Elisabeth Ingram Wallace

I am honoured to be appointed a Senior Editor for the Best British and Irish Flash Fiction 2018-2019, working with TSS Publishing.

Between June 2018-2019, I will be working alongside Rupert Dastur, Rebecca Williams, Barbara Lovric and Neil Campbell, curating a comprehensive list of outstanding Flash Fiction published online and in print, written by citizens of Britain and Ireland.

Here is my Editor’s Statement, so you can see what I am looking for!

EDITOR’S STATEMENT:

In Flash Fiction, I want honesty, humour, and risk.

I want emotional movement, and play with structure, subject, and language.

I don’t want weird for weirds sake – some surreal riff about mutating into a pilchard, without any heart. If you want to mutate into a pilchard give it some welly, some purpose – for the love of all that is aquatic!

I don’t want a self-indulgent dream sequence, shuffling around in the glittery unitard of prose poetry. When people prose-poem me, I get confused, and bored, and then I’ll start talking about pilchards until I cry, and you cry, and then we’ll all explode into pilchards, and you don’t want that.

I find depressing preachy stuff a bit depressing and preachy. If it belongs in the ‘Painful Lives’ section of a bookshop, I’m not buying. 

I want words I feel in my gut. Glandular stories.

This interview explains more – click here.

You can read the other Editor’s Statements on this page.

There is lots more information about the project on the TSS website, but here is a brief overview of the project.

Editors and publishers of websites, journals, magazines, anthologies, and collections are encouraged to submit recommendations to our Senior Editors, via our online portal here.

Anyone who has any questions is always welcome to contact me or any one on the team. Our email addresses are all listed here.

Criteria

Language: English

Writer’s Nationality: British or Irish

Publication: Open globally, print or online. Writers must be British or Irish.

Published between: 1stth June 2018 and 31st May 2019

Type: Flash Fiction

Length: 100 – 1000 words

Genre: Any

We are committed to finding the very best Flash Fiction from all over Britain and Ireland, encouraging and embracing writers from any and every background. 

Space Hopped won first prize in the TSS Flash Fiction competition a few months ago, published online in June 2018. An absolute joy and I’m very happy. It will also be published in an anthology chapbook with the other winners towards the end of 2018.

SPACE HOPPED

When I kill a man rainbow moonbeams flash out of my skull.

+++

Game Over. The End.

+++

We’ve all got to play something. Xbox, PlayStation, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Guitar Hero, Dungeons and Dragons, Paper Scissors Bloody Stone. I’d press the buttons on a broken washing machine at this point. I dream of dissolving into a bubbling gob of gnarl in the spin cycle.

+++

“It’ll end in tears,” my Dad used to say, when I was hanging upside down from a tree or skidding on pond ice. “Don’t come running to me complaining about brain damage.” Then he’d climb higher, he’d skid faster.

+++

The corners I used to play in, evaporating into spaceships. All joystick, kicking Baddies into red squares and howl, ‘till another one appeared, another, another. Jamming hammering. A flick of a twitch in the switch in my gut. Bliss, with each clean coded decapitation.

Read the rest HERE

I'm space hopping around to hear that I have won First Place in the TSS Publishing Flash Fiction Competition!

My story is called Space Hopped and will be published online in June 2018. It will also be published in an anthology chapbook with the other winners, within the year.

I am very thankful to the judges for picking my story. 

The judges were Christopher Allen, the author of the new flash fiction collection Other Household Toxins (I highly recommend this, it is startling and funny and pure and so, so smart), and Rupert Dastur, a writer and editor, and the founding director of TSS Publishing.

TSS Publishing aim to publish the best contemporary short stories and flash fiction in the English language and provide insightful news and views on short fiction. They have published over fifty writers, conducted more than seventy short fiction interviews, published dozens of essays and reviews on short stories. 

TSS Publishing are printing some lovely chapbooks. I own Waiting for the Runners, by Chloe Turner, and as well as being gorgeously written, it is a thing of beauty to hold and read. Nothing beats print.

Congratulations to all long listed and short listed writers, especially David O'Dwyer, Leonara Desar, and Geoff Kronik. 

Honoured to be a Finalist for The Best Small Fictions 2018.

The story is “A Chest Full of Spiders”which was the second prize winner in The Best Small Fictions Microfictions Contest in 2017.

It was published in 'Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction' in December 2017. You can read it right here.

The contest was judged by Tara Masih, Michelle Elvy, and Mel Bosworth. Thank you for the nomination. A wonderful shock.

