The calendar has turned to a new month, which means Okay Donkey has a fresh batch of updates to start your summer off with, including new community guidelines, more staff updates, and fiction reader Andre’a Victorian tells us how she turns her 1 am Notes app fever dreams into full-fledged stories!

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As Okay Donkey continues to grow, we’d like to highlight some of our new policies, which will act as guardrails for our expanding community. OKD does not want anything written by AI, LLM, etc., and if you submit, we trust this means you did not use AI as part of the creation of your piece. If you have some deliciously weird writing made by yourself (or your dog, we’re pretty pro-dog) submit now!

We’d also like to take this time to say that, despite our name, at OKD we have a strict no-jackasses policy! We support and appreciate our writers, and maintaining a friendly social space is important to us. If you don’t like a piece we publish, take a walk and shake it off. We block trolls.

Finally, we want to thank Christine Salek for kicking off Okay Donkey (but a newsletter) and giving it its distinct voice over the last year. OKD wishes them all the luck in their endeavors! If you want to read Christine’s work (and we highly recommend you do), you can do so here.

Fiction reader Samantha Borek will be expanding her role to take over as newsletter editor. She is a graduate of Pratt Institute’s BFA program in creative writing. Her writing has appeared in Truthout and Fish Girl Collective’s Bruised Knees and Gardenias. You can find her personal essays about pop culture, politics, Irish language, St. Brigid, and everything in between at her newsletter Who Gives a Focal?

I want to continue to make the newsletter a celebration of staff, contributors, and the writing that makes this magazine special. I want us to always be pluggin’ our community and all the work that they do.

I hope that the newsletter can function as a peek behind the curtain for readers and contributors. The literary world can be a bit opaque, especially if you’re just diving in. OKD already breaks that mold by giving writers with a funkier style and point of view a home, but I want the newsletter to act as a bridge. I want readers and submitters to know that we are an active community, we’re not just throwing up their work and not caring about what happens next.

I love features that showcase the staff’s personal processes and tastes. Many of our writers are very playful, which is a breath of fresh air to an art that can seem a little academic and stodgy in some spaces. I want to see your hyperfixations and how they relate to your writing!

by Andre’a Victorian, Fiction Reader

I’ve realized that almost all of my stories start the same way: with a hurried note in my phone or scribble in my notebook that looks completely unhinged when I read it back later.

Most of my ideas come from branching off a conversation, usually a rant, a joke, or me trying to figure out how to hook a reader. I always end up asking myself the same questions: What’s something I haven’t seen before? And if it has been done before, how can I make it stranger, more experimental? Maybe even a little taboo?

My notebook is full of ideas like:

For a long time, I thought this was the wrong way to write fiction. Other writers and readers didn’t always understand my stories. Fun? Usually. Publishable? That felt a little more questionable.

I spent hours reading advice from my favorite writers about structure and character arcs. Meanwhile, my actual process was mostly just collecting strange little sentences in my notes app that looked like they were written by someone I should probably check on.

At some point, though, I finally accepted that weirdness is usually the thing pulling me toward the story in the first place. If an idea is strange enough that it keeps poking at my brain all day, that’s probably something worth exploring.

I also used to make the mistake of trying to “fix” my weird ideas too early. I’d immediately start interrogating myself: Wait, does this make sense? Is this realistic? How would this work? Would anyone actually publish this? Would readers buy it?

That kind of overthinking kills the story for me. The second I start doing that, the idea loses all its energy.

Now, when an idea feels strange in an interesting way, I try to write toward it before I fully understand it. That’s part of why I love flash fiction so much. Flash doesn’t need to explain every detail or tie everything up neatly. Sometimes all it needs is one emotionally sharp moment.

A while ago, I wrote a short story inspired by “The Lovers.” The painting shows two people kissing with a cloth covering both of their faces. On paper, it’s kind of absurd. Maybe even a little funny if you describe it too literally: two people making out with pillowcases over their heads.

Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I started asking myself questions. What’s behind the cloth? Why can’t they fully see each other? What happens when intimacy and distance exist at the same time?

The image itself is bizarre enough that it sticks in your brain immediately, but what interested me wasn’t really the surrealism of it. It was the feeling beneath it, being close to someone while still feeling unreachable.

That’s when brainstorming gets interesting.

Does the cloth only appear when they lie to each other? Or does it tighten every time they kiss? Maybe nobody in the story even acknowledges the cloth as strange except you, the reader.

That’s usually how it works for me. The weird image gets me into the draft, but the emotional part is what keeps the story moving. Once I can find the vulnerable part hidden inside the strange idea, the loneliness, guilt, jealousy, or embarrassment, then I know I probably have something worth writing about.

What I love most about flash fiction is that you can almost get away with anything. Sometimes all you need is one weird image that won’t leave you alone.

So, if something strange keeps coming back to me, I just follow it and see where it goes. I’ve learned not to ignore it anymore.

We love when past contributors keep us updated on their lives! If your work has ever appeared in OKD, reach out and tell us about your new book, project, album, etc. We’ll give you a shoutout on our socials and here in the newsletter.

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