Month: January 2024

Welcome to the fifth in our series of interviews with this year's National Flash Fiction Day Anthology Editors and Microfiction Competition Judges! Submissions for the Anthology and Microfiction Competition are open until 15 February 2024 and we'll be posting weekly interviews over the next couple weeks.

This week, NFFD's Diane Simmons chats with Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar, one of this year's NFFD Microfiction Competition Judges, about her writing journey to inspiration to her advice for those entering the Microfiction Competition ....

 

DS: Thank you for agreeing to be a judge for this year’s micro fiction competition. You won the competition in 2023 with your flash ‘All my lovers’ and were Highly Commended in 2021 with ‘Adverb’. You obviously enjoy writing micros. Do you have any advice for entrants to this year’s competition?

Be clear, be visceral. This swatch of 100 words must give the readers enough context to build the entire story in their minds. Don’t leave them guessing the basics—who the narrator is, what’s their situation in life, and why they are telling this story. Finally, be merciless with your words. Write in a way that the readers feel your words poke and prickle under their skin.

DS: It can sometimes feel like writers are under pressure to always be putting words on the page. Are there any other activities, cultural or otherwise, that you feel are helpful to you as a writer? 

As an immigrant from India, I like to observe the similarities and contrasts in cultures. And, it’s not only the American way of life that I seek to understand—having grown up in the north of India, I’ve had limited exposure to the South and the East/West. It’s here in a foreign land that I’ve gotten to know people from different parts of my own country and learn about their rituals/beliefs. Participation in various events/holidays helps me understand people and the way they interact with each other. That indirectly helps my writing.

DS: Did you write as a child or teenager? If so, can you tell us a little about what you wrote?

Unlike many other writers, I started writing much later in life. Although I don’t have a degree or training in language/writing, immigration to the USA spurred in me a desire to write about my experiences. Later, that progressed into fiction.

DS: Do you enjoy performing your work? If so, do you have many opportunities to perform locally?

Other than Zoom and some in-person readings, I have never performed my stories, but I’d like to do that. There are some local opportunities, but more often than not, I hear about them after the event is over. Haven’t been able to catch the opportunities in time.

DS: Do you only write flash or are there any other forms that you enjoy writing?

Besides flash, I have written a few poems. Now, I’m trying my hand at short stories.

 

 

Welcome to the fourth in our series of interviews with this year's National Flash Fiction Day Anthology Editors and Microfiction Competition Judges! Submissions for the Anthology and Microfiction Competition are open until 15 February 2024 and we'll be posting weekly interviews over the next couple weeks.

This week, NFFD's Diane Simmons chats with David Rhymes, one of this year's NFFD Microfiction Competition Judges, about everything from Novella-In-Flash inspiration, life in Spain, and his advice to those entering the Microfiction Competition....

 

DS: Thank you for agreeing to be a micro fiction judge. Writing a hundred-word flash can be challenging. Do you have any advice for entrants to the competition or anything that you particularly like to see in a micro (or not see)?

DR: Thank you for inviting me. I'm really excited and honoured to take part.

Regarding a successful micro, I agree with Tim Craig's comment last year that you need to "get in late, leave early." One way to achieve this might be to jolt the reader awake with your first line –

• 'I'm a combi boiler, hot at the touch of a button.' (Alison Woodhouse)
• 'She has heard that you can mould children, like clay' (Gaynor Jones)
• The GIs puff like bánh bao dumplings and drink until their pockets leak. (Sara Hills)

You only have 100 words, so you are going to need to make everything earn its keep – the title, the diction, the arrangement of words on the page, but also their suggestion and/or implication. The subtext if you like.

I particularly love stories that hint via suggestion at a larger world, invoking or nodding towards currents of history. Sara Hills' "Neil Armstrong Walks on the Moon" is a fabulous example of this. We get glimpses of America in Vietnam, the US space programme, but it comes wrapped inside the story of a mother explaining the world to her son, engaging in a kind of magical or wishful/ironical thinking. So we get the global echo, but also a highly specific portrait of a character-in-time-in-action – all this in just 100 words.

DS: Your novella-in-flash The Last Days of the Union was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in 2022. Can you tell us a little about the novella and what inspired you to write it?

DR: I was reading around the story of Mathias Rust, the young West German aviator who, in 1987, rented a Cessna sports plane and landed in Red Square, Moscow. He was hoping to speak to Mikhail Gorbachev about peace.

