I'm honored to interview Hannah Andrews. Two of her stories, "Catching Life" and "Swan Song" won runner up in our Fall 2025 Flash Fiction contest.
Before we chat about her stories, here's more about the author:
Hannah Andrews lives in sunny southern California with her faithful dog Josie (who thinks her stories are amazing) and four cats (who are mostly unimpressed). Hannah’s fiction and CNF have been published in Shaking The Tree Short Memoir Anthology, Gold Man Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, Elegant Literature, Writing Battle, and WOW. She has been stalled on the third draft of her adoptee memoir, “None of This is Yours,” for about two years now. She hopes to finish it one day soon.
--- Interview by Nicole Pyles
WOW: Congrats on winning runner up! What inspired your stories, "Catching Life" and "Swan Song"?
Hannah: Catching Life was originally written for a prompt contest for Writing Battle. My prompts were a widow and a dozen eggs. My first thought was fertility, but I wanted to put a different spin on it. I'd recently visited the Galapagos Islands and the Darwin center (though there were no tortoise eggs or tour that included the incubator --that came from research) and thought of the tortoises. At first I thought I'd set my story here, in San Diego, with a young researcher. But then I gave her an internship... sent to the Darwin Center... and she fell in love...
Swan Song was written for an Elegant Literature contest, but was mostly inspired by my own search for my mother of origin. The line "the summer that followed the summer of love" is pulled from my own creative non-fiction, and my true story of being conceived during one of Chicago's most turbulent times, to a young teen who was then "sent away" to a maternity home. The rest is fictional. As a person who lived many years with closed records and unknown parentage, I have a myriad of fictional meetings and "what if" rumblings inside of me.
WOW: I love how you used a prompt and a real life instance to create really unique and creative stories. I can't help but notice common themes in both stories about the cycle of life. Is that a common theme for you to explore in your fiction or did this emerge on accident?
Hannah: It is both a common theme AND an accident. If you told me to write a story about interplanetary beings I would inevitably weave family, love, and loss in there. And maybe a bit of snark. I guess I write what I know and what I want to know more of... Loss, longing, and love.
WOW: Those are beautiful themes to have in stories. How did you come by your titles? Did they come to you automatically or did you struggle at all?
Hannah: They're both borrowed.
I've always loved the term "swan song," pulled into present language from the myth of swans singing an achingly beautiful song just before their death. It seemed a fitting metaphor for this story-- A mother-daughter reunion/ first and final meeting all at once, 50 years after surrendering the daughter, as an infant, and now sharing her truth and her daughter's origin story just before her final breaths.
On the flip side... Catching Life—not a common expression as far as I know, but I heard it once and it never left me. I'd taken my dog to the emergency vet for a minor after-hours injury. While we were there I kept hearing this high-pitched squealing cry. It was a sound (and maybe this part was my imagination) that seemed to silence people and pets alike. A vet tech explained that a mother dog was having a difficult birth. They were having to assist and then pump air into the puppies mouths, lungs. The pups would catch their breath and squeal. "We call it catching life," she said, "I think it's the most beautiful sound in the world." While researching the tortoises for this story, I watched a video of a biologist "catching" the clutch of eggs one at a time, and it seemed like something my character would do, and say.
WOW: What beautiful origins for your titles! You have quite the collection of published stories! What advice can you share on creating a winning story?
Hannah: Persistence. Editing. Thick skin. And community. Community. I hate rejection, no matter how often I tell myself "rejection is just an opportunity for redirection." If you already have thick skin, awesome. For me that's an ideal, not an actual. But, I keep going. I take any feedback provided with rejections, pout to myself, then work on applying it. I'm also fortunate to have found an online group of flash fiction/short story beta readers. (One of my beta buddies is a runner-up here too! ) Edit. Submit. Repeat. And, of course, read as much as you can.
WOW: Great advice! What is your writing routine like?
Hannah: I write most every day, generally in the morning, and mostly about nothing. Just writing to write, to clear out or maybe stir up the muck in my brain. When it comes to constructing actual stories though.... that is more random than routine. Most often my MC comes to me first. She's most often a woman, sometimes even a fictional version of myself . I let her run around my brain for a day or two while I walk the dog, stare out the window, walk the dog some more. I jot down bits of dialogue. Think of an opening, then an ending. Then I start constructing the messy middle. Then I edit generally right up to the deadline. I'm sure there's a better way to do it. But I haven't figured it out.
WOW: I love your routine. Thank you so much for chatting with us today! Congrats again!
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