Fred’s Latest Flash Fiction
In October 2024, The Lit Nerds, an online celebration of great literature and pop culture, featured “This One,” a short story by Fred Melton.
READ MOREA NEW COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES BY FRED MELTON
COUNTING BACK TO NOW
AND OTHER STORIES
Counting Back to Now and Other Stories is a collection that offers a journey through the 1950s and the following six decades. Along the way, you’ll travel with characters struggling to escape their pasts, trying to reclaim lost dreams or find new meanings in their lives. You will meet personalities as diverse as a young boy helping commit a murder, an abducted twelve-year-old protecting her father, a down-and-out bull rider trying to get back on his feet, and a young anesthesiologist judging his patient. And, in the final story, you will sit beside an Iraqi War vet doing all he can to find his way home—to get back to now.
From The Best American Mystery Stories 2002
“In the most chilling tale, ‘Counting,’ a kid’s skill with a baseball bat, supposedly his ticket off the farm, dooms him instead.”
Kirkus Reviews
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fred Melton was raised in the Southwest U.S. and has lived in the Pacific Northwest for more than half his life. He is a graduate of Pacific University’s MFA Fiction Program (Oregon). Melton has had poems, short stories, essays, and other nonfiction pieces appear in publications ranging from the Bellevue Literary Review and Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Mystery Stories to The Flyfish Journal. A number of Melton’s stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
“Stories that open a crack and take a plunge. Startling and moving.”
Kay Kenyon, author of The Arisen Worlds
“Melton’s vivid characters often find themselves the target of unprovoked evil. Left no choice, they fight back, risking themselves—and those closest to them.”
Jo Haraf, author of Marriage, Murder, and Betrayal
“Fred Melton’s is a distinctly Western voice, where wheat fields, rivers, and the smell of desert air after rain have their say alongside farmers, cowboys, addicts, and Jesus. But even more so, the territory we inhabit in these stories is the desperation that comes in how these characters are trapped in the ways they hurt each other and themselves. We keenly feel their struggles, their heartbreak and anguish, and, now and then, the sweet relief when one gets away.
Derek Sheffield, editor of Terrain.org and co-author of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry—Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award
MORE ABOUT THE BOOK
Your stories have been described as “dark.” Another descriptor might be “incredulous.” Could you tell us the origins of your stories? What seeds of truth initiated some of them?
Certain kernels, though quite dark at the time, were nothing short of authorial gifts. Despite it seeming improbable a man would die in an automatic car wash, an actual incident was the impetus for writing the fourth story. In “You Don’t Know,” I was the father racing to the Colchuk River to look for a missing son, doing everything I could not to vomit. And in “Back to Now,” it was I who picked up a woman I believed was about to jump into the Columbia River, only to be pulled over—and interrogated—by a very cordial Washington State patrolman.
What is the significance of the bridge on the book cover?
I think significant life choices are like bridges—once crossed, we can’t go back. I’d like to think that many of my characters stand before such bridges. Incidentally, the motivation for writing “Overlook” was fueled by my wondering, after stopping at the scene where a truck had just plunged into the Knik River near Anchorage, how the driver could have accomplished such a feat (if intentional)—and who the woman was that had been rolling up her window after screaming she couldn’t swim.
Your first story in the collection was published in 2002, long before you enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts fiction program at Pacific University. What prompted you to enter a master’s program when you did?
I felt extremely lucky with “Counting,” especially since I don’t read mysteries, much less try to write them. Ten years later, however, after constantly trying to re-invent the writers’ wheel, I realized that spinning wheel was gaining very little traction. In response to acclaimed author and faculty member Claire Davis’s prodding, I gave Pacific’s MFA program a try, and found my home, stretching a two-year program into nearly eight.
Is there anything else you would like readers to know about you or your writing?
As most authors will confess, writing is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Yet, while creating fiction, imagining or inhabiting the lives of others is priceless. As such, I never miss the chance to ask physicians, first responders, hairdressers and plumbers, What’s the most unusual thing you’ve ever experienced? because we all know truth is often stranger than fiction.
FRED’s BLOG
Thumbing and Humming in the Seventies
Hitch-hiking has always been a gamble, but in the 1970s it was ubiquitous—as long as the soundtrack had a groove. Read Fred’s 2025 work of creative non-fiction published in Talon Review’s Uprooted, volume 3, number 5.
Why Would Anybody Do This?
Check out Fred’s feature profile of a Viking guide in Argentina, published in The Flyfish Journal, issue 16.2 (December 2024).
FRED MELTON 