Tag Archives: flash fiction festival

Michelle Elvy, published by Ad Hoc Fiction, June 2019

Ad Hoc Fiction is honoured to be publishing the everrumble, “a small novel in small forms” by Michelle Elvy. It’s a wonderful and important work of fiction highly praised by the writers quoted below. The striking cover art is by acclaimed Ethiopian artist, Eyayu Genet.

“the everrumble is a poetic imagining of intense focus and sweeping ideas. Zettie’s story is fluid and in motion, transcending geographies and time. She stops talking, at age seven, and starts to listen – to the worlds she finds in language and books, and to the people and places she encounters as she moves across continents. Her silence connects her to people, to nature and to the elemental world. Magical and beyond boundaries, this collection focuses on small fragments, taking Zettie, and the reader, inevitably to the place where human history began.”
the everrumble was launched at the Flash Fiction Festival, UK on 28th-30th June where Michelle ran workshops, chaired a panel on Flash Around the World, introduced the latest Best Small Fiction anthology, and talked about flash fiction in New Zealand. It is for sale at the Ad Hoc Fiction bookshop in paperback in several different currencies and in Kindle ebook format via Amazon. Read in Full

Ad Hoc Fiction’s Fourth Birthday

It’s Ad Hoc Fiction fourth birthday! The micro contest opened for entries first on 15th April 2015 and the first winning story by writer, Nick Black was published on 22nd April, four years ago, today. Our big thanks to John at Ad Hoc Fiction, who runs the Ad Hoc Fiction contest; designs and publishes the Ad Hoc Fiction paper back and ebooks; administers the Bath Flash Fiction Awards, and who has been doing so much to help put flash fiction on the map in the UK and beyond. A lot has happened in the last four years and here are sixteen random Happy Birthday Ad Hoc Fiction Facts: Read in Full

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.
Read in Full

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.
Read in Full

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

Ad Hoc Fiction author, Diane Simmons, on Radio Bristol

We are delighted that our publisher, Ad Hoc Fiction is publishing Diane Simmons’ collection, Finding A Way, fifty one linked flash fictions which show one family’s grieving journey over the three years following a devastating loss. Diane is widely published in anthologies and magazines and has been successful in many writing competitions. She is a member of the organising team for Flash Fiction Festivals, UK and is also a Co-Director of National Flash Fiction Day, UK. This Thursday, (November 15th) she read A Collection, the first story from her forthcoming book, on BBC Upload, the fantastic new evening magazine programme dedicated to showcasing local artists and writers, at Radio Bristol. Click here to listen. She comes in about 1.34 mins into the programme.

Radio Bristol have created a brilliantly simple system in Upload. All you need is a mobile phone to record and submit your creative works for possible inclusion on their programme which airs weekday evenings, from 7.00 pm to 10.00 pm. Jude was approached by the presenter, the dynamic Adam Crowther, who asked if she could suggest some local flash writers and it seemed a perfect opportunity for Diane to read one of her stories and talk a little about Finding A Way. Do listen. Diane often reads her fictions in the Flash Fiction Evenings Jude organises in Bath and she is pictured here at the Flash Fiction Festival in July, 2018, reading A Picnic in the Park, another story from her forthcoming collection. As always, she reads wonderfully here on the radio and in the interview with Adam after the reading, she talks more about her new collection and her writing. Do listen. Diane is currently putting the finishing touches to her book, which will be published in January and available for sale at bookshop.adhocfiction.com in several different currencies for world-wide sales. We are really looking forward to seeing it in print. More details soon!

