News

Christopher Allen
Flash Fiction Award Judge
March 2019 – June 2019

Christopher Allen is the author of Other Household Toxins (Matter Press) and Conversations with S. Teri O’Type (a Satire). Allen’s fiction has appeared, or is forthcoming, in [PANK], Indiana Review, Split Lip Magazine, Longleaf Review and Lunch Ticket, among many other great places. Allen is a multiple nominee for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, The Best Small Fictions, storySouth‘s Million Writers Award and others. In 2017 Allen was both a finalist (as translator) and semifinalist for The Best Small Fictions. He is presently the co-editor of SmokeLong Quarterly and a consulting editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018.
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Fiona J Mackintosh
February 2019 Second Prize

Snow Falling Upwards

by Fiona J Mackintosh

Meteorology man, you called me when you first learned of my weakness for weather. My love for fire rainbows and sun dogs. For lake effect snow and katabatic winds.

“Weather is mood, and climate is personality,” I’d tell you as you tugged the shirt from my waistband. “As for snow falling upwards, it’s just a trick of the wind and the eye. Gravity will always make it fall.”

There’s a photograph of you lying on our seagrass rug, listening to Satie’s Gymnopédies, a sunbeam striped across your waist. You did bliss very well. In our thousand days together, you’d always listen like you were hearing music, even when it was just my voice, full of unnecessary language.

Over the years, I thought of our lives as railroad tracks, moving forward side by side but never touching. Sometimes I could taste the want of you, but then I’d think about sleeping dogs and Pandora’s box. Instead, I stalked the high latitudes for the greening pulse of the auroras, my wife holding the receiver to catch their eerie sighs and whistles. When she died, I said, “Soon,” but first there was the paperwork, a sorting through, and the four stages, a long tunnel with damp and crumbling walls. Only then did I send the letter drafted long ago, folded into clean, white thirds.

This is what I do, I wait too long. I’d imagined you in a wooden house in the mountains with a great lake spreading out from your door, but now I know there’s not a single place on earth I’d find your footprint. I only hope the spheres are making music where you are. Here, there’s nothing but a goitered winter moon and the slow drag of an ice circle turning in the dark.

About the Author

Fiona J. Mackintosh is a Scottish-American writer who lives near Washington D.C. with her husband and flies back and forward between her two countries at least twice a year. In 2018, she won the Fish Flash Fiction Prize, the NFFD Micro Competition, the October Bath Flash Award, and Reflex Fiction. Two of her flashes were selected to appear in the Best Microfiction 2019 anthology. In her non-writing life, she is a freelance editor for the World Bank. You can find her at www.fionajmackintosh.com.

February 2019 Judge’s Report Vanessa Gebbie

Below, our eleventh Award Judge Vanessa Gebbie’s report, detailing her interesting way of selecting the short list and winners from an anonymised list of flash fictions:

I was sent the long list – fifty carefully crafted flashes representing an impressive range of styles and subjects, a real cornucopia of flash skills. It’s always a huge responsibility, this judging game – and this time, I decided to see if there was any mileage in the Marie Kondo philosophy – could her thinking be applied to help me to remove thirty of them, somehow, leaving me with a short list of twenty.
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February 2019 Short List

Congratulations to all the authors who have made our Award short list.

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February 2019 Long List

Congratulations to all the authors who have made our Award long list and huge thanks to all who entered.

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Interview with new Ad Hoc Fiction author, Diane Simmons

Ad Hoc Fiction, the small independent press that publishes our Bath Flash Fiction Award Anthologies recently published Diane’s Simmons debut full collection of flash fiction Finding A Way. Diane tells Jude how the book came into being and the pictures on this post and in the gallery below are from her recent packed book launch with family and friends at St James Wine Vaults in Bath on February 9th. The collection is available in print to buy in several different currencies from the Ad Hoc Fiction online bookshop and also as a Kindle or Nook ebook.

Jude: Ad Hoc Fiction is delighted to publish Finding A Way , our tenth published book and second single-author collection. Can you give us a short synopsis of the book and tell us how the flash fictions work together?

