Elisabeth Ingram Wallace

SmokeLong Quarterly is my favourite literary magazine. I have rambled on at elegiac length about it being my Flash Fiction Holy Grail 420 times before… so I will simply add that being published in SmokeLong for a second time is a 2019 career highlight. I’m happy!

The story is called ‘Liquid History’, and was selected by Guest Reader, Zach Powers. Here is what Zach had to say about this story:

“Who doesn't love a story about a vengeful shipwreck? But what caught my attention in Elisabeth's writing is how she incorporates the terminology of sailing and shipbuilding, and how that terminology creates a prose style that exists only within the confines of her particular story. She takes a strange and brilliant concept and uses that to push the bounds of language itself. She doesn't ignore plot, though, tying the word-building and wordplay together with a deft, human-scale narrative at the end.”

LIQUID HISTORY

Ruby is a wreck. She lives in the Thames. Trout fish through her bilge tanks, turds flush past her decks.

Once, men lived inside her and plotted inky maps they could travel through; stargazed above her into Africa, to white beaches striped with zebra, sea-pigs singing, kraken rolling in the sand.

Now Ruby is lodged in a sludge of London slurry.

She is snapped, her skull six metres down, tiding with gravel. Her gut gurgling coke cans and Primark, plastic dental floss sticks, dead cats.

Her spine rests deep in the ice age, on a clam-fossil terrace, mainmast to mizzenmast knotting with eels.

In cold currents, she cracks, sends splinters of herself off to sea.

You can read the rest here.

I wrote a flash fiction to celebrate National Flash Fiction Day on 15th June 2019, and it was published in Flash Flood. A brilliant project to be a part of!

Also, I had far, far, far too much fun writing about a Granny taking magic mushrooms and running around with a chainsaw waving pilchards…

GRANNY SMITH, QUEENE

Fluorescent men in high-vis vests hang like fruit in the trees.

I want to pluck one.

Slice him in half, peel off his skin, crunch out his eyes.

This first blue sky day of April, a lorry is reversing, and blue sounds like magpies and a chainsaw cutting down apple trees in the Bluebell woods.

An ancient doodle of wilderness, a dark skinny scrap of me, tangling between the cracks.

Next year the wild-flowers here will be gone. No more apples, no more Witches’ Thimbles. No more nod and bow, no more great tits fighting worms in the dapples. The breeze will not bruise the fruit sweet.

There is talk of an apartment block, with parking for eighty cars.

The newspaper calls it progress.

I call it murder.

I wonder if I can kill a man with a kick to his ladder?

Read the rest here.

I was delighted to be asked to write a Flash Fiction Triptych by Steven John, Features Editor at New Flash Fiction Review.

In the pursuit of intellectual seriousness, fully embracing the honour and my new literary sophistication, I wrote a story called 'Alzhimer's and Wanking.'

ALZHEIMER’S AND WANKING

OAK

“I can’t stand Literary Fiction, it’s all Alzheimer’s and wanking.”

She’s draining her second bottle, Red, the White long gone; and I realise, I want to put this woman inside a tree and set fire to her.

Inside the tree I saw in Cyprus, struck by lightning, its inside glowing Notre-Dame.

All the leaves gone, birds skedaddled, eggs popping in their nests. 

She’d look good in that tree. 

Or the tree I climbed when I was six and fell from, fracturing my foot in three places. That was a malevolent bastard of a tree. 

An oak.

She’d look resplendent inside that tree.

Mice would nest in her skull. Badgers would pluck out her eyeballs.

I like trees. 

I hate this woman.

The world is that simple.

Read the rest here.

The Triptych form and idea is best described by Steven:

Like all the best ideas, the Triptychs came about in a light-bulb moment in the New Flash Fiction Review penthouse office suite – no brainstorming or s.w.o.t. analysis. We launched back in January 2019 and have since hosted truly remarkable work by some of the best Flash Fiction writers in the world. The response to the series has gathered huge momentum. We hope that Flash writers and Flash Fiction magazine editors everywhere will continue to represent this exciting model of the short form.

Find out more about the Special Feature section at New Flash Fiction Review, here.

I am delighted to announce that I won the Mogford Short Story Prize 2019.

My 2,500 word story, ‘Corvidae’, was selected from 1,019 entries from writers all over the world as the winner of the £10,000 Mogford Prize for Food & Drink Writing 2019.

