Mizuki Yamagen
Mizuki Yamagen took third place in BWG’s 2025 contest for her story, “A Fine Line in the Sand.” Mizuki is a writer from Japan, now living in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming at SmokeLong Quarterly, Flash Frog, the Baltimore Review, and HAD, among others. She was the winner of the SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction 2025 and was shortlisted for the 31st Bath Flash Fiction Award. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best MicroFiction, and the Pushcart Prize. You can find more about Mizuki at mizukiyamagen.com.
BWG: Tell us how your story “A Fine Line in the Sand” came to be.
MY: “A Fine Line in the Sand” began with an image: a colorful tent appearing out of nowhere in the middle of a desolate desert. Something about that contrast—the riot of color and magic against a barren, ruined world—felt charged with possibility. I started there and worked outward, asking myself what kind of world would make that tent feel miraculous, and who would be drawn to it.
The answers shaped themselves around questions I carry from my work in climate action—about what it means to survive versus live, and whether the tools we build to sustain us can ever be more than instruments of destruction. Aether emerged from that: a droid that’s both essential and resented, doing necessary, terrible work on behalf of people who can’t look at her. And then Aza arrived and changed everything. She’s the one who sees Aether not as a function but as a person—and that act of recognition is, I think, what the story is really about. The magician was there from the beginning in that first image, but writing him revealed his purpose: He’s the kind of liminal figure who exists precisely to dissolve the lines we’ve drawn between things that were never as separate as we thought. Creation and destruction. Human and machine. Science and magic. Once I had him drawing that line in the sand between them, the story opened up.
BWG: What draws you to flash fiction and short stories?
MY: Flash fiction has been my primary home, and I love it for the compression it demands—every word is load-bearing, every image has to do at least two things at once. A flash story has to trust the reader implicitly. You can’t explain everything, so you gesture at it, and what readers bring to fill the gaps becomes part of the story itself. There’s something about that exchange I find uniquely satisfying.
That said, this year I’m intentionally pushing myself toward longer work. I want to give myself and the ideas more room to breathe and grow into what they want to become. Flash is a beautiful constraint, but some stories need more time inside them—more space for the world to expand, for characters to move around and surprise you. I’m curious to find out what happens when I stop cutting so early.
BWG: Your publications page has evocative images. Do you create those?
MY: Some of them, yes! The page is a mix of sources. Some images are from Unsplash, and some are artwork from the magazines themselves. But others are collages I’ve made—many starting with a physical piece I’ve created, then photographing it and combining it digitally with other elements. And a few are sketches I’ve done in Illustrator. I spend a lot of time thinking about the emotional atmosphere I want a piece to carry, so finding or making the right image is part of how I stay in conversation with a story even after it’s published.
BWG: What are you working on now?
MY: As I mentioned, my big goal this year is to write longer—to give my ideas more room to breathe and grow into what they want to be. I’ve been noodling some early ideas for a novella, which feels both exciting and terrifying after living in flash for a bit. But I think that’s the right sign. We’ll see where it takes me.