I thought, “What about a historical novella-in-flash, based on the Rust story, in which the main protagonist, hardly features at all?" A "novella with a hole in it" so to speak – a story told with the main character absent, appearing only as a shadow shape, a kind of photo-negative – built only out of other peoples' testimonies.

The story changed shape once I discovered via research that Rust's role in effectuating regime change was much more significant than many histories acknowledge. The latter half of the novella explores this possibility, tracing how Gorbachev used the failure of national defences as an excuse to purge military opponents and move forward with an agenda for change.

DS: Are there any flash fictions that you remember made you laugh out loud? If not, are there any that have made you cry?

DR: I listened recently to a selection of poems by Simon Armitage on Audible and several made me splutter – "Hop in, Dennis" (about giving Dutch footballer Dennis Bergkamp a lift as a hitchhiker) for example – the bit about the wine gums, and also odd lines like, "a contortion of red and white, like Santa Claus in a badger trap." A lot of the poems in his "Seeing Stars" collection read like flash, but I think these boundaries are permeable– I find the debate about what's actually this and what's actually that a bit superfluous.

Crying. Hmmm. I can be very moved, but teary? Not all that often in truth. The last flash I can remember that really made me cry (like really cry) was "Handover notes" by Victoria Richards. This is still one of my all-time favourite pieces.

DS: Do you have a favourite author (of flash or any other form)?

DR: Yes. Hundreds. Too many to list.

DS: You live in Navarra, Spain. Do you have a favourite spot to visit in Spain? If so, what makes it special to you?

I've been living here in Navarra for over twenty years now, so it's as much my homeland really as anywhere else in the world. It's a place of huge contrasts, with the Pyrenees to the north, the hilly middle or mixed zone where I live and the flat south, la Ribera, watered by the Ebro. My village is a little way south of Pamplona, in a valley called Valdizarbe. This is a wine and wheat growing area, traversed by the Camino de Santiago (Way of St James.) At one end of the valley is the market town of Puente la Reina (pilgrims will know this place). The main street of the town leads down to a famous medieval bridge and this short stroll is possibly my favourite in the whole of Spain. There is a special quality to the light in early summer, the coolness of the shade, the bustle of the little shops and terraces as you approach the bridge - certainly that’s where I’ve felt happiest to be alive, just doing my shopping, drinking a vermouth, eating pintxos of a Saturday morning.

Welcome to the third in our series of interviews with this year's National Flash Fiction Day Anthology Editors and Microfiction Competition Judges! Submissions for the Anthology and Microfiction Competition are open until 15 February 2024 and we'll be posting weekly interviews over the next four weeks.

This week, NFFD's Diane Simmons chats with , one of this year's NFFD Microficiton Competition Judges, about everything from favourite books to first flashes to her advice to those entering the 2024 Microfiction Competition....

 

DS: Firstly, thank you for agreeing to be a micro fiction judge this year. You won the competition in 2022 with your flash ‘Just a Word to the Snowblind’ and were Highly Commended in 2023 with ‘The Fate of Small Creatures’. Do you have any tips for entrants to this year’s competition?

JK: I love the NFFD comp, so I’m delighted and excited to be a co-judge this year, though I should say that as well as winning and getting highly commended, I’ve also stalled on the short-list and got nowhere twice, so that’s all bases covered then! Tip wise, I think that when writing a successful drabble, it’s important to experiment with every tool available since wordcount is so constrained. Each word should earn its place, but more than that, each word should aim to be optimal - not only with reference to meaning, but also rhythm, pace, the way it sounds in context, the musicality of the syllables and phonemes and how collectively the words flow when read out loud. And writers could think about controlling the white spaces on the page and the beats of silence between words and sentences. Even punctuation can enhance constrained storytelling if used in ingenious and compelling ways.

DS: Can you remember where you first heard about flash? Do you remember any early flashes you read that left an impression on you?

JK: It was in 2015 doing a course called, ‘An Introduction to Creative Writing’ at the Open University. My tutor had us drafting 300-word stories, and though flash wasn’t the universally used term it is today (it was also known as short-short stories and brief fiction back then), whatever it was called, I became obsessed. I searched the internet to find out more and found the fabulous on-line litzine, The Molotov Cocktail | A PROJECTILE FOR INCENDIARY FLASH FICTION where I loved everything, especially flashes by Aeryn Rudel, and also Smokelong Quarterly where I read a story that has haunted me ever since called, ‘The Sadness of Spirits’ by Aimee Pogson. Here’s the link if you’d like to be haunted too: The Sadness of Spirits - SmokeLong Quarterly.