The Best Small Fictions anthologies are an Amazon top 100 Anthology, and a joy. An annual series, hailed as a "milestone for the short story" they honor contemporary masters and emerging writers of short-short and hybrid forms from across the globe.

Huge congratulations to all other Semi Finalists, Finalists and Winners! 

Here are just a few of the writers on The Best Small Fictions list that I love:

Emily Devane, Ingrid Jendrzejewski, Tara Laskowski, Kathy Fish, Cathy Ulrich, Nuala O’Connor, Jolene McIlwain, Jacqueline Doyle, Jules Archer, Melissa Goode, Gwen E. Kirby, Lori Sambol Brody, Monet Patrice Thomas, Ruth LeFaive

A brilliant surprise and unholy honour to be a Semi-Finalist for The Best Small Fictions 2018. 

It is the best anthology of flash in existence. I'm honoured! 

The 2015, 2016 and 2017 editions are incredible and you need to buy them all, and create a flash fiction altar out of them.

The upcoming 2018 edition is Guest edited by the incredible Aimee Bender.  It's impossible to choose if I love THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE more than THE GIRL IN THE FLAMMABLE SKIRT more than any of her other books. The first story I read of hers was The Rembemberer - so startling, so perfectly odd. Really excited to read the stories she has chosen for The Best Small Fictions 2018.

'Ida' was a runner up in the 2017 Atticus Review Flash Fiction Contest. I am thankful to Atticus Review for publishing my story, and to the judge  Carmen Maria Machado.

Huge congratulations to the other Semi Finalists, happy to be on such a beautiful list.

IDA

Ida has broad shoulders. One is three meters long, the other, stretches sixty-two miles. 

Some say she resembles a giant, a craggy black nightmare. A child’s drawing of a monster; a prehistoric dinosaur, sleeping under a snow crown of ice. 

She lives in fog and spray, nine miles out at sea. She feels the white horses, tickling her toes. The moon sends tides through her bones. Its rhythm is endless, glints though her rivers, swells in deep groans.

For thousands of years, men prayed to her as a Goddess. Women sang her devotions, threw wild thyme at her feet. Their boats only circled. No hands dared touch her, except on a full moon. There have always been women, desperate to conceive. And other women, those who came in the dark. These women she welcomed to her razor-sharp spine. 

Women threw themselves at her, and she let them bleed.

Today, on the map, Ida is ‘Bird Island’. A tourist attraction. A 1,217-meter-tall outcrop, her shoulders cloaked in gulls.

Bees nest in her ear canals. At night she sends forth booms to clear the bats out of her head.

You can read the rest of the story here.

It was an absolute, and only slightly terrifying, pleasure to be interviewed by the dreamy writer Hananah Zaheer for the equally dreamy SmokeLong Quarterly! 

I only swore once.  

One of the most interesting, and present, things about this story is the way it is structured. Why did you decide to use snapshots as a way of telling? 

Time is fractured, or our memory of it is. In my life, there are these intense moments of being that glow—with catastrophe or love, or clear, cold pain, shock, or fear;—and they are the ones that bubble up from under the floorboards of your brain and spider around in your mind when you are lying in bed trying to sleep.

Or even when you are locked in sleep. I have had dreams that have changed my waking life—the novel I’m writing today began in a dream. Nightmares are important, too—as is sleep paralysis. I have the full nocturnal experience. Lucky me.

I get murdered a lot in the night. But that’s pretty funny, right? We are just big bags of blood and guts and fear.

I think that laughing at pain is universal, and the closest I can get to truth in any narrative. Black comedy is truth standing on its head to get attention.

Or perhaps I am just a maladjusted weirdo.

You can read the rest of the interview right here, in issue Fifty-Nine.

I love SmokeLong Quarterly. They are the Holy Grail of Literary Journals. 

They publish the most incredible flash fiction. They are strange and smart and I have a story in Issue 59 . You can read “All About the Body”—A Letter from the Editor Tara Laskowski right here.  

Now I can die happy! Or just die. Who cares! I am in SmokeLong.

OUR BLACK COMEDY

“Your humour is really black,” you say to me, that first day we meet; standing in the college garden, just two future corpses, about to fall in love.

You can read the rest here. 

My story 'Satin Nightwear for Women Irregular' has been Commended in the Bath Flash Fiction Awards!

I have two stories in the top 20, so I am delighted.  My second story is called 'They Huddle and Fang'.  Both stories will be published the upcoming awards anthology.

