Things that stand out for me – and I am only one reader, with my own tastes and preferences – are a love for language, a delight in what words can do, especially in such a short space. Also, a sense that the story was made for the length it is, that it is not a longer story compressed, that it is wonderful not despite but because of its brevity. As for styles, I am open to anything at all, I love being made to laugh and cry, but the main thing is: move me, surprise me, delight me. This can be done without fireworks, without car chases, without much action at all. Or: with all these things! I am looking for stories that sing, that I can hear in my head as I read and for hours, days afterwards. But sing in your own way, not in a way to please anyone else. Send us your best.
Tania Hershman is the author of two short story collections: My Mother Was An Upright Piano: Fictions (Tangent Books, 2012), and The White Road and Other Stories (Salt, 2008) and co-author of Writing Short Stories: A Writers’ & Artists’ Companion (Bloomsbury, Dec 2014). Her début poetry chapbook is forthcoming in February 2016. Tania’s short stories and poetry have been widely published and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4. She is curator of ShortStops (www.shortstops.info), celebrating short story activity across the UK & Ireland, a Royal Literary Fund fellow at Bristol University, and is studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.
First, we’d like to welcome our new judge, Tania Hershman. Regular contributors will notice that we’ve made a few other changes. In brief, here they are, and why we’ve made them.
We now have a closing date.
Many of you told us that you prefer to have a time scale to plan out your competition submissions through out the year, so we’ve introduced closing dates. Our intention is to keep the flash rolling by running three awards per year, each Award lasting four months. To encourage early submission to each Award – and hopefully avoid a last-minute closing date rush – submission fees are reduced for the first two months of each Award.
The inaugural Bath Flash Fiction Award was launched in February 2015 and we’re delighted that Annemarie Neary agreed to be our first judge. She’s been very positive all the way through the contest, which has been a wonderful support – we didn’t know how long it would take to achieve the target of 1000 entries. In the end it’s been eight months from start to finish, roughly the same time as some other awards with known deadlines.
Running the Award without a deadline meant that we avoided the usual flood of entries that often arrive at the end of contests with a fixed-end date. We’ve been able to read the stories anonymously in batches as they arrived and select for a provisional long and short list as we went along. As a result, we’ve managed to announce the winners within a week of closure. Annemarie again helped with this. After receiving the shortlist, she spent a concentrated few days reading and rereading the stories to come up with three great winning flash fictions, two commended pieces and a very interesting and detailed report.
Judging the inaugural Bath Flash Fiction Award has been both an honour and a delight. The organisers did the hard work of sifting through one thousand entries and sent me, as if by magic, the twenty intriguing stories on this shortlist.
The first thing that struck me was the proliferation of certain themes — death, apocalypse or social breakdown featured in at least half the shortlist — which is not to say that the stories themselves are uniform. Far from it. Without exception, the writers have used their 300 words to create something fresh and distinctive.