‘Corvidae’ was chosen by Prize founder Jeremy Mogford, and guest judges; Julian Barnes, English Author and Man Booker Prize winner, and Tim Hayward, FT contributing writer and winner of the Restaurant Writing Award at the Guild of Food Writers Awards 2018.

I am beyond thankful to all the judges, and to Jeremy Mogford for creating this award.

You can listen to the story here, on The Story Player. It is read with such life-force and humour by Sara Wilson-Soppitt. I can’t thank Melanie Whipman enough for this recording, it is done with so much care and attention to detail.

You can read the story online, here.

The shortlist consisted of Tahira Yaqoob with ‘Café Beirut‘, April Pierce with ‘The Afterparty‘, and John Simpson with ‘The Last Night at the Palazzo‘. Yes, that John Simpson. Three novels , fifteen books, BBC war correspondent, CBE John Simpson.

 So. Fair to say, I expected to lose and was looking forward to a lovely few days in Oxford, and an evening fetching John Simpson champagne and diamond tacos (or whatever winners eat) from the bar.

My base for the night was The Old Parsonage Hotel in Oxford.

I was excited to find The Old Parsonage had a library. Plus, my room had a huge bathtub, with tiny little toiletries scented with slightly alarming things like ‘cornish hedgerows’. Heaven.

The prize giving took place at Quod in Oxford, on the 3rd April 2019. I wore my best lobster earrings and scuttled off to the restaurant.

Emotional Support Lobsters safely attached to skull, I arrived at Quod and met the other shortlisted writers, Jeremy Mogford, and past winners and judges of the prize.

Everyone rocked without exception, and there was prosecco, which always helps. I can’t enthuse enough about how lovely Oxford is, and going to Quod or Gees will only make it 8 billion times more sparkling.

It was a surprise to win. I think you can tell that from the expression of paralysed horror in my face.

I was then handed a microphone and instructed to give a speech. I am 99% certain I mimed lobsters and cornish hedgerows for five minutes, so, my apologies for that, to anyone present.

I hope I did manage to convey my huge gratitude to Jeremy Mogford and family for a magical evening in Oxford. Primarily, this is gift of time to write. £10,000 is an insane prize. It will buy me time to finish writing my first novel.

I was presented with not only an award, but a beautifully bound chapbook of my story. ‘Corvidae’, which will be gifted to all guests in The Old Bank and Old Parsonage in Oxford, over the coming years. I also have the full shortlist and past winners (7 years worth!) to read this week.

I arrived back to my room to find a bottle of champagne waiting for me, and I had my first of 37 mildly drunken hedgerow themed baths.

It was perfect.

Huge congratulations to all the shortlisters and longlisters, the competition was intense and the talent gigantic.

Making the longlist was a considerable achievement given that the competition attracted 1,019 entries from 58 countries around the world.

This year the Mogford Prize attracted entries from Israel, the United Arab Emirates, the Palestinian Territories, Trinidad and Tobago, Columbia, Guyana, Bermuda, Jamaica, Georgia, Iran, Monaco, Myanmar, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Georgia.

The full longlist includes these amazing writers -
Carol Adlam; Jayne Boxall; Giles Cooper; Julia Davey; Georgios Goris; Helen Harradine; Bruce Meyer; Geoff Palmer; Fiona Parker; Jennifer Parrott; Tim Pears; April Pierce; Simon Pritchard; Nell Rees; John Simpson; Craig Tiedman; Vijay Varman; Elizabeth Sinclair; Sudhakar Soman; Hugo Vickers; Kent Walley; Alexis Wolfe; Krystyna Wysocki; Tahira Yaqoob.

It is a huge honour to be a part of such a prestigious prize.

I am very happy to be joining TSS Publishing, as the Flash Fiction Senior Editor.

I will be responsible for the general submission periods for Flash, as well as guiding the direction of the organisation in terms of flash fiction publication and development.

I stick by what I wrote here about what I want to see more of in flash fiction.

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 here.

I am excited to learn my story Satin Nightwear for Women Irregular (published by Bath Flash Fiction) has been selected for inclusion in Best Microfiction 2019.