The awards were judged by Tara L. Masih, who said the following about the story:

"This flash broke the mold a bit from the other more traditional ones I selected. An intriguing title, and an intriguing story built from staccato lines full of alliteration and movement. You can easily get caught up in the list of unusual tasks that the “bereaved” partner takes part in to both honor and release the spirit of his or her wife, and miss the underlying grief. “The ground around me is worming, and when I walk away the earth shatters.” This line is one of the strongest in the competition. Learn from it."  

The full judges report can be read here.  

SATIN NIGHTWEAR FOR WOMEN IRREGULAR

The walk to the allotment is wet and full of cats, taut muscled screams darting under cars. It’s clunky, carrying all the bulbs she hoarded in one plastic bag, a bin-liner, stretched to a thin translucent skin.

When I get to her plot, I plant them. Ten halogen, twenty-two bayonet, and thirty-seven screw bulbs. 

The ground around me is worming, and when I walk away the earth shatters.

The full story will be published in the next Bath Flash Award Anthology in December 2018. It can be read in full now on the Bath Flash Fiction Award website. 

One of my most claustrophobic and trapped in the woods stories yet, "They Huddle and Fang" has been Shortlisted for The Bath Flash Awards.  It will be published in their Prize Anthology in December 2018.

The awards were judged by Tara L. Masih, who said the following about the story:

“They Huddle and Fang” was deliciously creepy and tantalizing with language that snapped and simmered.

You can read the rest of the judges report here.

I will post an excerpt here as soon as the book is out towards the end of the year.  Can't wait to read it!  

Warmed to the frosty cockles of my 2017 ice cave heart, to begin 2018 with a tiny tale in Flash Frontier.

At the end of 2017 'A Chest Full of Spiders' won Second place in The Best Small Fictions Microfiction Contest.  In the early hours of 2018, the story was published online.

Such an excellent way to see in the New Year.  Thank you Best Small Fictions, Flash Frontier, and judges Tara Masih, Michelle Elvy, and Mel Bosworth.

Happy 2018 all!

Big love and big strength; sending you health, love and hellacious good vibes. And zero frosty cockles.

You can read the three winning micro fictions, and the full December edition of Flash Frontier here.

Flabbergasted. Flabberstunned! ALL aflabber…

I’m a SmokeLong Quarterly Kathy Fish Fellowship Finalist!

SmokeLong is only the best bloody literary magazine dedicated to Flash Fiction. In the WORLD.  

IN ALL THE WORLDS.

The fellowship honors Kathy Fish, a former editor at SmokeLong, a fantastic writer herself, and a continuing champion of new and emerging writers.

The winner of the 2018 Kathy Fish Fellowship will be considered a “writer in residence” at SmokeLong for four quarterly issues (March, June, September, and December 2018). Each issue will include one flash by the Fellowship winner.

The winner of the Fellowship is announced in mid December.

Honoured to be on such a blazing hot list. 

Happy as a crustacean to have a story 'My Thirty-Eight Step Korean Cleansing Routine' in this anthology.  The story was commended by Kathy Fish in the Bath Flash Fiction Awards in 2017.

I love lobsters. They live to 100+ (unless some weirdo eats them), plus, they pee out of their faces!

You can read the story online here, and you can buy the anthology here.

One hundred and thirty-five flash fiction stories from world-wide authors selected from the long lists of the three Bath Flash Fiction Awards in 2017. These dazzling fictions, all 300 words or under, give us fresh insights into world wide concerns – from relationship issues and domestic situations tender or fraught, to war torn landscapes and the plight of the dispossessed. So much is compressed into so few words.

MY STORY IS INSIDE A ROBOT!

I could not be more excited to bow to my future robot overlords and be involved in a project dreamed up by Jason Lee Norman (@bellyofawhale).  My story 'Brink'  is in the first short story vending machine in Canada!  It is at Edmonton International Airport.

I hope to post it here at some point, if the robots allow.

Shirley swallowed her IPod. A thing the size of a box of matches.

It was playing acoustic rock and jazz classics, interspersed with self-hypnosis. INSTANT CONFIDENCE. SHRINK FAT– WHILE YOU SLEEP! 

Shirley burned through the hours, on random, and repeat, her gut under fire. 

Read the rest of this story in the Flash Fiction Festival: One anthology.

