“A bear walks into a bar” sounds like the beginning of a joke. But in writer Sherrie Flick’s latest collection of short stories, it’s just one of the many possible scenarios where a bear might find itself. The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple recently spoke with Flick about the book, I Have Not Considered Consequences, and how bears found their way into the stories.
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Kara Holsopple: Throughout this collection are stories that feature bears: a bear that plays the piano, works at an office, and wears floral cotton underwear. In the acknowledgments, you write “Special, special thanks to the bear, whoever you are, wherever you came from.” Why a bear?
Sherrie Flick: The bear came to me during the pandemic. And if you think about the time of the pandemic and how our brains were working, it doesn’t seem that weird, right? I was finishing up an essay collection, revising my essay collection Homing and writing these bear stories on the side to kind of have a time out or procrastinate, not really thinking they were going to become anything. And then this bearness, this bear consciousness kind of came to me like a muse. The muse was with me and then I wrote about 13 stories and then it trotted away. So the bear was here and then left and the impulse for the stories were more a bear consciousness more than a bear animal.
Kara Holsopple: Did you have to do any research about bears for the stories or do you have experience with bears?
Sherrie Flick: I have zero bear experience. I did a minimum amount of research kind of purposefully. I didn’t want to get too in the weeds about bears, but I did do some research on diet, the kinds of trees they were near, that kind of thing, so that the bear was at least in a proper context.
Kara Holsopple: How does the bear or the bear stories relate to other stories in the collection? They’re kind of peppered in the collection among other stories.
Sherrie Flick: The collection itself is a combination of flash fiction and longer, more traditional length stories. Flash fiction is stories less than a thousand words. The bear stories really work as a thread. I see them as a kind of momentum in the collection, and I also see them as a way to kind of almost give you breathing time between the longer stories. Once I had all the bear stories, I started writing the non-bear stories to kind of fit in in contrast to the bears.
Kara Holsopple: “Bear in a Canoe” is about a bear who pushes someone else’s canoe into the water at night and then has to retrieve it. This is the most natural state that readers will find the bear in. But he’s still ruminating, thinking about things as people would. How do you get inside a bear’s head?
Sherrie Flick: It’s interesting. I was recently asked a question about the bear and point of view. And I really do feel like I was inside the bear while I was writing these stories. And again, remember pandemic, think pandemic, think super weird altered state of being for the entire world. So when I was thinking about this setting, I spent a lot of time near and on lakes. The setting was really driving this story. And then this, again, kind of bear consciousness and the drive to figure out this world that you know well, figure out the boat that you don’t know well. I mean, it’s kind of a simple story in that way, but I do feel like I kind of got the bear observing his life and kind of maybe longing for it not to change.
Kara Holsopple: The bear even takes a moment to think about climate change.
Sherrie Flick: Or how the lake might change, yes, it wasn’t his father’s lake. Time has passed.
Kara Holsopple: Speaking of getting into a bear state of mind, the story “Bobby the Bear” is about a man who works as a home inspector and buys a custom bear suit and begins to slowly incorporate wearing it in his daily life. So instead of a human-acting bear, we have a human trying to inhabit the body and sometimes mannerisms of a bear. Tell me more about that.
Sherrie Flick: As I was exploring bearness, there were all these different ways that it came into my head. There’s a bear who’s a bartender, who people call a “bear tender.” There’s little ways I thought of bears in the world. Naturally, a bear costume came to mind. I did research for this on people who wear animal costumes, and there’s a video that he watches, which is real. The home inspector, this idea that, you know, there’s a character that goes into these alien worlds and it’s a routine and perhaps wants to shake up his life a little bit and doesn’t know how, and is weirdly longing for this bear suit that somehow brings all of his worlds together. I found the tension of the bear suit, like it was right up my alley. I loved writing about Bobby. So that was an interesting way also to actually have a character explore the kind of bear consciousness that I was exploring. I think in that way, there’s a layer to it.
Kara Holsopple: In the final story of the collection “Arnie and the Bear Think About Risk,” the bear is a middle manager in an office dealing with some HR issues and he thinks wistfully, as many people who work in offices do, about what else he could do with his time. He remembers more bear-like times when he ate blackberries and felt the sun on his back. How does this story harken back to the title of the collection, I Have Not Considered Consequences?
Sherrie Flick: The bear manager is interesting because he’s obviously taken a lot of risks to get to this mid-level professional place in his life. But the bear character himself doesn’t see it that way, necessarily. This idea of, ‘What if I had done things differently? What if I actually had taken real risks,’ you know? Because his employee Arnie wants to quit to kind of explore being a musician And there is a kind of Gen X theme that runs through the book, too, of not selling out, that kind of stuff.
So I do think Arnie forces the bear to reconsider his decisions. And the title is a phrase from the first story in the book which is another bear story, but this idea that people go forward and things happen to them and you can take risks and not care about the consequences of diving in. I think a lot of the characters and bears in this book kind of do that. The bear in the last story has a little dog and he has a nice life; [he] likes to cook dinner. But he’s like, ‘Maybe I could have been a contender,’ you know?
Sherrie Flick is the author of the short story collection, I Have Not Considered Consequences, published by Autumn House Press.
