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Published on Leave a comment on Be clear, be visceral: an interview with Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar

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.

 

 

Published on Leave a comment on Jolt the reader awake: an interview with David Rhymes

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.

Published on Leave a comment on Experiment with every tool available: an interview with Jan Kaneen

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Published on Leave a comment on Strive for originality: an interview with Karen Jones

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....

 

Photograph of Karen JonesDS: 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.

 

 

Published on Leave a comment on Give yourself permission to play: an interview with Sara Hills

Welcome to the first of 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 this interview series will resume in the new year.

This week, Diane Simmons chats with Sara Hills, this year's NFFD Anthology Guest Editor, about everything from music to collections to some tips for tackling this year's anthology theme....

 

Photograph of Sara HillsDS: Firstly, thank you for agreeing to be a co-editor of this year’s National Flash Fiction Day anthology. The theme is the natural elements: air, earth, fire and water. Do you have any tips on how to interpret the theme or any advice on how to approach themes in general?

SH: I’m delighted to have been invited to co-edit the NFFD anthology, and I love this year’s theme as the natural world is so rich with possibility and conflict. What happens when there is an absence or excess of one element? How do these elements sustain or destroy life? What sensory descriptions or experiences do they inspire?

I’m a firm believer in free-writing and brainstorming so I usually tackle a themed prompt by first making lists. For example, take five minutes and list everything you can think of to do with one of the natural elements. Write without stopping—just whatever crazy thing pops into your head. If you’re anything like me, you’ll hit upon the common ideas first. But the longer you keep pen to paper, you’ll start to find more unique ideas, ones that spark because they call up hints of character and conflict. As soon as something sparks for me, I’m off running to get the words down. You can do this for each element if you like and see how they contrast or support each other. And if you’re a more visual person, you can also try the elements as the center or main branches of a mind map and challenge yourself to use a handful of the words/ideas you brainstorm in your draft. Above all, give yourself permission to play and see where it takes you.

 

DS: I believe your first publication was for something other than fiction. Can you tell us a little about that?

SH: Good sleuthing! Since my writing often trends toward darker subjects, I suppose it might surprise people to know that my first publications were actually knitting patterns for toys in a natural crafts magazine: an apple tree and a root vegetable garden. Besides writing, making toys is probably my other happy place. When my kids were younger, I spent countless hours making myriad dolls, playscapes and machines… whatever might delight them. Now that my kids are grown I try to filter that playfulness into my writing.

 

DS: You were born and grew up in America and now live in the U.K. How much does America influence what and how you write?

SH: This is such an interesting question. I wish I could say that after living in Europe and the UK for fifteen years that my stories are infused with medieval architecture or the charm of pub quizzes or queues for the sake of queueing. But so much of my writing is still very much rooted in the physical and economic landscape of the US. It’s the smells, sounds and mindsets of home that my writing brain churns over. I don’t know if that’s because the formative years never truly leave us or if that’s just what feels most honest to me.

What has begun to infiltrate my writing more is the lingo of Britain, and oftentimes I don’t notice it. I’m lucky to have a critique group that points it out to me, and then I have to decide if these Britishisms belong in the story. The same is true with sensory details. After discussing one of my stories, a group of astute high school students in Montana reminded me that ambulance lights in the US are predominantly red. Whereas after living in Europe for so long, I can’t imagine them as anything but blue now.

 

DS: Your flash collection The Evolution of Birds was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in 2021. Can you tell us a little about how you went about putting the collection together?

SH: I followed all the advice to start with, such as put your best stories first but save a few good ones for last. But then I decided that the stories felt like they wanted to be in conversation with each other. I like to think of my characters as people who might live in the same neighborhood or trailer park, experiencing similar familial situations or challenges. So I grouped many of them by age and theme to try and create a sense of cohesion, and it seemed to evolve from there. I also checked endings and openings for flow and made sure to scatter the stories with bird-related images throughout, playing on the overarching theme. There was a lot of second-guessing, but I’m so grateful for how well it was received in the end.