Seventy-four micro-fictions written by presenters and participants at the first ever literary festival entirely dedicated to flash fiction, held in Bath, June 2017. These short-short stories, 250 words or under, show the wide variety of styles possible in this emerging genre.

There will be another festival in 2018.  I sincerely hope there will be a wine bar that opens at 10am again.  I don't even like Prosecco, but I did my very best.  

Most of the UK’s top flash fiction writers and teachers offered workshops and talks and readings at the Flash Fiction Festival: David Gaffney, Tania Hershman, Calum Kerr, David Swann, Vanessa Gebbie, Kit de Waal, Paul McVeigh, Peter Blair, Ashley Chantler, KM Elkes, Meg Pokrass, Jude Higgins, Christopher Fielden and Michael Loveday. Plus distinguished international guest and leading exponent of the form, Pamela Painter, from the United States.

I'm elated to be a runner up in the Atticus Review Flash Fiction Contest!  

Extra delighted because the contest was judged by Carmen Maria Machado, whose short story collection Her Body and Other Parties is the best short story collection I have read this year.  It is wild and smart, and blindingly bonkers.

IDA

Ida has broad shoulders. One is three meters long, the other, stretches sixty-two miles.

Some say she resembles a giant, a craggy black nightmare. A child’s drawing of a monster; a prehistoric dinosaur, sleeping under a snow crown of ice.

She lives in fog and spray, nine miles out at sea. She feels the white horses, tickling her toes. The moon sends tides through her bones. Its rhythm is endless, glints though her rivers, swells in deep groans.

For thousands of years, men prayed to her as a Goddess. Women sang her devotions, threw wild thyme at her feet. Their boats only circled. No hands dared touch her, except on a full moon. There have always been women, desperate to conceive. And other women, those who came in the dark. These women she welcomed to her razor-sharp spine.

Women threw themselves at her, and she let them bleed.

Today, on the map, Ida is ‘Bird Island’. A tourist attraction. A 1,217-meter-tall outcrop, her shoulders cloaked in gulls.

Bees nest in her ear canals. At night she sends forth booms to clear the bats out of her head.

The full story can be read here, at the Atticus Review.

I am honoured to win 'Writing the Future', the world's largest heath Science Fiction prize.

My winning short story OPSNIZING DAD can be read online and in the competition anthology.  It is short and strange and full of swearing and men losing their trousers on the bus. 
 
The £10,000 Writing the Future competition asked authors to imagine how health and healthcare might look in 2100. Kaleidoscope Heath & Care initiated the Writing the Future project to spark new conversations and radical thinking about the long-term future of health and healthcare.

The competition was supported by The Commonwealth Fund, the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London and lastly The House of St Barnabas, where the incredible awards ceremony was held in October 2017.  

Matthew Warren, for The Oracle, and Andrew Dana Hudson, for Mend and Make Do, were runners-up. The other short-listed authors were: Matthew Castle, Hannah Harper, and Ida Keogh. 

The anthology can be purchased online, or a digital copy can be downloaded and read for free.

Richard Taunt has an excellent blog about the thinking behind the prize, and why 'Writing the Future' matters.

Babies born today are likely to be alive to welcome in the next century.  The care they receive and health they enjoy will be radically different, but how?

MARY SHELLEY 1818

A story of reanimation, organ transplantation, genetic engineering, and medical ethics.

ALDOUS HUXLEY 1931

The citizens of London kept sane by mood-altering medicine. Anti-depressants didn’t become the subject of experimentation until the 1950s.

KAZUO ISHIGURO 2005

Exploring the impact on health and society of radically extended life spans, human cloning and organ transplants

In a world where five years counts as long-term, we need to think differently. Thinking about the real long-term in health is exceptionally limited - this means governments and the NHS are flying blind as to where we're headed.

Writing the Future fills this niche, bringing new ideas and creative thinking.

Delighted that 'A Chest Full of Spiders' won Second place in The Best Small Fictions Microfiction Contest.

It will be published in 'Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction' in December.

The contest was judged by Tara Masih, Michelle Elvy, and Mel Bosworth.

The Best Small Fictions anthologies are an Amazon top 100 Anthology, and an absolute treat.  An annual series, hailed as a "milestone for the short story," they honor contemporary masters and emerging writers of short-short and hybrid forms from across the globe.

The latest 2017 edition is for sale now.

“I believe The Best Small Fictions series . . . is an extraordinarily important literary event. The art form of the small fiction speaks strongly to the zeitgeist of the 21st century and this sort of focused recognition is long overdue.”