Edited by Meg Pokrass, Gary Fincke, and Dan Chaon, the Best Microfiction anthology series provides recognition for outstanding literary stories of 400 words or fewer. Co-edited by award-winning microfiction writer/editor Meg Pokrass, and Flannery O’Connor Prize-winning author Gary Fincke, the anthology features the well-known novelist and short story writer Dan Chaon serving as final judge, an exclusive craft-oriented interview with the great Etgar Keret, and an essay about the current state of microfiction written by Robert Scotellaro. The inaugural edition, Best Microfiction 2019, features eighty seven of the world's best very short stories.

The book will be published in April 2019.

The following stories have been chosen by final judge Dan Chaon to appear in Best Microfiction 2019. 

It is an excellent list of talented microfiction writers, I am so happy to be a part of this anthology.

Best Microfiction 2019

Sarah Arantza Amador, “Sanctus Spiritus, 1512” (Cheap Pop)

Anita Arlov, “He, She, It, They” (National Flash Fiction Day NZ)

Jessica Barksdale, “Knock Knock” (Matchbook Lit Mag)

Roberta Beary, “Swimming in Circles” (KYSO Flash)

Matt Bell, “The Hungerer” (Wigleaf)

Dick Bentley, “Health Care” (Serving House Journal)

Gregory Brown, “Birdhouse” (PRISM International)

Tetman Callis, “Candlelight and Flowers” (NY Tyrant)

Mike Chin, “Training” (Passages North)

Myfanwy Collins, “Euthanasia” (Jellyfish Review)

Tim Craig, “Northern Lights” (Bath Flash Fiction Award)

Tommy Dean, “You’ve Stopped” (Pithead Chapel)

Olga Dermott-Bond, “Mr Rochester and I” (Bath Flash Fiction v3)

Leonora Desar, “Fire, Ocean” (TSS)

Leonora Desar, “My Father’s Girlfriend” (Matchbook Lit Mag)

Leonora Desar, “The Monkey” (Reflex Fiction)

Will Finlayson, “The Strip Club” (Southampton Review)

Valerie Fox, “Even the Christmas Tree was Nicer That Year” (Across the Margin)

Sarah Freligh, “Any Body” (Cincinatti Review)

Frances Gapper, “Plum Jam” (Flashback Fiction)

Jo Gatford, “Things Left And Found By The Side Of The Road” (Bath Flash Fiction Award)

Christopher Gaumer, “He Died We Left Him Til Morning” (The Citron Review)

Beth Gilstrap, “Becky” (Pithead Chapel)

Beth Gilstrap, “Bone Words” (Longleaf Review)

Melissa Goode, “Empire of Light” (Gone Lawn)

Melissa Goode, “I Wanna Be Adored ” (Cheap Pop)

Melissa Goode, “Tonight, We Are Awake” (Wigleaf)

Cavin Gonzalez, “Fragments of Evolution” (Cheap Pop)

Anita Goveas, “Frau Roentgen’s Left Hand” (Flashback Fiction)

Anita Goveas, “Let’s Sing All the Swear Words We Know ” (Lost Balloons)

Tina May Hall, “The Extinction Museum: Exhibit #28 (incandescent bulb, unlit)” (The Collagist)

Toni Halleen, “Not the Whole Story” (Wigleaf)

Steven John, “A Brief History of Time in Our House” (Ad Hoc Fiction)

Peter Krumbach, “11.37” (The Adroit Journal)

Meghan Lamb, “Missing” (Passages North)

Raven Leilani, “Kanekalon” (Split Lip)

Paige Leland, “Self Portrait with Early December” (Former Cactus)

Robert Lopez, “A Warm Motherly Look” (Wigleaf)

Paul Luikart, “Breathless” (Brilliant Flash Fiction)

Fiona Mackintosh, “Siren” (Bath Flash Fiction Award)

Fiona Mackintosh, “The Chemistry of Living Things” (Fish Publishing)

Lutivini Majanja, “Am Inheritance” (Flash Frontier)

Prosper Makara, “Lessons from my Mother” (Afreada—Africa’s Literary Magazine)

Dan Malakoff, “Loop-the-Loop” (Wigleaf)

Michael Martone, “Boom” (Always Crashing)

Michael Martone, “Klaus Weber, Curb House Numberer” (The Collagist)

Kathleen McGookey, “You Can Find Joy in Doing Laundry” (KYSO)

Adam McOmber, “A Roman Road” (Atticus Review)

Heather McQuillan, “A post-traumatic god” (Menicus)

KC Mead-Brewer, “It’s Shaped like a Grin, They Say” (Cheap Pop)

