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 from 1 December 2021 to 15 February 2022.
This week, Diane Simmons chats with Christopher Allen, one of this year's judges for the 2022 NFFD Microfiction Competition, about movement, editing and crafting a collection of flash....
Diane: You have at times described yourself as a nomad. Do you think moving from place to place affects what you write about or how you write it?
Christopher: Indirectly maybe? Characters and situations I’ve encountered around the world do show up in my writing, but only rarely. The tree in ‘Fred’s Massive Sorrow’ was inspired by a tree growing on the top of a building in the middle of Vienna. A man working on the Mekong in Cambodia inspired ‘Kerosene Man’. A river in South Tyrol is the river in ‘Providence’. I just happened to be in Siena during The Feast of Santa Caterina, the memory of which forms the setting for my story ‘Santa Caterina’—but these are exceptions in my writing. I’m usually very much an ‘in-the-mind’ writer.
Always being on the road, though, does affect the way I write. I write on trains and planes or sometimes not at all. I scribble lines on scraps of paper and stuff them in my backpack. I think about stories for months before I write anything. I don’t have a desk or even a bookshelf, but I have memories of both. Writing for me is always a struggle to shut out the commotion around me.
Diane: In your role of editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, you must read a huge number of flash fictions. Is there any advice you can give entrants to your competitions on writing a successful flash or anything you would particularly like to see?
Christopher: I think around 5000 submissions a year since 2008? As a team, the SmokeLong editors read around 3000 submissions each quarter. Honest work that shines through every narrative layer, from word to concept, has a good chance of doing well in a SmokeLong competition. Something innovative with heart will stand out.
Diane: Can you recall a flash fiction that made you cry?
Christopher: When I received my copy of SmokeLong Quarterly: The Best of the First 10 Years anthology in 2014, I took it to the Greek restaurant around the corner from my house in Munich. I remember sitting there alone and choking back tears at more than a dozen of the stories. I don’t remember the specific stories that made me cry, but there were lots. ‘A Soldier’ by Siamak Vossoughi made me cry the first time I read it. ‘Rascal’ by Brendan Stephens makes me cry every time I read it in my Elements of Flash workshop. And lots of my own stories. I get so choked up when reading ‘What if All the Oceans’ that I’ve decided not to try to read it in public again, especially if I’ve had wine.
Diane: Your collection Other Household Toxins was published in 2018. Did you enjoy the process of putting together a collection? Do you have any tips that you’d like to share?
Christopher: Oh yes. The process was satisfying. I love the jigsaw nature of creating a collection. Other Household Toxins went through several permutations. At first the publisher wanted it to be a craft book, but I decided it was a couple of decades and a few collections too soon to make a craft book using exclusively my own work.
I’m not great with advice. Everyone has their own take on what works and what doesn’t. Don’t worry too much. Include only the stories you love. I’ve written and published quite a few stories I don’t love, and they will never be in a collection. A couple of years ago I made a commitment to myself to stop sending out stories just to send out stories.
Diane: Writing and editing must keep you very busy. What do you like to do in your spare time?
Christopher: Editing is a full-time job. SmokeLong is a full-time job. We have a team of talented editors who work so hard. I am continually impressed and humbled by how much work they put into the feedback they give.
Spare time. Oh god. I try to do as much sport as I can. I hike and cross-country ski. In months that are not cold, I try to cycle as much as possible. My dream holiday is just getting on my bike and cycling from village to village until I’m far far away.
Christopher Allen is the author of the flash fiction collection Other Household Toxins and the editor-in-chief of SmokeLong Quarterly. His work has appeared in Indiana Review, Split Lip, Booth, The Best Small Fictions and many other fine places. An instructor for more than 30 years, he teaches the flash narrative in workshops around the world, mostly online these days. He is a nomad.
Joanna Campbell is a full-time writer from the Cotswolds. Her short stories have won first place in the 2011 Exeter Writers competition, the 2013 Bath Short Story Award Local Prize, the 2015 London Short Story Prize, the 2018 Magic Oxygen Literary Prize and the 2018 Retreat West Short Story Prize. Joanna’s flash fiction won second place in the 2017 Bridport Prize, for which her short stories have been shortlisted many times. Her novella-in-flash, A Safer Way to Fall, was a runner-up in the inaugural Bath Flash Fiction Award and published in How To Make A Window Snake (Ad Hoc Fiction). Her short story collection, When Planets Slip Their Tracks, was published in 2016 (Ink Tears). It was shortlisted for the Rubery International Book Award and longlisted for the Edge Hill University Story Prize. Her novel, Tying Down The Lion, was published in 2015 (Brick Lane Publishing). Her next novel, Instructions for the Working Day, will be published in 2022 (Fairlight Books). She is on Twitter at 
Tracy Fells was the 2017 Regional Winner (Europe and Canada) for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her short fiction has been widely published in print journals and online, including: Granta, Brittle Star, Reflex Fiction, Popshot Quarterly, Firewords, Funny Pearls and the Bath Flash Fiction Award anthologies (2019 & 2020). She has been shortlisted for the Bridport and Fish Flash Fiction prizes, placed in the Reflex Fiction competition and Highly Commended in the NFFD Microfiction competition (2016 & 2020). In 2016 she was awarded an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing from Chichester University. She is a regular reader for several large short story competitions and leads writing workshops on short fiction. Tracy also writes novels and was a finalist in the 2018 Richard & Judy ‘Search for a Bestseller’ competition. Her debut novella-in-flash Hairy on the Inside was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in 2021. She tweets as 
Damhnait Monaghan was born and grew up in Canada but now lives in the U.K. Her flash fiction has won or placed in various competitions and is widely published and anthologised. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfictions. Her novella in flash The Neverlands (V.Press) won Best Novella in the 2020 Saboteur Awards. Her debut novel New Girl in Little Cove is out now with Harper Collins.
