Author Archives: Jude

The Molotov Cocktail
A projectile for explosive flash fiction
Interview with Josh Goller the brain behind the mayhem

I should be clear about this right from the beginning. I LOVE The Molotov Cocktail being freakishly keen on the strangely, darkly weird. I enter all their comps and won their last themed Flash Fiction competition in May – Flash Felon. This interview with its creator, Josh Goller is therefore more starry-eyed big-up than incisive critique. Having said that I can genuinely think of nothing not to like about the darkly whimsical retro-styled badass flash zine based under gloomy Portland skies in the USA.
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Interview with Carrie Etter
Poet and Flash Fiction Writer

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. Carrie Etter’s recently published flash fiction chapbook Hometown (V Press) is reviewed here by Santino Prinzi. You can hear Carrie read from the chapbook alongside Meg Pokrass, K M Elkes, Santino Prinzi, and Diane Simmons at our Evening of Flash Fiction, St James Wine Vaults, Bath on Friday 29^th July.
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Hometown by Carrie Etter
Reviewed by Santino Prinzi

Hometown (V.Press, 2016) is the debut fiction pamphlet from the poet, lecturer, and critic Carrie Etter, whose most recent collection, Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014), was shortlisted for the 2014 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry by The Poetry Society.

The collection explores the lives of characters living in the American Midwest and is divided into two sections, with the second section detailing “the aftermath of a white man’s accidental killing of a black man in central Illinois” in a series of flashes. For this reviewer, the perfect flash is a complete story in itself, can be read quickly, but remains in the mind of the reader long after an initial reading, the type of flash you read and have to step away from the text so you can recover; if you’re looking for a collection of flashes that do exactly this then look no further.
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Interview with Shelley Wood
June 2016 Flash Fiction Second Prize

Shelley Wood

Shelley Wood won second prize with her flash fiction Rags,Riches in our June 2016 award. Her story took an unusual perspective on a photograph of a carefree moment she was given in a writing group. Read more about how she began writing flash and take note of her writing tips when you are editing a longer piece. She tightened her winning story so much she ‘almost had to use a wrench.’ The result was certainly worth the effort.

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Interview with Kelly Creighton
Founder of Incubator Literary Magazine

Kelly Creighton

Kelly Creighton’s debut novel The Bones of It (Liberties Press, Dublin) was nominated for the Kate O’Brien Award and selected as San Diego Book Review’s 2015 Novel of the Year. Runner up and shortlisted for numerous fiction and poetry prizes, her short story collection will be published in Spring 2017.
@KellyCreighton

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Interview with Sharon Telfer
June 2016 Flash Fiction First Prize

sharon-telfer-on-hills

Our first prize winner for June, 2016, Sharon Telfer, nearly didn’t enter her winning piece because she thought it wasn’t ‘the right sort of thing.’ So her advice is to cast aside such judgements, take the leap and enter. Read more in our interview about her writing methods, which include getting away from the desk to solve knotty problems.

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New Novella-in-Flash Award

We’re excited to announce this new competition judged by author, teacher and editor Meg Pokrass whose novella, Here, Where We Live is one of the flash-fiction novellas included in the Rose Metal Press awarding winning guide My Very End of the Universe – five Novellas-in-flash and a study of the form.

From My Very End of the Universe:

“One way to describe the interplay between flash fiction and novellas-in-flash is to think of each flash as a star. Stars stand alone…In nearly every era and culture, humans have named the stars and then taken those beloved luminous points and connected them in the sky into shapes and stories. Novellas-in-flash are like those constellations: writers linking their flashes together into a larger image– into narratives deep with possibilities”

Read Meg’s interview here for more information.

And if you are in Bath on 29^th July do come and hear Meg read alongside poet and flash-fiction writer, Carrie Etter. Places available for booking here.

Cue The Gods Of Despair
An Interview With Sara Lippmann

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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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?

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Award Round Up
June 2016

It’s been another thrilling round of Bath Flash Fiction Award with six hundred and eighty six entries coming in from twenty five different countries – a huge variety of styles and subject matter. Many entrants wrote close to the maximum word limit – and a large number of writers entered much shorter pieces. The winning and commended stories are by authors living in the UK, Canada and Ireland.
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