We launched The Lobsters Run Free Bath Flash Fiction Volume Two and Flash Fiction Festival One at Beaufort Bookshop, Larkhall, Bath on Saturday evening, 27th January.
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Sue is one of a number of authors who submit to our free micro contest Ad Hoc Fiction every week. We really appreciate her support and it’s marvellous to see what good use she has made of entering. It was our intention in launching Ad Hoc Fiction to encourage people to write more short-short fiction and to read other people’s work. Sue is so inventive and dedicated with writing and sharing her pieces – an event where people called out numbers to select a story for her to read from her ever-growing collection, a scarf she has had made with the Ad Hoc stories printed on it, writing while in hospital and forming the ‘Adhoccers’ group.
You can buy our anthologies, The Lobsters Run Free: Bath Flash Fiction Volume Two and Flash Fiction Festival One, both published by Ad Hoc Fiction, from the new online bookshop.
The Lobsters Run Free contains 135 stories – the winning and listed entrants from the 2017 Bath Flash Fiction Awards. The 74 stories in the Festival Anthology are written by presenters and participants at the first ever literary festival dedicated to Flash Fiction, held in Bath in 2017.
Since publication in early December, the books have travelled the world.
Catherine Higgins-Moore lives in New York and shows us a New York city background for her copy of The Lobsters Run Free. She was short listed in the February 2017 round of Bath Flash Award with her story, ‘Holy Cross’.
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We’re glad Anna liked the lobsters on the cover of The Lobsters Run Free: Bath Flash Fiction Volume Two and seeing it first online lifted her mood on a frustrating day. Her powerful story with this title was short listed in the February 2017 round of the Award by Kathy Fish, our judge for that round. We thought it summed up many themes in the anthology, and for this reason we placed it as the final story in the book. We think it makes a fitting ending. The title went on to inspire the publisher’s striking cover design.
Anna has some good tips for writing successful flash fiction. She says that readers need ‘to be transported from one state of being to another’ and the best advice she was given about writing flash fictions was that they require ‘movement and resonance’. Her story certainly achieves all these things. At the end of her flash fiction, the image of lobsters escaping and running free in an apocalyptic world is very memorable.
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Our second novella-in-flash award, judged by Meg Pokrass, closes at midnight 29th January 2018. Our first winner was Charmaine Wilkerson, an American writer, who now lives in Rome.
Her winning novella-in-flash, How to Make a Window Snake, was published in Summer 2017, by Ad Hoc Fiction, in our anthology of the same title. Also included in this anthology are flash novellas from the two runners-up, Things I Dream About When I’m not Sleeping by Ingrid Jendrzejewski and A Safer Way to Fall by Joanna Campbell. The anthology, which was launched at the inaugural Flash Fiction Festival in Bath in June 2017, has been selling well around the world. Here’s a photograph of How to Make A Window Snake taken by Charmaine in a café in Rome, complete with an authentic Italian cappuccino.
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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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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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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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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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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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