At the heart of the stories in Everything Flirts are some of life’s trickiest questions: Why is it so hard to make the first move on a date? How do we find the person we will love? If you finally find a person to love, how do you convince them to love you back?
With a mixture of humor and reverence, Sharon Wahl, MFAW ’97, hijacks classic works of philosophy and turns their focus to love. The philosopher Wittgenstein helps us consider the limits of language: Does there exist an argument, a logical deduction, that will cause another person to love us? The philosopher Zeno’s laws of motion stipulate that we can only ever cross half of any distance. This principle is applied to a first date, where making a first move becomes more and more impossible because the movie this couple goes to see is a depressing mood-killer. A woman afraid of love applies Bentham’s utilitarian principles to find her perfect match, testing every man she meets until she finds one who aces every one of her tests. Nonetheless, she wonders: Is he right for her? Is she ready to fall in love forever? The sublime and the ridiculous come together to playfully examine why love just might be a topic too hard for philosophers to explain.
Everything Flirts is the winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award.
About the author
Sharon Wahl is a writer and documentary film producer. Her collection of love stories inspired by classic philosophy texts, Everything Flirts, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award and will be published by the University of Iowa Press in the fall of 2024. Her stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Harper’s, the Iowa Review, the Chicago Tribune, Harvard Review, Pleiades, and other periodicals. She is currently writing Bitter Tales, a collection of interlocked stories and essays.
Sharon studied ethnomusicology at Wesleyan, math at MIT, and writing at Washington University in St. Louis and the Clarion Workshop. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, with her husband, documentary filmmaker and writer Jonathan VanBallenberghe.