~Robert Olen Butler

I’m honoured to be shortlisted for the "Writing the Future” £10,000 short story prize.

Winners are announced on the 26th October.

OPSNIZING DAD

I decided OPSNIZE was for me when Dad lost his trousers on the bus.  He threw them out the window.  Then he rolled around on the floor, screaming his own name, over and over, until some kid pushed a panic button. 

David

David

David

That was his name.  He wanted to hold on to it, for as long as he could.

Whole weeks went by where he lost it, though.  Just sat in a chair and occasionally allowed his skull to rotate around three-hundred and sixty degrees on his neck. 

Sometimes an arm fell off. 

You can read the full story here.

Holly was at home watching a triple-bill-all-night-retro-horror-film-fest when her jaw dropped. It landed on her lap, like a baby bird.

It was plump and hot, and there was white bone and sharp gristle bleeding out one side. Holly pushed her sweater over it, quick, so Ron wouldn’t see it and get angry.

Her ears had been the first thing to go. They had dropped last Thursday, while she was doing her Tax return. She had wrapped them in foil and put them in the freezer. They were in there right now, frosting hard next to the Cookie Dough ice cream.

She’d curled her hair forwards, set with a hot iron over the holes in her head.

Ron had not said anything when he got home that first night, or maybe he had and she hadn’t heard through all the bleeding.

Read the rest online at b(OINK) 

Six months ago, my Mum and I started to get serious about skincare.

Mum’s goals were to be ‘barely there’, ‘flawless’ and ‘age-defying.’

My goals were to ‘go big’ and ‘colour!’

Mum tried ninety-eight Concealers and Foundations.

I tested Highlighters (for inner glow) and Contouring kits (to define).

You can find all our reviews on YouTube. With the product placement offers rolling in, we took things up a level.

Mum had her tummy tucked.

I got a bigger bum, bigger boobs, and bigger lips.

We weren’t getting the impact we wanted, YouTube viewer wise, so we upped our game.

Mum spackled plaster into her wrinkles and applied beige masonry paint.

I had my forehead surgically removed and replaced with the skull of a tiny baby bird. I’ve always felt insecure about my skull, ever since I was a toddler and I first noticed my cranium was disproportionate to my mandible.

Read the full story online here.

This story was Commended in the Bath Flash Fiction Competition, Judged by Kathy Fish.   The Anthology will be published in late 2017.

Davina clocked Harold the second he was born. She slapped his arse and shoved her wrist-watch in his mouth. He sucked the tinny heartbeat, silenced. “I understand you,” she said. “You just need more time.”

By six-months old, he had twenty-six manual alarm clocks, four digital time-pieces, and a free-standing grandfather clock which he slept in like a crib. The days pounded. The flat pulsated. Davina slept in the bathtub like each night was a hurricane warning.

Each time Harold cried, Davina gave him a new watch, or let him touch the numbers on her iPhone. Then the wailing began again.

“What’s wrong Harold?”

But Harold just sobbed, his big hands in his mouth. The hands were from a 1919 train station clock. Czechoslovakian, solid bronze. She’d bought them off eBay.

Read the rest of the story here.

This story won Third Prize in the June 2016 Bath Flash Fiction Competition, judged by Michelle Elvy.

Take a look at the Anthology this story is published in.

David is fruity.  Each Spring, pods grow like blisters from his bald head, his hands, and his face.  The only way to prevent it is to stay inside, wear hats, and SPF-50.  Long sleeves, Wellington boots, and a thick balaclava.  May is OK, but by June there are vines.  Moss can grow in even the smallest cracks.  The fungi are interminable.

It is lonely.  He wishes Prince Charles would come and speak to him.  Help him grow better. 

A gardener’s work is never done.  This concept depresses David.  An eternity of busy work, just to look normal.  Not even preened.  Just, human.  It’s more depressing than the time he found a cherry blossom in his scrotum.

Read the rest of this story in 'To Carry Her Home' - Bath Flash Fiction Volume One, 2017

There’s a box room for the spiders by the front door. You hoard junk in there, old boxes, newspapers.

You chase the spiders out, together, smack them dead with rolled up newspapers. ‘Local hero slashed by mob’ says her headline. ‘I was paralysed by a pork chop’ says yours.

“Do you want to paint it pink, or blue?” you ask, smashing the biggest insect with your boot.

Read the rest of this story in 'To Carry Her Home' - Bath Flash Fiction Volume One, 2016