Flash fiction
about solitude.

Solitude is not loneliness. It is the condition in which the writing happens.

Alone in cities · The writer's condition · Chosen versus imposed

Most of Tumbleweed Words was written in solitude — in hostel rooms, in cafés where nobody knew who I was, on trains where the other passengers were occupied with their own lives. Solitude is the condition of the nomadic writer, and it is also a literary subject in its own right: what happens to the self when it is unwitnessed, what it notices when there is no one to perform for. The flash fiction about solitude is the most interior work in the archive.

"In the hostel in Lisbon he had a room with four beds and he was the only one in it. He lay on the bottom bunk and listened to the city. By three in the morning he had written more than he had in the previous three months at home."

David — Tumbleweed Words — Lisbon

Writing about solitude requires distinguishing it from loneliness — solitude is chosen, productive, the state in which thought becomes available. The Tumbleweed Words solitude pieces are concerned with this distinction and with what solitude produces: not introspection for its own sake but the sharpened attention to the external world that being unoccupied by social performance allows. You see more when you are alone.

David — Tumbleweed Words Flash fiction and poetry written on trains, in hostels, and in city streets. Published in Litro, Adelaide Magazine, Cleaver Magazine. Pushcart-nominated. Read on Substack.