 

DS: Do you ever listen to music when you write?

SH: I find music incredibly inspiring, especially if there’s a particular mood I’m trying to capture. I often listen to a certain song or playlist on repeat in my non-writing hours while I think about a story. For example, with my story ‘Lil Fucker’ which was recently published at Fractured Lit, I listened to The Smith’s ‘How Soon is Now?’ thirty or forty times while I was churning it over in my head. While I only reference the band in my story, that song perfectly conjured up those gutting teenage feelings of my character, plus it has a muddy sound that reminds me of the setting—the winter sky in Utah where I lived for several years. In similarly inspired stories, I’ve often referenced albums or song titles because most lyrics are copyright restricted.

However much music affects my process, when it comes to putting words on paper I prefer silence so that I can hear my own thoughts. And if I’m in a loud environment, I’ll listen to something like a rainy cafe background with light jazz to drown out distractions. Until I get immersed in the story, I’m a ball of distraction.

 

Published on Leave a comment on Pushcart Nominations 2023

We are delighted to announce our 2023 Pushcart Prize nominations.

Congratulations and good luck to the following:

  • 'All my lovers' by Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar
  • 'Cuttlefish' by Patricia Q. Bidar
  • 'Javelin Girl' by Rebecca Field
  • 'Time Takes' by Anne Summerfield
  • 'Were You Ever There' by Kathryn Aldridge-Morris
  • 'Venus of Willendorf' by Pam Plumb

You can read all these stories and more in print or via ebook in Scratching the Sands: 2023 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology, available from the National Flash Fiction Day Bookshop.

Congratulations as well to the Pushcart nominees of our sister projects, FlashFlood and The Write-In.  You can read more about FlashFlood nominees here and The Write-In nominees here.

Published on Leave a comment on 2024 NFFD Anthology & Microfiction Competition are OPEN for submissions!

National Flash Fiction Day is OPEN for submissions to our annual Anthology and Microfiction Competition!

It may be cold and dark outside, but we're getting ready for the UK's twelfth annual National Flash Fiction Day which we'll be celebrating on 15 June 2024.  We've opened submissions to both our Anthology and Microfiction Competition projects and will be reading submissions from now until 15 February 2024.  We are open to work from anyone and everyone, all around the world.

For the 2024 Anthology, we're looking for flash up to 500 words on the theme of AIR, EARTH, WATER AND FIRE.  Your work will be read by editors Karen Jones and Sara Hills.  Selected work will be published in our 2024 print/ebook anthology and be considered for our Editors' Choice Awards which come with a £50 prize.  You can read our submission details here.

For our Microfiction Competition, we're looking for flash of up to 100 words.  There is no theme.  Your work will be read by judges Sara Chansarkar, Jan Kaneen, David Rhymes and Alison Wassell.  Winners and runners-up will receive cash prizes and be published online and in our print/ebook anthology.  Full submission details can be found here.

Our Anthology and Microfiction Competition teams look forward to reading your work!

 

Published on Leave a comment on Announcing our 2024 Microfiction Competition Judges

With our submission window set to open shortly we'd like to take a moment to introduce you to this year's judging panel.  This year, we're excited to announce that Sara Chansarkar, Jan Kaneen, David Rhymes and Alison Wassell will be doing it all: reading the submissions that come in, compiling a shortlist, and then deciding on the winning and highly commended pieces.

Our submission window opens on Friday 1 December 2023 and closes on Thursday 15 February 2024.  We will be announcing results on or before 15 March 2024.  We'll be reading flash of up to 100 words on any theme, but we are not able to consider simultaneous submissions this year.

For the 2024 competition, we will be awarding:

  • £150 for first place
  • £100 for second place
  • £50 for third place
  • seven awards of £20 for highly commended pieces.

