Skip to content

Introducing...

Legerdemain: National Flash Fiction Day Anthology 2021

This year we're bringing spellbinding tales on the theme of 'magic' by authors from all over the world! From fortune tellers to ghosts, performance shenanigans to the magic of science, there's something for everyone in this year's anthology!

Available for pre-order very soon!

Artwork by our artist-in-residence Jeanette Sheppard.

 

After reading so many stunning stories on the theme of MAGIC, Nod Ghosh and I have finalised our selections!

Congratulations to all the authors listed below!

We would like to thank everybody who submitted their stories for consideration for this year's anthology. Times continue to be very challenging for us all, and I personally found it an absolute joy to be able to immerse myself in the wonderful stories and worlds you all created. Thank you for sharing your work with us!

To celebrate our tenth National Flash Fiction Day we will also be featuring stories from past anthology editors. These stories will either be on the theme of magic, or throwbacks to stories from past anthologies, or, as luck may have it, a combination of both!

We'll also be including the winning stories from this year's micro fiction competition, and judging is well under way!

We hope that you will all join us for the launch of the anthology on National Flash Fiction Day later this year!

Janine Kovac A Night at the Nutcracker
Marie Gethins All That is Earthly
Claire Carroll Deference Ritual
Jolene McIlwain Few Things are More [Stressful] Magical Than Building a House
Sarah Salway Knitting
Jennifer Brutschy Life After the Sun Doesn't Blind Us
Chris Barkley Lumbar-sick
Linda McMullen Magic Act
Gaynor Jones Me and Joe and the Rainbow
Epiphany Ferrell Renaissance
Jacqueline Doyle Spelling Lachlan
Sam Payne The Acrobats are Talking About Love
Rebecca Field The White Rabbit
Garry Cox Tinder
Faye Brinsmead What She's Trying to Tell Me
Edward Barnfield Magic Box
Audrey Niven Jesus of Barnet
Farhana Khalique Everybody
Chrissy Sturt Womb Tombs
Karen Jones Teeth and Claws
Keely O’Shaughnessy What If We Breathed Through Our Skin?
A.B. Kyazze Edmundo's Predicament
Nan Wigington Beneath Smoke, Mirrors
Iona Rule Bad Blood
Catherine Ogston An Orkney Wise Woman Tells It As It Is
Lisa Ferranti Disappearing Act
Cheryl Markosky Everyday Magic
Morgan Quinn Not Every Missing Thing is Lost
Rachael Dunlop The Poet
Stephanie Carty The Science of Self
Emily Devane This is How They Meet
Natalie Reilly-Johnson Turning to Glass
Valerie Griffin Whispers to the Moon
Debra A. Daniel Ann tells Me to Burn Sage in the House Where I Live With My Fiance
Katie Piper Bath Man
Michael Loveday Be More Cup
Claire Polders If You Think Stars Can't Clap You're Not Listening
Susie Morgan Your own kind of magic
Laurie Babcock al fresco
Dawn Siofra North Frozen Child
Martha Lane Mammy's theme tune is played by violins
Morgan Quinn String Theory
Jo Ward The Change
Caroline Gonda The End of Magic
Robert Carroll The Getaway Car
E. E. Rhodes The Magic Circles
Mark Stewart Tunnel of Love
Sherri Turner Wallface
Kinneson Lalor Winter
Charlie Swailes Without and Within
Claire Carroll To be cut cleanly in half like a geode
Jenny Woodhouse To see the world in a Chelsea Bun
Diane Simmons Support
Jeanette Sheppard Searching for Sky Lights

Welcome to the sixth in a series of interviews with this year's National Flash Fiction Day anthology editors and micro fiction competition judges! This week, Santino Prinzi is in conversation with micro fiction competition judge, Kevlin Henney, who discusses clichés, live performances, and editing tips...

Santino: Kevlin, you’ve read, written, and judged many micros in your time. What, in your opinion, makes a micro pop?

Kevlin: Like anything that pops, there has to be some kind of energy to release. There’s not a lot of space in a micro, so use of language is essential not just structural. Whether the language is shaken or stirred, it can’t be flat — language is where that released energy comes from.