José Enrique Medina, “Niños de La Tierra” (Burnside Review)

Tracy Lynne Oliver, “This Weekend” (Fanzine)

Brenda Peynado, “Fire” (Craft Magazine)

Dominica Phetteplace, “After the Flood Waters Came” (Wigleaf)

Meghan Phillips, “Abstinence Only” (Passages North)

Meghan Phillips, “Final Girl Slumber Party” (Barrelhouse)

Kristen Ploetz, “LifeColor Indoor Latex Paints® — Whites and Reds (R)” (JMWW)

Claire Polders, “Breathlessness” (Moonpark Review)

Dina Relles, “And Sometimes We Meet” (Matchbook Lit Mag)

Belinda Rimmer, “Domestic” (Anti-Heroin Chic)

Nicole Rivas, “Crumbs” (The Cincinnati Review)

Becky Robison, “Baby Dolls” (Pank)

Brad Rose, “Desert Motel” (Pithead Chapel)

Sarah Salway, “Not Sorry” (Cincinnati Review)

Kim Samsin, “World’s Finest” (Matchbook Lit Mag)

Noa Sivan, “The End of the World” (Synaesthesia Magazine)

Rachel Smith, “What I Now Know” (Flash Frontier)

Rachel Smith, “Glossectomy” (Menicus)

Joe Squance, “The Seeds of Things” (Cease, Cows)

Elizabeth Stix, “Tsunami” (Southampton Review)

Paul Strohm, “Masculinities” (West Marin Review)

Xenia Taiga, “Princesses” (Synaesthesia Magazine)

Kaj Tanaka, “The Hair Child” (Bending Genres)

Sharon Telfer, “My Father Comforts Me in the Form of Birds” (Reflex Fiction Magazine)

Jamie Thunder, “The Central Line Has Severe Delays” (Spelk)

Cathy Ulrich, “The Delicate Art of Ikebana” (Barren Magazine)

TM Upchurch, “There Will Be No Lace” (Flashback Fiction)

Zach VandeZande, “Making an Illegal U Turn on 15th near Union” (Monkeybicycle)

Elisabeth Ingram Wallace, “Satin Nightwear for Women Irregular” (Bath Flash Fiction Award)

Clare Weze, “Helping” (Reflex Fiction)

Charmaine Wilkerson, “The Laundry Room Comes First” (Fiction Southeast)

Benjamin Woodard, “Half Tank” (Atticus Review)

Luke Wortley, “Reverse Field Trip” (Longleaf)

Tara Isabel Zambrano, “Feeding Time” (Okay Donkey)

Tara Isabel Zambrano, “New Old” (The Southampton Review)

Tara Isabel Zambrano, “Snowstorm” (Atticus Review)

C Pam Zhang, “BRAINDRAIN” (Paper Darts)

I have two stories in “Things Left and Found by the Side of the Road -  Bath Flash Fiction Volume Three.”

The first is “Satin Nightwear for Women Irregular” (which can be read online here), and the second is “They Huddle and Fang” (which can be read in the book).

It is an absolute honour to have been in all three of the Bath Flash Fiction Anthologies so far, 2016, 2017 and 2018.

This years anthology has 133 short short fictions selected from the winners, short listed, and long listed authors from the three rounds of the 2018 international Bath Flash Fiction Awards. All 300 words and under, these stories are by writers representing over twenty different countries. Experimental fictions exploring many different themes and subjects which show the variety possible in his exciting and continually developing genre.

Glittering like a broken bottle on a moonlit night, to win Second Place in the Anton Chekhov Prize, at New Flash Fiction Review!

My story, “She Said her Favourite Colour was Haddock” will be published in January 2019, at New Flash Fiction Review.

New Flash Fiction Review honours master storyteller Anton Chekhov through holding an annual award for excellence in flash fiction. Chekhov’s mastery for saying a lot with a little makes him one of the flash fiction’s spiritual inspirations. Over one-hundred years before the term “flash” was invented, Chekhov himself was writing short stories in under 1,000 words, stories such as “After the Theatre”, “A Country Cottage”, and “Bliss”.

In 1886, Chekhov wrote in a letter to his brother, “… you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.

The prize was judged by the brilliant poet, short story and novel writer Nuala O’Connor - many thanks to Nuala, and congratulations to the other Prizewinners, poet and short story writer Angela Readman, and Clare Guyton.

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