Gather us up and bring us home by Shasta Grant
Reviewed by Jude Higgins

The ten short fictions in Gather us up and bring us home by Shasta Grant (Split Lip Press, 2017) centre on American small-town life in the 1980s or early 1990s. It feels like the characters could all know each other, have met in school, or at stores or local events, have driven or been driven around in an estate car, like the one pictured on the cover.

The title of the collection uses the last phrase from the final sentence of one of the stories, ‘Us Girls.’ This phrase fits very well with a theme in the collection. Many characters depicted are not ‘at home’ in their lives. In ‘Us Girls’, the mother has left and her young daughter, who now lives alone with the father, harms herself. Her so-called friends bully and taunt her on a sleep-over, find out exactly what she has been doing and make her life even more miserable and precarious.
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How to Write a Novella-in-Flash
Joanna Campbell

Joanna Campbell was one of the two runners-up in our inaugural Novella-In-Flash Award judged by Meg Pokrass earlier this year. Her novella A Safer Way to Fall plus How to Make a Window Snake by our winner Charmaine Wilkerson and Things I Dream About When I’m Not Sleeping, by the other runner-up, Ingrid Jendrzejewski, were published together in one anthology, in time to be launched at the Flash Fiction Festival in Bath in June 2017. Joanna wasn’t able to attend the event but we were very pleased that she could come and read at a Flash Fiction Evening of Readings at St James’ Wine Vaults, Bath in May. A Safer Way to Fall is an historical piece spanning traumatic events concerning a family pre and during World War Two, and the subsequent devastation wrought upon the family. She is pictured here reading ‘Counting’ a very tense and moving flash fiction from the novella, where one of the main protagonists is in a line-up facing a firing squad.

Below, Joanna tells us how she came to understand the form and discovered a thread, which she could form into a novella, from flash fictions she had written during the previous eight years.
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How to Write a Novella-in-Flash
Ingrid Jendrzejewski

Ingrid Jendrzejewski tells us how she compiled her brilliant novella-in-flash, Things I Dream About When I’m Not Sleeping, which was one of the two runners-up in the inaugural Bath Flash Fiction novella-in-flash Award judged by Meg Pokrass earlier this year. The anthology of winning novellas How to Make a Window Snake was launched at the Flash Fiction Festival in Bath in June 2017 and the picture here shows Ingrid reading from her novella at the festival with winner, Charmaine Wilkerson, listening. Everyone at this event was very moved by both their readings. How to Make a Window Snake the anthology containing the novellas by Ingrid, Charmaine and the other runner-up, Joanna Campbell, is available from the Ad Hoc Fiction bookshop. The deadline for the second novella-in-flash award, also judged by Meg Pokrass, is on 29th January, 2018. Ingrid went through several stages, detailed below, before she finished her winning novella-in-flash.
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The Lobsters Run Free
Bath Flash Fiction Volume Two

One hundred and thirty-five flash fiction stories from world-wide authors selected from the long lists of the three Bath Flash Fiction Awards in 2017. These dazzling fictions, all 300 words or under, give us fresh insights into world wide concerns – from relationship issues and domestic situations tender or fraught, to war torn landscapes and the plight of the dispossessed. So much is compressed into so few words.

“The stories were of a very high standard…I’m so impressed with how organized and efficient all of the Bath contests appear to be. The production of a beautiful anthology from the contest long list is also very impressive…”
—Kathy Fish, author of Together We Can Bury It and co-author of RIFT.

“I could not believe how many powerful stories I read in the long list of fifty stories. It was very difficult to select the short list of twenty and then to choose the winners.”
—Meg Pokrass, author of Bird Envy, Damn Sure Right and The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down.

“Every single flash I received possessed qualities I admired and envied…I marvelled at the form’s ability to permit such a range of approaches – from slices-of-life to epic narration to poetic experiments and beyond…”
—David Swann, author of Stronger, Faster, Shorter and The Privilege of Rain.

196mm x 134mm, 160pp
Paperback ISBN 978-1-912095-69-8

£9.99 GBP

Available Here

Flash Fiction Festival One

Seventy-four micro-fictions written by presenters and participants at the first ever literary festival entirely dedicated to flash fiction, held in Bath, June 2017. These short-short stories, 250 words or under, show the wide variety of styles possible in this emerging genre.

Most of the UK’s top flash fiction writers and teachers offered workshops and talks and readings at the Flash Fiction Festival: David Gaffney, Tania Hershman, Calum Kerr, David Swann, Vanessa Gebbie, Kit de Waal, Paul McVeigh, Peter Blair, Ashley Chantler, KM Elkes, Meg Pokrass, Jude Higgins, Christopher Fielden and Michael Loveday. Plus distinguished international guest and leading exponent of the form, Pamela Painter, from the United States.

