Sara Lippmann received a BA from Brown and an MFA from The New School. Her stories have been published in Tupelo Quarterly, Joyland, Jewish Fiction, The Good Men Project, Slice Magazine and elsewhere, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and included in Wigleaf’s Top 50. She received a 2012 Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and her debut collection, Doll Palace, was longlisted for the 2015 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Raised outside of Philadelphia, she lives with her husband and children in Brooklyn, and teaches through Ditmas Writing Workshops.
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Views
Cue The Gods Of Despair
Interview with Robert Vaughan
Flash Fiction Award Judge
July – October 2016
Robert Vaughan teaches workshops in hybrid writing, poetry, fiction, and hike/ write. He has facilitated these at locations like Alverno College, UWM, Fox Valley Technical School, JMWW (online), Red Oak Writing, The Clearing and Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos. He leads writing roundtables in Milwaukee, WI. He was twice a finalist for the Gertrude Stein Award for Fiction (2013, 2014). His short fiction, ‘A Box’ will appear in the Best Small Fictions 2016 (Queen’s Ferry Press). Vaughan is the author of four books: Microtones (Cervena Barva Press, 2012); Diptychs + Triptychs + Lipsticks + Dipshits (Deadly Chaps, 2013); Addicts & Basements (CCM, 2014). His newest, RIFT, is a flash fiction collection co-authored with Kathy Fish (Unknown Press, 2015). He blogs at www.robert-vaughan.com.
Interview
- You’ve been senior flash fiction editor for JMWW literary journal for six years and have also been fiction & poetry editor for Lost in Thought Magazine and guest editor for Smokelong Quarterly. What makes a piece of flash fiction stand out for you?
An Evening of Flash Fiction
with Meg Pokrass, Carrie Etter & More

Friday 29th July
7.30 pm – 9.30 pm
St James’ Wine Vaults
www.stjameswinevaults.co.uk
10 St James St
Bath
BA1 2TW
| Cost £5.00 | sold out |
Limited availability. Your place will be confirmed by email.
American writer, Meg Pokrass, is a flash fiction writer, poet and writing tutor. Her books include flash fiction collections, Bird Envy (2014), Damn Sure Right (Press 53 2011) and The Dog Looks Happy Upsidedown (forthcoming from Etruscan Press 2016) and an award-winning book of prose poetry Cellulose Pajamas (Blue Light Book Award Winner 2015). Among her many other publications, she has a flash-fiction novella and essay on the form in My Very End of the Universe, Five mini-novellas in flash and a Study of the Form published by Rose Metal Press. Meg is moving from the United States to England at the end of this year, and we’re thrilled she is able to spend some time with us. Meg will be reading from her new collection The Dog Looks Happy Upsidedown which you can pre-order here and follow on Facebook.
Carrie Etter is an American award-winning poet, resident in the UK since 2001. She has three published collections, The Tethers (Seren 2009), Divining for Starters (Shearsman 2011) and Imagined Sons (Seren 2014) and is also a flash fiction writer. Carrie is senior lecturer in creative writing at Bath Spa University, where she has taught since 2004. She will be reading from her new flash fiction pamphlet Hometown, available here.
Meg and Carrie will be joined by local prize-winning and published flash fiction and short story writers K M Elkes, Diane Simmons and Santino Prinzi.
Book early to avoid disappointment. We’re looking forward to a great evening of flash.
Looking at Bartleby Snopes
A Talk with April Bradley & Nathaniel Tower
For the second in our series on literary magazines publishing flash fiction, we’ve a focus on Bartleby Snopes. A summary of the magazine on the Review Review website says “Bartleby Snopes is an online literary magazine with several goals in mind. We want to publish the best new fiction we can find. We want to give the many writers out there an opportunity to publish their best work. We want to inspire you to create great works of fiction. We currently publish two stories per week and end each month with a Story of the Month contest. We also publish our favorite stories in a semi-annual magazine format available as a free pdf download every January and July.” To find out more, I interviewed Associate Editor April Bradley and founder Nathaniel Tower.
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Bystanders by Tara Laskowski
Reviewed by Eileen Merriman
This month I’ve had the pleasure to read Bystanders, a compelling collection of short stories by writer, columnist, and editor of SmokeLong Quarterly, Tara Laskowski.
Bystanders is an apt title. A bystander, by definition, is a person who is present at an event or incident but does not take part. This is the theme running through the stories in this collection, whether it be a woman who becomes obsessively sympathetic to the driver involved in a hit-and-run; a new mother whose baby monitor shows her a chilling truth; a house-hunting couple whose relationship has recently been tested by an affair; or an investigative reporter whose alias likes to ‘ruin other people’s careers.’
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Interview with Tara Laskowski
Writer and Editor at SmokeLong Quarterly

Seek Adventure:
An Interview with Bud Smith

Collaboration:
A review of Rift by Kathy Fish & Robert Vaughan
In Rift, stories by Kathy Fish and Robert Vaughan, published in 2015 by Unknown Press, lovers of flash fiction have a new Must Read, a new entry to the list of flash fiction classics that show the power and depth possible in stories compressed into a page or two.
Even the one-word, four-letter title conveys more than the sum of its parts. As a noun, rift means a break in something. A crack. A split. A flaw. A breach. A fracture. A cavity. An opening. A serious division in friendly relations.
The book Rift contains four escalating sections: Fault, Tremor, Breach, and Cataclysm. Each section has around eighteen stories that alternate between writers.
The table of contents is the only place Read in Full
Interview with Peter Blair
Bath Flash Commended

Interview with
Clodagh O’Brien
Bath Flash Prize Winner

