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Interview with Kathy Fish
Flash Fiction Award Judge
October 2016 – February 2017

kathy-fish We’re delighted that renowned American flash fiction writer and teacher, Kathy Fish is judging our next award, which opens on November 1^st.

Kathy teaches flash fiction for the Mile High MFA program at Regis University in Denver. She has published four collections of short fiction: a chapbook in the Rose Metal Press collective, A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women (2008); Wild Life (Matter Press, 2011); Together We Can Bury It (The Lit Pub, 2012); and Rift, co-authored with Robert Vaughan (Unknown Press, 2015). Her story, “A Room with Many Small Beds” was chosen by Stuart Dybek for inclusion in Best Small Fictions 2016 (Queen’s Ferry Press).
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Dots and Other Flashes of Perception
Debut flash fiction collection by Santino Prinzi
Review by Jude Higgins

dots-and-other-flashes-of-perception Forty six stories are included in Santino Prinzi’s debut collection of flash fictions published by The Nottingham Review. Many of the characters in this diverse and fascinating collection see life from the periphery, longing to connect with others and finding this hard or impossible.

Stories take place in cafes, parks, food and clothes stores, kitchens and parties and reveal the lives of (usually) young people in contemporary urban society. Prinzi’s style is clean and precise – low on metaphor, simile and embellished language of any kind. This way of writing suits the subject matter and setting of the stories, which have no fluffy edges, although some are humorous and playful. Shelf Life is like that – a neatly crafted story following the path of a relationship all the way to its noir end as the protagonists wander around a bookshop morphing personalities as they select different genres of writing from the shelves.
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The Best Small Fictions 2016
Eds. Tara L. Masih & Stuart Dybek
Reviewed by Santino Prinzi

The Best Small Fictions 2016 (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2016) is the second instalment in this series of anthologies that pull together the very best in small fiction. To say this is no easy task is an understatement, one with which I can only begin to empathise. Tara L. Masih, series editor, highlights in her foreword to the anthology: “out of thousands of published small fictions, my staff and consulting editors and I narrowed down the field to 100”, to which the guest editor, Stuart Dybek, whittled this selection down to 45 stories. This feat is admirable in itself, but truly rewarding for readers of this anthology.

An additional feature to this anthology are interviews offering a spotlight on a particular author and on a particular press, magazine, or journal. Both Megan Giddings, (formerly an Executive Editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, now co-fiction editor at The Offing mag and a recipient of the Kathy Fish Fellowship) and Texture Press, received five nominations and have two small fictions featured in this anthology. Not only is this an incredible achievement for both Giddings and Texture Press, but, and most importantly, when you read these pieces you see how their places are more than well-deserved.
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Interview with Matt Potter
Founder of Pure Slush Magazine

matt-potter Pure Slush was established in December 2010, publishing flash fiction online for anyone who wants to read it. Moving into print publication in late 2011, what has followed includes two further imprints (Truth Serum Press and Everytime Press) and almost fifty books. There are many more to come – memoir, how-to resources, anthologies, fiction, poetry – so there is always something to like about the entire catalogue. The best words to describe Pure Slush: zesty and cosmopolitan.

Pure Slush founder, Matt Potter, was born in Adelaide and has lived most of his life in Australia … but keeps a key part of his psyche in Berlin. If you want to know more about him and the way he thinks, read his travel memoir Hamburgers and Berliners and other courses in between (Červená Barva Press, 2015). Does his Australian outlook affect the work and the mood and the tone of Pure Slush? Yeah, he reckons it does.
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Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer
Edited by Robert Swartwood
Reviewed by Santino Prinzi

hint-fiction Hint Fiction (W.W. Norton & Company, 2010) is, as the title suggests, an anthology of fiction where each story is 25 words or fewer. There are 125 stories to be found in this anthology, divided across three broad themes: life and death; love and hate; this and that, which entails any story that fails to fit into the first two categories. The anthology boasts a series of celebrated writers, such as Joyce Carol Oates, Gay Degani, Stuart Dybek, among others. Robert Shapard, the editor of numerous flash fiction anthologies who has provided his views on the reverse of this anthology, believes that “some of these stories suggest entire novels in just a few words,” and, as became clear on reading, these stories really are microcosms of universes that become apparent once the penny drops.
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Songs Without Music by Tim Stevenson
Reviewed by Santino Prinzi

Songs Without Music (Gumbo Press, 2016) is the third fiction collection from Tim Stevenson. He is a first prize winner of the National Flash Fiction Day Micro Competition, has had his fiction published widely in magazines, anthologies, and online, and is judging this year’s Bridport Flash Fiction Prize.

The collection is presented with the by-line “flash-fictions and curiosities”, which is an accurate and all-encompassing description for Songs Without Music; we have flash, haiku, centipieces, and other forms possibly eluding definition. Not only are there different forms of fiction but different genres too, making for a collection that invigorates the imagination and provides a varied, thought-provoking reading experience.
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Interview with Michael Fitzgerald
June 2016 Flash Fiction Commended

MF falklands B Michael Fitzgerald tells us more about his trip to the remoter parts of the Falkland Islands, which inspired his piece. An architect, he explains how architectural work, like writing, goes through a constantly evolving process and includes “a finite palette of components”. When writing flash fiction he says to ignore the rules and experiment, which is what he does to great effect in ‘Falkland Island Walk‘. We also like his tip to save your work under a different title if you are struggling, then “go mad on it”.
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Q and A with John Saul
June 2016 Flash Fiction Commended

Call It Tender John Saul told us he likes interviews, reading them especially. Matching the condensed nature of flash fiction, he’s given us some brief answers to our questions. We like his one word answer – ‘read ‘ – to our question about a tip for writing flash fiction. There’s lots of opportunity for reading a variety of short-short fiction on this site. John’s commended story, ‘Tearful‘ which came to him in the middle of the night, all the winners and commended in the June round and the other winning pieces from the first two rounds of Bath Flash Fiction Award, plus many links to fiction from writers around the globe and, of course, all the pieces on Ad Hoc Fiction, our weekly free micro contest, where you can read and vote for your favourites. You can also read John’s longer fiction – he’s published several collections – including Call it Tender, published by Salt.
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Interview with Anita Macallum
June 2016 Flash Fiction Commended

Anita Macullum Anita Macallum commended by Michelle Elvy for her flash fiction Boobless, tells us how a prompt from her writing group kick started this piece and how keeping things simple is her biggest lesson when she performs her work.
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Stronger Faster Shorter
Flash Fictions by David Swann
Review by Jeanette Sheppard

The twenty-five flash fictions in Stronger Faster Shorter Flash Fictions (Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press, 2015) form a chronological narrative spanning a boy’s childhood in the 1970’s to adulthood. Each flash provides a sense of the narrator inviting the reader to peer into the past and experience the emotional truth of ‘our world, up the M6’ (as termed in Butlins with Books). Sometimes the narrator looks back with a measured eye, at other times he is rummaging in the past rediscovering people and places that recall further memories and provoke reflection.

There is a nostalgic quality throughout as the narrator shines a flashlight on a multitude of emotionally resonant characters including: a singing alcoholic, a goat murderer, a spoon playing war veteran, CB radio hams, pigeon fanciers, a university student, war survivors, a burned man on a bus and an ex-lover’s friend.
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