All winning and commended pieces will be published online as well as in the 2024 National Flash Fiction Day print anthology and will receive one free copy of the anthology.

You can find our full submission guidelines here.

In the new year, we'll be posting interviews with our judges so you can get a better sense of what they're looking for, but in the meantime, you can read more about each of them below.

Huge thanks to our judges for taking on the 2024 NFFD Microfiction Competition and we look forward to reading your work!

 

Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar is an Indian American writer. She is the author of Morsels of Purple and Skin Over Milk, and is currently working on her first novel. Her stories and essays have won several awards and have been published in numerous anthologies and journals. She is a fiction editor for SmokeLong Quarterly. More at https://saraspunyfingers.com, Twitter: @PunyFingers

Jan Kaneen writes sometimes prize-winning small and tiny fictions. Her memoir-in-flash The Naming of Bones was published in 2021 by Retreat West Books and her novella-in-flash A Learning Curve is on sale now from Ad Hoc Fiction. Hostile Environments, her unsettling short story collection, will be published by Northodox Press in 2025

David Rhymes lives with his wife and children in a village near Pamplona in Navarra, Spain. He grew up in Nottingham and has a degree in English and American Comparative Literature from the University of Warwick and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia.

He is the author of two novellas-in-flash. The Last Days of the Union was published by Adhoc Fiction in 2022, and Monsieur, was winner of the Retreat West Novelette Prize in the same year.

His flash fiction has appeared in the Bath Flash Fiction, Reflex Fiction and Fish Publishing anthologies, and he has won prizes in the Bath Flash Fiction and Barren Magazine competitions. Other short listings include the Bridport, LISP, Desperate Literature and Smokelong Quarterly flash fiction competitions.

For more details, you might like to follow David on Twitter (@dsrhymes)

Alison Wassell is a short story, flash and micro fiction writer from St Helens in Merseyside. Her work has appeared in several NFFD anthologies, Ellipsis Zine, Litro, WestWord, The Cabinet of Heed and The Phare. She has twice been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and, in 2022, was placed fourth in both the Summer and Autumn rounds of the Reflex Flash Fiction Competition. Alison also writes regularly for The People’s Friend magazine, which has published more than 50 of her short stories. She is passionate about very short fiction, and has no plans whatsoever to write a novel.

Published on Leave a comment on NFFD 2024 Anthology: Introducing This Year’s Theme and Guest Editor

We are delighted to welcome Sara Hills to the National Flash Fiction Day team as this year's guest editor for the 2024 National Flash Fiction Day anthology.  She'll be joining NFFD's Anthology Editor Karen Jones in putting together this year's anthology of flash fiction from around the world.  You can read more about this year's editors here.

The theme for this year’s anthology is THE CLASSICAL ELEMENTS – AIR, EARTH, WATER AND FIRE. You can use any combination of the elements, just one or all four, which should give you plenty of space to play around with ideas. Will you take us flying in the air, bring us down to earth, set us alight with your words or plunge us into the watery depths? We can’t wait to find out.

Feel free to interpret the theme however you wish, in 500 words or fewer. Selected flashes will be published in National Flash Fiction Day's 13th Annual Anthology. Payment is one contributor's copy of the anthology.  Two pieces will be chosen for an Editor's Choice Award which comes with a £50 prize.

The submission window is 1 December 2023 to 15 February 2024.  Please see our submission guidelines here and submit work via Duosuma, our submission manager.

Published on Leave a comment on Autumn Sale: Past NFFD Anthologies Now Reduced!

The 2023 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology and Microfiction Competition will open for submissions on 1 December 2023...but in the meantime, if you'd like to catch up on your NFFD reading, we're reducing the prices of all the anthologies from past years.

All NFFD print anthologies up to 2022 are now on sale for a reduced price of only £5 plus postage!  You can purchase them at our Bookshop.  If you want to order more than one, do contact us -- we can combine shipping and offer you a reduced rate.

Happy reading!