Interview with Vanessa Gebbie
Flash Fiction Award Judge
November 2018 – February 2019

Vanessa has won multiple awards for both prose and poetry, including a Bridport Prize and the Troubadour. Her flash publications include Ed’s Wife and Other Creatures (Liquorice Fish Books) and the weird/irreal collection Nothing to Worry About (Flash: The International Short Short Story Press at Chester University) as well as many individual publications online and in print. She is author of three short story collections (with Salt and Cultured Llama), a novel (Bloomsbury), and two poetry publications (Pighog and Cultured Llama). She is also commissioning and contributing editor of Short Circuit, Guide to the Art of the Short Story (Salt). She teaches widely www.vanessagebbie.com.
Read in Full

Teaching Alligators at Night – notes by Frankie McMillan

Frankie McMillan introduces flash fiction to her students at the Hagley Writers’ Institute, Christchurch, New Zealand by studying works of great writers of short-short fiction. Here she describes how she recently taught flash fiction using Meg Pokrass’s marvellous new collection Alligators at Night, published in July 2018 by Ad Hoc Fiction and available from the Ad Hoc Fiction bookshop. We thrilled that Frankie is widening the international line up and coming over from New Zealand to teach and read at the next Flash Fiction Festival, taking place at Trinity College, in Bristol, from 28th-30th June 2019. Frankie says: Read in Full

Interview with Tim Craig, June 2018 Third Prize Winner

Tim Craig, who won third prize in the June Award judged by David Gaffney with his story ‘Northern Lights’ only recently began writing flash. We love how Tim was prompted to write in this form by his friend, Mandy Wheeler’s suggestion that ‘Life’s too short to write long things’. It’s a great incentive to get into writing short short fiction and then perhaps to stitch the pieces up into longer fictions like novellas or novels. After I received Tim’s answers to my questions, I asked him for a photograph of his dog, as he mentioned it. We’ve noticed many of our prize winners for this contest own dogs. He’s included a picture of it looking very chilled under a lattice of shade. We hope he gets some quiet time himself soon to do some more writing. He’s a very good reader and we’d really like to hear more of his stories. The other picture included here of what he calls ‘the hairy babies’ he saw in a French cafe, looks like a perfect story prompt. And his tip quoted from Ray Bradbury, to think of rejection as nothing more than a wrong address is a further incentive for anyone to get those words down on paper and not worry about how they will be received.

Can you tell us what inspired your powerful and atmospheric flash fiction ‘Northern Lights?

I did a fair amount of hitch-hiking when I was younger, and came across some interesting people on the way – a bit like my character Pavel the truck driver, so maybe it was that. There’s certainly something magical about entering a stranger’s life and hearing their story in such a confined space and limited amount of time. In that respect, I suppose it’s a bit like flash fiction itself.

Read in Full

New Collection by Meg Pokrass

We’re thrilled that Ad Hoc Fiction has published Meg Pokrass’s new collection, Alligators at Night, the first book of hers published in the UK. Acclaimed US author Stuart Dybek says of her new collection:

The nuanced tonal complexity, which can go from the whimisical to a darker irony in the turn of a phrase, has been a signature feature of the work of Meg Pokrass. That complexity is in her new collection, Alligators at Night, heightened further by the fertile invention and unpredictable interplay of these beautifully crafted pieces

The title story was recently chosen for Wigleaf’s best fifty stories of 2018 and another story in the collection, Barista was selected by Amy Hempel for Best Small Fictions, 2018.

Alligators at Night will be launched at the Flash Fiction Festival in Bristol, 20-22nd July where you will be able to hear Meg reading some of these brilliant stories and it is available to buy now worldwide in many different currencies from the Ad Hoc Fiction bookshop

Meg Pokrass is the author of four other collections of flash fiction, and one award-winning collection of prose poetry, Cellulose Pajamas which received the Bluelight Book Award in 2016. Her stories and poems have been widely published and anthologized in two Norton Anthologies: Flash Fiction International and the forthcoming New Microfiction and her novella-in-flash, Here Where We Live, is published in My Very End of the Universe the Rose Metal Press Guide to the form. Meg was the judge for the Bath Flash Fiction Award, Novella-in-Flash competition in 2017 and 2018. She is curator of Flash Fiction Festivals and editor of The New Flash Fiction Review She currently teaches on-line flash fiction workshops.