Category: News

Happy New Year from all of us at National Flash Fiction Day!

This year's National Flash Fiction Day will be celebrated on Saturday, 26 June 2021 when we'll be marking our tenth anniversary with an online celebration of all things flash.  We hope you'll join us then, but to start the year off right, we've got some exciting things to share with you....

1.  Today we're launching our new banner for 2021, featuring artwork created by National Flash Fiction Day's talented Artist-in-Residence, Jeanette Sheppard.  She says, "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." You can read more about Jeanette's artistic process and the inspiration behind the new image in her most recent NFFD artistic statement.
2. Today also marks the launch of our interview series with our 2021 NFFD Anthology editors and Microfiction Competition judges.  The first is an interview with National Flash Fiction Day's own Santino Prinzi in which he discusses his new collection, his history with National Flash Fiction Day, and what he's looking for in the anthology submission queue.  We are currently open for our submissions and will be posting one interview every Monday until submissions close on 15 February 2021.  Check out our Anthology Guidelines and Microfiction Guidelines and then send these wonderful people something to read...they can't wait to read your work!
3. Last but certainly not least, here's a little advanced notice that we've got something special up our sleeves for later this year.  National Flash Fiction Day is excited to announce that we will be opening our doors from 1 February to 31 October 2021 for novella-in-flash manuscripts between 6,000 and 12,000 words, with a maximum 1,000 word limit per flash. The judge is Sophie van Llewyn and yes, there will be prizes. We'll post full details on the 1st of February, but we thought we'd let you know early so you can start the new year with a great excuse to write and edit.

Again, Happy New Year from all of us at National Flash Fiction Day.  We wish you a creative and productive year of writing and reading, and hope you'll join us for all the fun on and around our tenth anniversary, National Flash Fiction Day 2021 on 26 June 2021.

 

Welcome to the first in a series of interviews with this year's National Flash Fiction Day Anthology editors and Microfiction Competition judges! This week, Diane Simmons chats with one of this year's anthology editors, National Flash Fiction Day's own Santino Prinzi, about his latest collection, his history with National Flash Fiction Day, and what he loves to discover in a submission queue....

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Diane: I very much enjoyed your flash collection This Alone Could Save Us which was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in 2020. Can you tell us a little about the collection?

Santino: I’m very glad to hear you enjoyed the collection! This Alone Could Save Us focuses on the theme of change, how well we do – or don’t – handle change, and how our expectations and perceptions of others don’t always match up with the reality.

The following quotation from Mary Shelley was at the back of my mind when I was compiling stories for this collection:

‘Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. The sun might shine, or the clouds might lour: but nothing could appear to me as it had done the day before.’

The stories are very varied and may not seem to fit together necessarily, but the way an unexpected event – minor or major – can suddenly and irreparably shift reality is explored in each of these stories. I also enjoyed exploring telling stories with a surreal edge, and I think this was something I was conscious of when writing some of these flashes. Flash fiction really enables authors to be playful and explore the weird and wonderful.

 

Diane: You have previously published two collections of flash fiction: Dots and Other Flashes of Perception (The Nottingham Review Press, 2016) and There’s Something Macrocosmic About All of This (V. Press, 2018). How has the process of publishing your new collection differed because of coronavirus restrictions?

Santino: Personally, I don’t feel the process of publishing my collection has been very different. If I remember correctly – which I may not, because trying to pinpoint exactly what has happened throughout 2020 feels like wading through thick fog – the collection had pretty much been finalised before the first UK lockdown, bar perhaps a few odds and ends.

The key difference for me has been around the physical launch and promotion of the collection itself. I feel uneasy marketing a book called This Alone Could Save Us during a global pandemic, as if I’m claiming you can shelve all your worries because this book is here to fix everything. I even considered changing the title at one point, but I kept it because stories widely do have the power to save us. For me, personally, retreating into various forms of narrative – books, films, videogames, etc. – has been how I’ve managed to navigate these unsettling times. I also like the title a lot.

We had planned to launch the collection at the Flash Fiction Festival, an annual festival held in Bristol where flash fiction writers and teachers from all over the globe descend for a weekend of words, workshops, readings, wine, and karaoke. Obviously this couldn’t happen, but we instead published and launched the anthology a few weeks later at the beginning of August.

The launch via Zoom was truly wonderful and a highlight of 2020 for me. While it would’ve been great to launch the collection with an in-person event, an online event enables so much flexibility. People from all over the world were able to come to the launch, many who may not have been able to come otherwise, and I was able to have a number of guest authors to help me celebrate the launch by reading their own stories too.

