Chatting with Tiffany Sciacca

Author Highlight​

Tiffany Sciacca was born in a small town, fled her small town, and is back again. She is a poet new to the Flash Fiction genre, whose work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, MER, Pidgeonholes, and Blink-Ink. When not writing, she watches horror movies and haunts thrift stores.

Check out her Substack here.

Tiffany S.

​Jen: Hi, Tiffany! So let's dive right in. I am a huge fan of your writing, and I'm always curious about writers' influences. What is your favorite book/story?

Tiffany: I don’t have a favorite anything. Not even a piece of my own, I used to feel guilty that I didn’t really have a top 10 or 5 of anything. Or was able to recite a piece of my own by heart. That somehow I was not legit if I did not have or could not do these things. But that is just not how my mind works. I will say that one book that I used to consistently return to every winter was Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. At the time I was really obsessed with the Paris of the 20’s, 30’s. I bought my first copy of it at a yard sale at the mouth of a Chicago cemetery and the woman who sold it to me? Her mother used to babysit Hemingway. Did I mention that I had also been told by an old Polish psychic that in a past life I was a Prima Ballerina who was basically a horrible person and that was why I was going through strife at the that present time? Ha!

Jen: How has your education or professional career impacted the way you approach creative
work?

Tiffany: I think my current job allows different ways to tell a story I’m already in the middle of. I’ve always written about death. Growing old, etc. Now I have a front-row seat to all of it and it has awakened ghosts I’d forgotten. It’s scary because sometimes I feel like something’s been tapped and is now a bit out of control.
 
Jen: When and how did you start writing?

Tiffany: I started writing well when I could write with more freedom about what I loved, who I loved, etc. without the teen angst, was the early years of Livejournal. Good times! I had a tight community of writers, artists.

Jen: Can you tell us a little more about the piece below? What inspired you to write it?

Tiffany: Kenmore Street was my first acceptance for a CNF piece. Pidgeonholes did me the honor.  What inspired me to write it was nostalgia. The nostalgia of not just first love, but the first love that stuck and still holds.

Kenmore Street

Back then I never thought men could talk for hours on end in the darkness of a parked car. We talked as if it would be the first and last time. The only light coming out of a fifth-floor apartment window, silhouette of a cat mystifying the moment. Your car smelled of cigarettes, as did your fingers and mine when I took your smoking hand, rubbing and rubbing as if to straighten your love line. Knowing our hearts were weak from the false starts of first love. That painful swell of hope. We talked of love lessons wasted on parents more focused on the shallow ends. We shared the songs that first introduced us to love, the songs that mimicked our heartbreak and still hummed once we were happy. But that night we fought to hold on to a spell we knew worked only on paper or in prayer. You suggested The Melrose next, “our place” for a Farmer’s Breakfast and bottomless cups of coffee and I, smoking one of your cigarettes, said yes.

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Jen: What do you find most difficult about the writing/publishing world?

Tiffany: I think what is so difficult about the writing/publishing world is probably the same as what is so great? A lot more voices out there doing wonderful work. We still have breakouts but there is still a lot of gatekeeping. 

We all want to amplify our circle but can’t allow ourselves to be confined to it. That is what I love about us. There is a balance.

Jen: What do you find most rewarding about the writing/publishing world?

Tiffany: The most rewarding thing is discovering great writing! When I come across a piece that makes me smile, wince. Makes me wish I’d written it but still have the chance to place it. Awesome.

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