National Flash Fiction Day is gearing up to celebrate its tenth anniversary, and we're ringing in the new year with brand new artwork by our Artist in Residence, Jeanette Sheppard. Here, Jeanette gives us a glimpse into her artistic process and the inspiration behind her latest work for National Flash Fiction Day....
Before I begin explaining my process, I’d like to say what an honour it is to create the social media banner for National Flash Fiction Day’s tenth anniversary. My first publication was thanks to NFFD, so it’s a huge thrill to be here ten years later revealing the image for this year’s special celebrations.
In the early stages of creating the banner I experimented in watercolour with ways to escape the conventional zigzag flash or crack of lightning across a dark sky that are often used to represent flash fiction. I like the freedom experimentation brings — diving in means I don’t freeze or overthink things. As a writer of flash any desire to overthink the artwork in the early stages was thankfully kept to a minimum — images about what the form is or might be are embedded in my mind. As I explored my instinctive attraction to light in dark places it occurred to me that the skeletal outline of a tree often echoes the shape of lightning. This realisation dovetailed with an image in my head of lights in trees. Lights in trees always say ‘celebration’ to me. I joined the trees to suggest the linking of flash into the longer form of a novella-in-flash.
The flash of a lighthouse beam and an electric torch were also in my mind. One of my favourite definitions of flash fiction is that it’s like a torch in a darkened room. I’ve forgotten who said it, so I’m hoping someone might tell me who came up with the idea. A firework also fizzed in my mind. I first came across this as an image for flash fiction in Rose Metal Press’ excellent, Field Guide to Flash Fiction. Here, Vanessa Gebbie talks about a firework in relation to the resonance of flash. These ideas merged and to my surprise the flashes of light worked well as a variety of zigzags.
I set the sketches aside for a few days to see which one stuck. While I mused on whether to go with the zigzag images social media rumbled, as it does every so often, about whether flash fiction is the best name for the form. Alongside this, I read a wonderful interview in Splonk (Issue 4) where Stuart Dybek ‘says’, ‘Flash spirit is not a matter of word length.’ The inspirational Kathy Fish talks about movement, resonance, and emotion in flash. It’s those three things I hold onto when I’m creating flash and it was those three things that I held onto when I was composing the final image for the NFFD banner. All of this fed into my thinking, especially the idea of a ‘Flash spirit’, and confirmed to me that the idea of the zigzag images was the way to go. The debate will rage on about whether or not flash fiction is the best name for the form, but for me flash does indeed have its own ‘spirit’, able to convey a story in unconventional ways. For many flash fiction writers the zigzag has become synonymous with that spirit — I saw it a great deal when National Flash Fiction Day began. I wanted to pay homage to the flash fiction community. What a supportive bunch they are!
Weaving through all of these ideas was an awareness that National Flash Fiction Day 2021 would be online. I wanted the banner to look like a virtual outdoor party, an invitation for you to join in the celebrations, to read some flash, or to write some flash, or hopefully do both of those things. Finally, I hoped to capture the excitement I felt when I discovered National Flash Fiction Day, ten years ago.
Jeanette Sheppard’s collection Seventy Percent Water won the 2020 Ellipsis Zine Flash Fiction Collection Competition. Her flash fiction appears in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including the Bath Flash Fiction Anthology, Reflex Fiction, Mslexia and four National Flash Fiction Day anthologies. One of her flash fictions pops out of a vending machine in Canada. She is currently redrafting her novella-in-flash that was Highly Commended by Ellipsis Zine in their 2019 competition.
As an artist, Jeanette creates artwork for small press book covers. In 2020 she created the cover for her own collection of flash fiction. Her work can be also be seen on the covers of Alison Woodhouse’s, The House on the Corner and Diane Simmons’ Finding a Way, both published by Ad Hoc Fiction. Jeanette is in her third year as artist-in-residence for National Flash Fiction Day. The 2019 and 2020 NFFD anthologies, And We Pass Through and Root, Branch, Tree, feature her artwork on the front covers. In 2021 she created the social media banner for the ten year anniversary celebrations and she will once again be creating the cover for the annual anthology due to be released in June.
You can find Jeanette online at jeanettesheppard.com and on Twitter @Inklinked.