Christopher M Drew is a writer from Yorkshire. He started submitting flash fiction in 2015 and since then has been published widely in online journals and print anthologies. He has won second prize in the Bath Flash Fiction (2016), Reflex Fiction (2018), and Forge Literary Flash Fiction (2019) competitions. His SmokeLong Quarterly story Alligator was selected for Best British and Irish Flash Fiction 2019, and When we were young, originally published in trampset, was selected for Best Microfiction 2021. He has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net, and was one of the founding editors of the historical flash fiction journal FlashBack Fiction. You can connect with Chris on Twitter (@cmdrew81), or through his website (
Farhana Khalique is a writer, voiceover artist and teacher from London. Her stories are forthcoming or have appeared in the National Flash Fiction Day Anthology 2021, Leicester Writes Short Story Prize Anthology 2020, Reflex Fiction and more. Farhana has been shortlisted for The Asian Writer Short Story Prize, and she has won a Word Factory Apprentice Award. She is also the editor of Desi Reads and a submissions editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. Find Farhana 
Anita Goveas is British-Asian and based in London. She’s on the editorial team at Flashback Fiction, an editor at Mythic Picnic’s twitter zine, and she’s an editor for the FlashFlood. She is one of the teachers on Dahlia Publishing’s 2021 ‘A Brief Pause‘ writer’s development programme. Her debut flash collection Families and Other Natural Disasters was published by Reflex Press in Sept 2020. Find her at 
Johanna Robinson is based near Liverpool, UK, and has been writing short fiction for around five years. Her work has been featured in various magazines and anthologies, including SmokeLong, Reflex Press and Mslexia. In 2020, she won the TSS Cambridge Prize for Flash Fiction and the Bath Flash Fiction Award, and in 2019 Ad Hoc Fiction published her novella-in-flash Homing, which follows a Norwegian Resistance family in the Second World War. More of her work can be found at 
Dan Crawley is the author of the novella Straight Down the Road (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2019) and the short story collection The Wind, It Swirls (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2021). His writing appears in a number of journals and anthologies, including JMWW, Lost Balloon, The North American Review, SmokeLong Quarterly: The Best of the First Ten Years 2003-2013, Wigleaf, Quarterly West, and Atticus Review. He is a recipient of an Arizona Commission on the Arts creative writing fellowship. Also, he is a two-time Best Small Fictions nominee, a two-time Best of the Net nominee, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and appears on the Wigleaf Top 50 longlist (2019, 2021). His work won a Bath Flash Fiction Award 2019 Novella-in-Flash highly commended prize. Recently, he has been a Contributing Editor for Best Microfiction and a Little Patuxent Review fiction reader. Find him at
Jupiter Jones grew up on the north-west coasts of Cumberland and Lancashire. The first was wild and secretive, the second trashy and jaded; she loved them both and they haunt her writing. Following a brief spell in London to complete a PhD in Spectatorial Embarrassment at Goldsmiths, she now lives in Wales and writes short and flash fictions. She is the winner of the Colm Tóibín International Prize, and her work has been published by Aesthetica, Brittle Star, Fish, Scottish Arts Trust, and rejected by many, many others. Her novella-in-flash The Death and Life of Mrs Parker was shortlisted in the Bath 2021 competition and will be published by Ad Hoc Fiction later this year, and Lovelace Flats was runner up in the Reflex Press novella competition and will be published in 2022. 
Tom O'Brien is an Irishman living in London. His Novella-in-Flash Straw Gods is published by Reflex Press, and his Novelette-in-Flash, Homemade Weather, with Retreat West. His work has been Pushcart and Best Microfictions nominated, and he is the winner of the 2021 NFFD NZ Best Microfiction. His flash fiction and short stories can be found in print in various anthologies such as Blink-Ink and Bath Flash Fiction (forthcoming) as well as many sites around the web including Ellipsis Zine, Reflex, Spelk and 50-Word Stories. He’s on Instagram and twitter @tomwrote and has a class on Skillshare called Introducing the Novella-in-Flash. His website is 
Eleanor Walsh is a PhD graduate from the University of Plymouth. She lives in Cornwall where she works as an English tutor and creative editor. Her novellas 'Birds with Horse Hearts', set in Nepal, and 'Stormbred', set in Cornwall, are available from Ad Hoc Fiction.