We’re delighted to share Kathryn Aldridge-Morris’s really interesting answers to Jude’s questions. Learn more about how she wrote her first prize winning story, selected by judge Matt Kendrick ‘Visiting Lenin’s Tomb’, her current writing projects and a great tip for writing flash. The picture shows Kathryn reading one of her stories which was included in the 2023 Flash Fiction Festival Anthology launched in Bath at the beginning of this year.

Thank you! The seeds of the story emerged from a personal essay I’d been working on. Our brains are narrative machines constantly making connections between seemingly random events and, with essays, I often start out by juxtaposing two disparate parts of my life experience and seeing what emerges. A large part of the joy I get from writing comes from making these unexpected connections. I’d started writing about my time living in the Soviet Union during the last couple of years of communism and braiding in more recent events in my life to see where the connections lay. I found myself with a rough draft of an essay about endings; personal and political, as well as about authoritarianism and the family as a site of politics. I felt a lot of energy in the juxtaposition of the settings and eras and that it had potential for experimentation. And what better form to experiment with than flash? I decided to write a fictional story instead of an essay to engage with the themes, while still drawing the sensory details—such as the Kino cigarettes and dill— from my lived experience; the memory alone of these smells is enough to immediately transport me back to Moscow at that time. I opened with Lenin’s tomb because it does so much heavy lifting in terms of evoking place and mood.

I was also inspired by a brilliant workshop I took with Suzanne (S.A.) Greene called ‘Write like a Cubist Paints’. It encouraged me to think about how I could distort perceptions of place and time in my writing. I wanted to play around to see what I could do with the form: to see if I could use the inherent features of flash to convey how our minds make these unexpected connections in real time, to convey that sense of how everything we experience in the present is informed by our past, and how that can manifest as intrusive thoughts or dissociation at times of heightened stress or trauma. I decided to see if I could pull off this effect by braiding time and place not by paragraph but within the sentences. I wanted the images and happenings to bump up against each other, to blur and disorientate and make the reader question what they’d just read and double-take.

I wrote a story in 2016 which got published by Paris Lit Up—one of the best journals out there by the way! — and was invited to read at the launch but didn’t dare accept because I didn’t see myself as a writer. I then started writing again in 2020 when work slowed down during lockdown. It was the first time I could give myself permission to write fiction without feeling guilty because I didn’t have much work. The SmokeLong Quarterly CNF intensive was an epiphany for me and turbocharged my writing. Since then, I’ve taken workshops with most of the big hitters in flash, and I honestly don’t think I’d have had the quality of teaching or tutors with that level of expertise in flash fiction if I’d done an MA at university.

• You’ve been writing ELT text books for many years Do you think this has influenced your creative writing practice?

It’s such a different way of writing I never saw a connection between the two, but I think it probably did hone my skills of writing short and with tight constraints. Some briefs are incredibly prescriptive like: write 400 words, include this set of lexical items, these language functions and these grammar points, and I think you need a creative bent to be able to create a context in which it all comes together naturally.

• At the flash fiction festival in Bristol 2024 you offered a session on running Writing for Wellbeing groups and you work for Bristol charities facilitating such groups. Can you tell us more about this?

I did a postgrad in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes after years of teaching ESOL because I could see the impact of bringing creativity into the classroom. I now run writing for wellbeing workshops in community settings, like cafes and libraries, and got funding at the start of the year to be writer-in-residence for a charity which works with women seeking asylum. I’m going to be running an online version of the workshop with Propelling Pencil next year, if people are interested in how facilitating these workshops differs from teaching creative writing.

• You received an arts council grant this year to write a novella in flash. What do you find interesting about writing in this form? How is it going?

Great— now that I’ve found my momentum! Writing longer has meant planning has become part of my process – and I weirdly love it! Writing short, I never know at the start of a piece where I’m going to end up, but with my novella I’ve become a planner. I’ve got a flipchart paper with post-it notes plotting out the skeleton of the story and so when I write a piece that is fitting somewhere, I kind of need to have an idea of where it’s going to land from the outset.

• We’d love to know more about your debut flash fiction collection, Cold Toast, which is being published by Dahlia Books. Do you have a publication date yet?

It’s out in spring 2025 and is a collection of flash fiction about the female experience where characters navigate girlhood and then young womanhood. The stories are rooted in 70s and 80s Britain, a time of the rise of the women’s movement, a spike in divorce rates and the emergence of households headed by single mothers. As ever in my writing, the personal is political and it’s unashamedly feminist. I worked hard on sequencing the stories, so that when read together, there is a suggestion of an arc and shift by the end. And I cannot wait to reveal the stunning cover art!

Don’t set out to write a prize-winning flash! Pull out your best WIP, one that holds the most energy for you, and copy and paste it into another doc. Rename it ‘justplayingaround.doc.’ If it’s rubbish you can delete it. But it won’t be because you’ll have magically tricked your mind into bypassing your inner critic! You have nothing to prove because you are just playing around. Say it out loud. I’m just playing around. Zero stakes! Experiment. Be bold. Chop it, grow it, change the form, be playful like nobody’s watching because nobody is. You’ll surprise yourself— I promise!

Jude: The next BFFA award, this time judged by Sarah Freligh, ends February 2nd 2025. Early bird discounted entries end this Sunday, 15th December.

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