on the occasion of Mother’s Day. She read it and cried. Then my father asked me to honor him too with a poem for an early Father’s Day. From there I started writing short stories too. In fact, in grade six, the teacher would allow us to read our poems and stories during rainy lunch hours, so I would pray for rain.

My friend George Neuman who could draw very well stood up in the front of the room with me because he was the illustrator of my lunch-hour stories. While I read, he held up his art work.

Then when I got home, I read my story after dinner. My sister Joanie would kick me under the table because she wanted to go play, but no one could leave till I was done. Sometimes, just to be spiteful, I would make the story longer by making it up as I went along, pretending to read from my writer’s notebook.

PDB) When and how did you get involved with Six Sentences?

Sal) In 2007, my good friend Tovli and I were members of the West Virginia Poetry Society until it went defunct. She suggested I should join Six Sentences because I enjoyed brief writings and would meet lots of great writers there. And I have done that.

PDB) If you could choose three stories as examples of your work, what would they be?

Sal) I‘ve written quite a few stories in my day. I try to keep the genres varied, so I don‘t get typecast in any particular one. Having said that, I completely contradict myself by listing four (did you ask for three?) of my stories, all recent ones, and all quite serious. This is not to say I do not write humorous stories; I do, and laugh out loud while writing them.

My major concern in writing any of my stories is to characterization. Of course, plot makes the story, but it’s the antagonist and the protagonist who create that problem and resolve it by story’s end. Readers need to have a clear picture of who these main characters are or the plot becomes trivial

“Barrymore.” http://at-the-bijou.blogspot.com/search/label/Salvatore%20Buttaci
(February 25, 2010)

“Someone’s After Me.” http://wordvamp.blogspot.com/2010/02/guest-write-salvatore- buttaci.html (February 26, 2010).

“Connie’s Dead.” alongstoryshort.net. February 2010.

“La Dolce Vita Eterna.” Flashing My Shorts. (Maine: All Things That Matter Press, 1010), 102-105.


PDB) Do you consider yourself to be an international writer?

Sal) Some of my poetry has been published overseas. My favorite overseas credit is a poem called “Sicily” in a bilingual Italian American anthology of Italian American poets. I’ve had several stories published in British publications as well as Portuguese and Icelandic, but what I truly want is to see my new book Flashing My Shorts translated into a few foreign languages and sell, if not like hotcakes, then at least like pizzas, gyros, French fries, scones, and burritos!

While a near unknown in the international marketplace, I will say that my themes and plots and characters are internationally appealing. I enjoy constructing characters whose roots are European or extraterrestrial; in other words, not always American.


PDB) What have you got in store for 2010?

Sal) I am always writing and submitting my work for publication. It’s an ongoing process in which all writers involve themselves. The year is still young, but I’ve managed to enjoy already twenty-two publications of my poems, stories, articles, and letters.

This will be the year I spend editing the first draft of my novel Carmelu the Sicilian. I wrote this book during a nanowrimo November in 2008 as my statement against the rampant media bias against Italian Americans. I am sick and tired of shows like The Sopranos and Jersey Shore, which disparage my ethnicity by portraying us as murdering Mafiosi who are about as dumb as unsharpened pencils. My book addresses that injustice in the form of a novel about a man who stands up to the media and makes a difference.

I also intend this year to revise my November 2009 nanowrimo novel Denver-under-Dome, based on an earlier short story of mine called “Under the Dome of Noonan,” which was written and published years before Stephen King’s new book, sometime in 1997 and published at http://www.the-manhattanite.com/dome_of_noonan.htm

If the year does not run out, maybe I will assemble a collection of my poetry and also do a follow-up to my new book Flashing My Shorts. I could call it Flashing My Shorts Again,
or perhaps Flashes of Memory or Flash Gordon I’m Not. I’ll think of something.

FLASHING MY SHORTS (by Salvatore Buttaci)
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http://www.allthingsthatmatterpress.com/buynow.htm