DS: You can only take one book (that you have already read) on a long train journey. What would it be?

JK: The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch. I love everything about this book: the form of the story; the unreliable narrator; the exquisite language; the undercurrents of magical realism, especially when they seep to the surface; and the wild and isolated sea-cliff setting - a landscape that provides a looming narrative presence throughout. It’s a story I never stop reading.

DS: Your novella-in-flash ‘A Learning Curve’ won the Bath flash fiction NIF competition in 2023 and Northodox Press have announced that they'll be publishing your short story collection in 2025. I’m guessing you dedicate a great deal of time to writing and I wondered if you have a daily writing routine.

JK: Ha! I’d love a daily writing routine, but in reality, I more carve out time around family and caring commitments so no two days are the same. But I do try to write, or edit, or provide feedback to writing buddies every day. For me, writing is a joy, a therapy and a gift, and I hope everyone who enters the comp this year has something like fun crafting their entries.

 

 

 

 

 

Happy New Year and welcome to the second in our series of interviews with this year's National Flash Fiction Day Anthology Editors and Microfiction Competition Judges! Submissions for the Anthology and Microfiction Competition are open until 15 February 2024 and we'll be posting weekly interviews over the next five weeks.

This week, Diane Simmons chats with NFFD's Karen Jones, one of this year's Anthology Editors, about her journey as a reader, writer and editor, and, of course, her advice for those interested in sending work for consideration for the 2024 NFFD Anthology....

 

DS: This will be your third year co-editing the anthology for NFFD – thank you for all your hard work. Has there been anything that’s surprised you about the type of stories that you’ve read so far?

KJ: I’m often impressed, and, yes, surprised by the ingenuity of our submitters, of how they manage to find new and fascinating ways of interpreting our theme. On the other hand, I’m frequently surprised by how many people make the title of their piece the theme word – please don’t do that. As well as being an administrative nightmare, it always comes across as unimaginative.

DS: The theme this year is the natural elements: earth, air, fire and water. Do you have any tips on how to interpret the theme or any advice on how not to approach the theme?

KJ: My advice for this stays constant: write down the first few words that come to mind when looking at the theme, then discard them, because everyone else has probably thought the same thing. Strive for originality – not easy, I know, but when we see something we haven’t seen before, we tend to get very excited. Remember that we are putting together an anthology, so we want as much variety as possible, so avoid standard subjects e.g. dementia, death of a child, break-up stories, domestic violence, cancer. If you do feel drawn to one of those subjects, try to make it as different as possible, because you will be up against a lot of people writing about the same thing and that reduces your chances immediately.

DS: You have, I believe, been writing flash for over twenty years. Can you remember when you first came across the term and any early flashes that you read that left a lasting impression on you?

KJ: I first came across the term in 2004, but it wasn’t flash as we know it. Back then, when I first discovered it, it was a timed exercise, writing to a theme in a ‘flash’ of around 20 minutes. Then I discovered 60 word stories and drabbles. It was a while before I found places to submit flash as I now know it and my first publication was in print, in an anthology, in 2008.

I don’t remember any specific flashes from that time that have really stuck with me, unfortunately, but I think that’s because there really didn’t seem to be much of it about.

DS: Did you read much as a child. If so, did you have a favourite author or authors?

KJ: I haunted the library as a child and, like most people of my generation, read everything Enid Blyton wrote. But the author who I loved the most was Ruth M. Arthur, and I recently discovered she was Scottish, which I had no idea of at the time. She wrote novels that often included the supernatural, and I adored them. Funnily enough, as an adult, that’s exactly the kind of thing I avoid, having become very easily frightened by supernatural books and films. I was clearly much braver as a child.

DS: You recently had a historical novella Highly Commended in Bath novella-in-flash competition. Do you write much historic fiction and if so, do you have a favourite period of history to write about?

KJ: I don’t consciously think of many of my stories as historical, but I do often write from the POV of a child in the 1960s/1970s which I suppose is deemed as historical now. Stories set in that era and up to the 1990s are probably the ones I find easiest to write, the easiest to slip back into that time and how I saw things then.