Welcome to the third 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 2026.
This week, Diane Simmons chats with Debra A. Daniel, one of this year’s Microfiction Competition judges, about various things including her novella-in-flash, music and her US gameshow experience….
DS: I’ve heard a rumour that you were once on the TV programme Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in the USA. Can you tell me a little about that experience?
DAD: My husband and I went to a taping while we were visiting NY, thinking that my elderly aunt would love hearing of such an adventure since it was her favorite game show. Every audience member was given the contestant test. I passed. A production assistant interviewed me and was delighted to hear that our band had played a gig at a nudist colony. They want interesting and unusual stories and a bunch of bare-skinned people playing horseshoes and grilling burgers was too good to pass up. Two weeks later, I was back in NY and standing on a brightly lit television set next to Meredith Viera. I made it to the $100,000 question which was about Mars. I’m a writer not an astronomer. Nevertheless, I narrowed it down, guessed wrong, but still left with $25,000. It was surreal, exhilarating, and a once in a lifetime experience. All thanks to a lot a happy naked bodies.
DS: You play and sing in a band and having heard you sing at the flash fiction festival in Bristol this summer, I know you are a talented singer. If you had to choose between never singing again or never writing again, which would it be?
DAD: That would be a crazy hard choice to make, but I think I’d choose to keep writing. Even if I couldn’t sing, I could dance and listen to music, still feel rhythm and the percussive drive. I could still experience the emotional lift, joy, solace, and comfort from the blues and ballads, holiday carols and classical melodies, Broadway tunes and lullabies. I’d still have music inside me even if I couldn’t find my voice.
DS: You won the Bath novella-in-flash contest this year with In the Dark Eyes of the Rabbit. Could you tell us a little about the novella and how it came about please?
DAD: I was so delighted, grateful, and humbled to win this award. My novella-in-flash is a coming of age story set in the 1960s. Retta, the young girl is wise but naive, optimistic but filled with doom, innocent but wary. She wants a sitcom family and yet she lives with her elusive and enigmatic parents and her grandmother who is a topnotch worrier. Retta is on the verge, trying to make her way into her teenage years while maneuvering a world and a family that often makes no sense to her.
It started with several 300-word pieces that were published online and in anthologies. Then Retta and her family kept nudging me to tell more of their story. Retta was pretty insistent on being heard. And her grandmother just would not give me a moment’s peace until I sat down and put the words on the page. I adore these people even with their flaws and secrets and misdeeds. I’m so happy that In the Dark Eyes of the Rabbit was chosen.
DS: Thank you for agreeing to be a microfiction judge. Do you have a favourite micro fiction that you can recall reading? If so, what was it that you admired about it?
DAD: Oh, so many. I could give a list. One that stands out to me is from Tiny Sparks Everywhere NFFD Anthology 2024. James Montgomery’s ‘Stars and Stripes—1945’ is a stunner. The first line, ‘Tomorrow, we’ll dance to the devil’s piano’, slams the reader with so many emotions—dread, fear, resignation. The men, about to face battle, gather—singing, dancing, finding escape from the inevitability horror and pain that war brings—realize that one fellow soldier, holds love for another man, and they accept the truth that love is love. This small flash carries huge power and poignancy. So timely and so timeless. It’s beautiful.
DS: Did you write as a child or teenager? If so, can you tell us a little about what you wrote at that time?
DAD: I remember writing one poem in particular. Sitting at my desk. Using a fountain pen. Trying hard not to smudge my cursive letters. I remember it being full of woe but holding hope at the end. Rhyming couplets. Lots of similes. When I showed it to my family, they were impressed and seemed somewhat doubtful that I had created this work of literary genius. I thought, hmm, this is a great feeling. In truth, I’m sure it was dreadful.
Many times, when asked to write the typical themes in elementary school, I would opt to make mine humorous. I loved the idea of making my teacher or classmates laugh. I still do.
I also wrote lots of plays including songs with funny lyrics, which I talked my sisters into performing although usually, they mutinied halfway through rehearsal.
In high school, I had short stories published in the literary yearbook was feature editor for the newspaper so I was submitting my work at an early age and quickly learned about rejection, which I made me more determined to improve my skills and hone my craft.
Mrs. Jeffcoat, one of my English teachers, pulled me aside one day and told me I had talent, and I should consider that when I chose my life path. I think she’d be happy that I took her advice.
Debra A. Daniel is this year’s winner of the Bath Novella-in-Flash award and has previously published novellas-in-flash, A Family of Great Falls and The Roster, (AdHoc Fiction), novel, Woman Commits Suicide in Dishwasher and poetry chapbooks, The Downward Turn of August and As Is. She’s a Pushcart and Best Short Fictions nominee, has been longlisted and shortlisted in numerous competitions, and has won The Los Angeles Review short fiction prize. She was twice named SC Arts Commission Poetry Fellow, won the Guy Owen Poetry Prize, as well as awards from the Poetry Society of SC. Work has appeared in journals and anthologies including: With One Eye on the Cows, Things Left and Found by the Side of the Road, Los Angeles Review, Smokelong, Kakalak, Emrys, Inkwell, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River, Gargoyle. She’s sings in a band with her husband and was once on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.