“It was a wonderful assembly of authors and editors and ‘students’ – though the students already seemed like authors.”—Pamela Painter

“You managed to create a relaxed yet focussed ambiance so that participants could let anxieties fall away, have fun writing and immersing themselves in craft and other skills, soaking up all the varied and sparkling influences that abounded.”—Vanessa Gebbie

“…I had previously come across the genre, viewing it more or less exclusively as something light and whimsical but I had completely under estimated its potential and the discipline involved. It was these latter two aspects that intrigued me…”—Patricia Wallace

“…comments and insights from the workshops showed me how the embryonic idea I started with could be developed and given depth.”—Mary Bevan

196mm x 134mm, 112pp
Paperback ISBN 978-1-912095-67-4

£9.99 GBP

Available Here

Interview with Nod Ghosh
June 2017 Flash Fiction Second Prize

Your wonderful story ‘The Cool Box‘ won second prize in Bath Flash Fiction Award, June 2017 round judged by Meg Pokrass. Can you tell us how it came into being?

I’m an obsessive hoarder, so keep old e-mail chains. At 7:30 am. on June 10th, I sent the first draft to my critique partner, Auckland author Eileen Merriman. The story had come to me in a dream. I sent it with the following comment: ‘I have attached the flash, though I’m not sure if it’s a bit like most of my paintings, fun to do, but of no use to anyone.’

Eileen’s critique arrived a few hours later, with a suggestion to send to Bath Flash Fiction Award. I’d had an urgent call out to the laboratory where I work in the interim, and was chopping up someone’s spleen or something when I saw her message. I nearly forgot about it until nearer the deadline.
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Interview with
Catherine Edmunds
October 2017 Flash Fiction Second Prize

A multi-talented creative artist, Catherine is an inspiration in many ways. Here she tells us how being immersed in the culture of former pit villages, and a vintage picture of boys playing outside Elsecar Colliery, prompted her second prize winning story ‘The Hierarchy of Substances.’ She’s a dedicated writer who begins writing early, continues on and off throughout the day and has many current projects on the go, including finishing a novel which she began in last November’s NaNoWriMo. She also writes poetry and talks here about the similarity between writing poetry and flash fiction… “the music and the flow of the text matters in both forms.” Catherine is a musician by training and an artist. We need to look out for her on Sky Arts ‘Landscape Artist of the Year’ where she is a contestant, having also been in last year’s ‘Portrait Artist of the Year.’ We love her self-portrait reproduced here, and her drawing of a pit pony. And we like her advice for entrants to Bath Flash Fiction Award to “sock it to them with that first sentence.”
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Interview with Nancy Stohlman
Founder of FlashNano

Nancy Stohlman is the author of the flash collection The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories (2014), the flash novels The Monster Opera (2013) and Searching for Suzi: a flash novel (2009), and three anthologies of flash fiction including Fast Forward: The Mix Tape (2010), which was a finalist for a 2011 Colorado Book Award. She is the creator and curator of The Fbomb Flash Fiction Reading Series in Denver, the creator of FlashNano in November, and she has been published in over 100 journals and anthologies including the forthcoming Norton anthology New Microfictions (2018). Find out more about her at nancystohlman.com
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Interview with Rose McDonagh
October 2017 Flash Fiction Winner

We were fascinated to read that our first prize winner, Rose McDonagh, is a late night writer and has written almost every day since she was fifteen. Her winning piece was drafted in a community writing group she runs, inspired from one of her own exercises. She says, although it’s not always about getting published, a story gets “half its life from its author and half from being read and understood by other people.” Many writers have commented on the meaning of ‘Pony’ to them on social media. It’s a story with much resonance. David Swann, our October round judge, said “Haunting and elusive, yet simultaneously plain-speaking and precise – a story I won’t ever forget and my clear winner. Tremendous.”
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The Best Small Fictions 2017
Edited by Tara L. Masih and Amy Hempel
Reviewed by Santino Prinzi

The third instalment of one of the most popular and esteemed series of flash fiction anthologies, The Best Small Fictions 2017 (Braddock Avenue Books, 2017), is an essential read for every flash fiction writer or reader. From Matthew Baker’s island of presidential doppelgangers to Harriot West’s ekphrastic haibun story about Van Gogh’s sunflowers, each of the pieces in this anthology proves that writers are not only continuing to produce high-quality flash fiction, but that the imagination and scope of flash fiction is far-reaching, whether writers choose to explore the uncharted or re-invent the wheel.

A wonderful aspect of this series is its author spotlight, which includes an interview with an author with either more than one story in the anthology or multiple nominations (and being nominated just the once is an achievement in itself!). This year’s spotlight author is Joy Williams, a renowned American writer. The two stories, taken from 99 Stories of God (Tin House Books, 2016) serve as a great opening to the anthology and as a taster of Williams’ engaging, stripped-back collection itself. ‘36’ tells the story of Penny and the house she and her husband lived in, a house that she despises and rents out after her husband’s death. The story is laced with wit, the language is stripped back to the bare essentials, and culminates in a final striking image that offers a spectacular opening to the anthology.
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