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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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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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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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