Depending on the story, the language can be spare, novel, humorous, grave, playful, meditated, slow, fast, but it should definitely be. Every word, every construction, is working in a gig economy, passing through but holding down multiple jobs. They have their grammatical roles to fulfil, but they also need to pass interviews on flavour — or feel or colour or whichever sense metaphor captures for you the quality of the story you sense and want the reader to experience — pace, mood, appropriateness — don’t stumble from pathos to bathos. Write but don’t be writerly.

Santino: Where do you draw inspiration for your own work?

Kevlin: Many of my stories grow from moments, either imagined or observed. A toddler unlocking the door of a public toilet onto a concourse, mother not yet ready. A teenager discovering a seam on her neck. Being served an empty plate in a restaurant.

And then this moment sparks another thought or shacks up with another moment... and before you know it a story is growing, whether gently below the surface of your awareness or in a mad rush through your fingers onto the page. There’s rarely a big idea or a strict intention — if those are present in the final story, they are usually late arrivals, realised sometime after the small idea or the accidental insight.

Santino: I have seen you read your flash fiction at various live events and you always read with energy and character. How important do you think going to live readings of flash fiction, or any literature, is?

Kevlin: Where the written word counts as a single medium of expression, reading counts as many. The written word can come alive through sight, through sound and, via Braille, through touch. Reading is sensual.

Giving life to fiction through live readings adds a public performance side to the otherwise private life of personal reading. Stories can support public and private experiences, extrovert and introvert contexts, the prosocial and the hermetic. A live reading can show both listener and reader different sides of a story, it can bring stories to new audiences, it can contribute to the experience of an event, it can be downright fun!

Compared with longer forms, flash fiction is the fiction of minutes not quarter hours, falling comfortably within the limits of attention span, jostling with poetry as a natural fit for this platform.

Santino: People argue that the key to writing great flash fiction isn’t only in the act of writing itself but in the editing, too. Could you please share your favourite writing and/or editing tips that help you transform the idea in your head into the piece of writing you wish it to be?

Kevlin: Editing is where the story can go from toddling around, bumping into inconsistencies and not yet sure of itself, to coming of age, with a sureness of purpose and more solid wordfall.

For me, editing is where I wrangle the words and sentences to defamiliarise and refamiliarise myself with the story. Work out what story is being told while working out how to tell it. Noise words, jobless clauses and filler sentences served a supporting role in the initial draft, but their contract’s over, so let them go.

But what about repetition and cliché? Repetition is double edged (or triple, quadruple...). Conventionally repetition is something to strike out, but repetition can lend a story foreshadowing, theme, pace and rhythm. The answer is not as simple as three strikes and it’s out.

And rather than say that clichés should be avoided, any cliché should either tell us of era or of person — if a cliché has a strong association, work that angle, you’re worldbuilding with an economy of words — or it should be played with and subverted — surprise the reader! But clichés that just fill the space don’t spark joy, so bin them.

Santino: If you could liken flash fiction to a piece of technology, fictional or real, what would it be and why?

Kevlin: Flash fiction is a smartphone. It fits in your pocket but contains the world. You can get lost in it. You can show others. You can take it anywhere and anywhen.

Kevlin Henney writes shorts and flashes and drabbles of fiction and books and articles on software development. His fiction has appeared online and on tree (Daily Science FictionLitroNew ScientistPhysics WorldSpelkReflex FictionLabLitFlight Journal and many more) and has been included in a number of anthologies (The Dark Half of the Year,North by SouthwestWe Can Improve YouHauntedSalt Anthology of New WritingRipeningSleep Is a Beautiful Colour and many more). As well as having his work rejected and make no impression whatsoever on writing competitions, Kevlin’s stories have been longlisted, shortlisted and placed, and he won the CrimeFest 2014 Flashbang contest. He reads at spoken word events, winning the National Flash-Fiction Day Oxford flash slam in 2012, and has performed his work on local radio (BBC Radio Bristol and Ujima). Kevlin has been involved in the organisation of the Bristol Festival of Literature and events for National Flash-Fiction Day. He lives in Bristol and online, where he can stalked as @KevlinHenney on Twitter, @kevlinhenney on Medium and @kevlin.henney on Instagram.

SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW OPEN for this year's National Flash Fiction Day Anthology and Micro Fiction Competition. Submissions close on 15th March 2019. For more information, please visit our Anthology and Competition pages.