Flash Club Live: Grant Faulkner's "Cold Hard Cash"

This Flash Club explored Grant Faulkner’s Cold Hard Cash, a flash that follows one man’s life through a single recurring image: frozen money tucked away in coffee cans. We spent much of our conversation tracing the changing meaning of that image. What begins as a practical habit becomes a symbol of hope, then love, then grief, and finally loss. Each return to the money reveals something new about Trudeau’s desires, disappointments, and longing to belong.

We also talked about accumulation as a structural strategy. Rather than building through plot alone, the story gains power by revisiting the same image from different angles, allowing meaning to gather and deepen with each appearance. Finally, we explored the story’s shifting narrative distance, moving from intimate character details to a broader, almost mythic perspective, and how that widening lens transforms one man’s heartbreak into something that feels universal.

Choose a single object or ritual. Something a person returns to over and over: saving receipts, sharpening knives, checking the mail at the same hour each day, freezing leftovers, polishing shoes.

Write five short sections. In each section, return to the same object or ritual, but allow its meaning to change. What begins as one thing should gradually become something else.

Try varying the distance of the narration as you move. Start from the perspective of an outside observer. Then move closer to the person performing the ritual. Consider widening the lens again later, allowing the object to reveal something larger than the character themselves.

As you write, focus less on plot and more on accumulation. Let the repeated image gather emotional weight each time it returns. By the end, the object should mean something entirely different than it did at the beginning.

Then we asked Faulkner a few questions about his process…

I loved the meandering POV in Cold Hard Cash because it gives us both distance from and immediacy regarding Trudeau’s experience. From start to finish we are compelled toward compassion for Trudeau--even in his darkest hour.
What role does compassion play in your writing?

I haven’t thought about it much, but compassion plays large in my writing. I love writing about lost souls, seekers, people who lunge for meaning or pleasure in perhaps the wrong ways—as we all do, because life is messy and confusing and mysterious, right? So I have a lot of compassion for my characters, even those who are doing bad things. Because they rarely think they’re doing bad things. They just want to fill the wound we’re all born with.

The story feels almost oral in cadence, like something told across generations. Were you consciously drawing from storytelling traditions outside contemporary literary flash?

I wasn’t conscious of pulling from other storytelling traditions. I tend to write things intuitively, without a lot of planning or deliberation. But you’re right—this does carry the weight of an oral storytelling mythologizing voice.

What have you read lately that knocked your socks off? What made the socks land so far away?

I recently read Ross Gay’s Book of Delights and loved its essayettes.

Join us every Thursday at 5 PM PST / 8 PM EST for Flash Club on Zoom.