Congratulations to all the authors who have made our Award short list.
February 2018 Long List
Congratulations to all the authors who have made our Award long list and many thanks to all who entered.
Flashing in Spain
with David Rhymes and Hemingway
For last minute inspiration for this February round of Bath Flash Fiction Award, which closes this Sunday 11th February at midnight (UK time), we’re catching up with David Rhymes, who won third prize in the June 2017 round of the competition, judged by Meg Pokrass with his story ‘The Place We Live Before We Don’t.’ David lives in Pamplona, Spain and sent us a picture of his contributor’s copy of The Lobsters Run Free, outside the cafe Iruna, where Hemingway used to write. From his description of the rooms upstairs with their comfy velvet benches, it sounds like just the right place to go and get ideas. David describes what prompted his own story in our interview and it’s interesting to think of how time passes in narrative fiction and how that can translate into a powerful micro fiction like his. We’re looking forward to seeing David’s historical novel about a bareknuckle boxer in print, and now he’s been re-energised by a recent Fast Flash Workshop with Kathy Fish, to read more of his short fiction as well.
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Launching Lobsters
and Festival Flash
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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On Being an Adhoccer
S.B. Borgersen
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 have entered Ad Hoc Fiction since the beginning – I am not sure if you were one of the seventeen writers who entered the very first contest, in April, 2015, but you have submitted most weeks since. Can you tell us what you like about the competition?
Our New Anthologies
Travelling the World
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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Interview with Anna Geary-Meyer
Lobsters Run Free in Berlin
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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Charmaine Wilkerson
In Print with Bath Flash Fiction
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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Gather us up and bring us home by Shasta Grant
Reviewed by Jude Higgins
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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How to Write a Novella-in-Flash
Joanna Campbell
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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