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Six Bath Flash authors selected for Best Microfiction 2019

We are thrilled that micro fictions by five authors who won prizes, or were listed in our Bath Flash Fiction Awards 2018 and one winner from Ad Hoc Fiction were selected by guest editor, Dan Chaon from lists drawn up by series editors Meg Pokrass and Gary Fincke for their new anthology series Best Microfiction.
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Highlights from the book launches, 19th Jan, 2019

The gallery room at St James Wine Vaults, Bath was packed with readers, their friends and family and our guests for the joint launches of Flash Fiction Festival Two and Bath Flash Fiction, Vol 3, Things Left and Found By the Side of the Road. last Saturday, 19th January. We heard a wonderful variety of flash fictions from twenty-two readers in all, who had travelled miles from all over the country to attend. Bath Flash Fiction supplied wine and two ‘book cover’ cakes, which you can see Jude cutting up in the pictures, to celebrate the occasion. Everybody read brilliantly and we thank them very much for coming.

In the first half of the evening, ten writers, pictured in a group here, and who you can see individually in the gallery below, read their micros from Flash Fiction Festival Two, beginning with well-known flash writer, poet and Reader at Bath Spa University, Carrie Etter, who led a workshop at the festival and who is quoted recommending it as a place to be inspired on the back of the anthology.
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BFFA anthology launches

We are excited to be launching our two latest anthologies this week, on Saturday 19th January at St James Wine Vaults, in Bath, 7.30 pm – 10.00 pm. It’s going to be a fun and pacy evening with readings of micro fictions (around 2 mins reading time each) from Flash Fiction Festival Two by writers who came to the second Flash Fiction Festival in Bristol last July in the first half of the evening and after a break for chats, drinks, cake and book buying, readings from some of the winning, shortlisted and longlisted writers who are published in Bath Flash Fiction Vol Three, Things Left And Found By The Side Of The Road.

Flash Fiction Festival Two:

Things Left and Found At The Side Of The Road

Bath Flash Fiction Anthologies

Around the world with the third Bath Flash Fiction Award Anthology

We posted out contributor copies of Bath Flash Fiction Vol 3 Things Left And Found At The Side of The Road at the beginning of December and the anthology has been arriving all over the world in the snail-like Christmas post. Here’s a selection in the gallery from a few of the authors who posted marvellous pictures on Twitter of the anthologies by and on roads, some with extraordinary landscapes in the background. We also see them on doorsteps, next to pipes, travelling on trains and down lanes, perched on postboxes, with flowery backgrounds or with sparkly lights and holiday greetings, or on bookshelves, in a duo with another lovely book, by a window with a cat and on a new rug.

Thank you to Adam Lock, Anika Carpenter, Christine Collinson, Emily Devane, Gail Anderson, Jane Westwell, Steven John,Tim Craig, Stephanie Hutton and Susanne Stich from the UK; Fiona Mackintosh, Molia Dumbleton, Joyce Wheatley, Mahesh Nair and A E Weisgerber from the USA; Louise Mangos and Marissa Hoffman from Switzerland; Charmaine Wilkerson from Rome, Italy, Shannon Savvas from Cyprus, Vineetha Mokkil from India and Simon Cowdroy from Australia for posting up your pictures. If you have a story in the anthology, do send us a picture to add to the gallery, showing where the book has landed. Or if we’ve somehow missed your Twitter photo, let us know. We’d love to see more.

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We’ve Canned Heat’s ‘On The Road Again’ to go with the gallery of pictures. Do listen!

Buy the anthology to read these and the other stories in this wonderful collection (133 stories of up to 300 words each,in total), from the Ad Hoc Fiction Bookshop.
And if you are in or near Bath on Saturday 19th January come to the anthology launch at St James Wine Vaults Bath. 7.30 pm – 10.00 pm with free wine and cake. Authors coming who will be reading their stories from the anthology include first, second and third prize winners from the June round of the Award, KM Elkes, Conor Haughton and Tim Craig together with Diane Simmons, Ingrid Jendrzejewski, Thomas Mallock, Steven John, Steve Partridge, Bronwen Griffith and Rosamund Davies. We’ll also be launching the anthology of stories from the 2018 Flash Fiction Festival, Flash Fiction Festival Two, on the same occasion and you’ll be able to hear micros from some of those authors in that anthology too. Let us know if you can make it.
Bath Flash Award number eleven is now open for entries. Deadline February 10th. In six weeks. And all fifty longlisted pieces will be offered publication in our 2019 Anthology.