And, of course, the book is out there in the world finding its way to readers, and being able to share the stories I wanted to share with the readers who want/need to read them is to me the most important part about publishing anything in the first place.

 

Diane: Together, with Nod Ghosh, you are an editor for this year’s anthology. The theme is MAGIC. Is there anything you are particularly looking for in submissions?

Santino: No, I try not to anticipate what I’m looking for because then you’ll only be looking for that story and your eyes will be closed to all the other stories sent your way. The only things I ask for are for authors to tell the story they want to tell and to share with me the stories that they love. I’ll know what I’m looking for when I see it. Other than that, authors must interpret the theme in some way and must not put their name on their submission.

As always the theme of the National Flash Fiction Day anthology is open to interpretation. Editing this anthology is a joy because I’m consistently blown away by the inventive ways authors respond to the themes we choose – and that’s not to mention the quality of flashes themselves – so send me the magic you want to share.

 

Diane: Do you listen to music when you write or do you require complete silence? If you do listen to music, do you find it influences the way you write?

Santino: This completely depends on my mood or what I’m writing. Sometimes I need silence to concentrate, but sometimes I need music to block out all the other distractions. I find the same happens when I read.

I’m unsure if music influences what I write when I’m writing because I’ve never interrogated this idea in my own work, but I do believe we’re all influenced by everything we consume – consciously or unconsciously. So, music probably has influenced my writing, as much as the books I’ve read, the experiences I’ve had, the people I’ve met, the conversations I’ve overheard…and on and on and on…

 

Diane: You have been involved with National Flash Fiction Day since 2015. What has been the most exciting thing about your time with National Flash Fiction Day?

Santino: The best thing about National Flash Fiction Day throughout my years of involvement has to be the many authors and stories I’ve had the pleasure to be introduced to. I have made so many friends within the flash fiction community who I truly appreciate and have made many memories. It has also been incredibly fascinating to see how flash fiction has changed and evolved over this short period of time. Writers of flash fiction have become more daring and experimental over the years and continue to find new ways to telling stories. It has been, and continues to be, incredibly exciting.

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Santino Prinzi is a Co-Director of National Flash Fiction Day in the UK and one of the founding organisers of the annual Flash Fiction Festival. His debut, full-length flash fiction collection, This Alone Could Save Us (2020), is available from Ad Hoc Fiction. His flash fiction collection, There’s Something Macrocosmic About All of This (2018), is available from V. Press. His writing has been published in various magazines and anthologies, including Best Small Fictions 2019, Best Microfiction 2020, SmokeLong Quarterly, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Jellyfish Review, and many more. To find out more follow him on Twitter (@tinoprinzi) or visit his website: santinoprinzi.com

SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW OPEN for this year's National Flash Fiction Day Anthology and Micro Fiction Competition. Submissions close on 15th February 2021. For more information, please visit our Anthology and Competition guidelines.  

 

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.

 

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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.

 

Congratulations to our 2020 Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions nominees, and best of luck to all these flashes in the next round of these selection processes.  You can purchase copies of the 2020 NFFD Anthology containing these fantastic pieces and more at our Bookshop.

Pushcart Prize 2020

• 'Peter Rabbity' by Clementine E. Burnley
• 'The Long Walk' by Chella Courington
• 'Nesting' by Gary Duncan
• 'This Is How It Starts' by Sara Hills
• 'Bath Time' by Helen Rye
• 'Smoke & Cinnamon' by Trasie Sands

Best Small Fictions 2020

• 'Diadem through the eyes of the bear' by Donna L Greenwood
• 'Second-Storey Window' by Niamh MacCabe
• 'Endless Possibilities' by Nora Nadjarian
• 'Root, Branch, Tree' by Sharon Telfer
• 'Footnotes' by Jo Withers

 

National Flash Fiction Day is celebrating its 10th Anniversary on Saturday, 26 June 2021!

To mark the occasion, we've upped the prizes for our annual Microfiction Competition and have a brand new theme for our next anthology...and submissions are now open for both!

2021 NFFD Microfiction Competition

We have a brand new team of judges for this year's Microfiction Competition; a huge welcome goes out to Rachael Dunlop, K M Elkes, Sharon Telfer and Alison Woodhouse who will be reading this year's submissions.

You can read more about the judges here, and of course, stay tuned for interviews with each of our judges and editors which we'll post in January and February 2021.

We've increased our prize pot this year, but have kept entrance fees and our 100-word limit the same. There is no theme for the Microfiction Competition; anything goes in terms of style, subject and theme. Please have a read of our Competition Guidelines and then send something our way!

2021 NFFD Anthology Submissions

The theme of this year’s National Flash Fiction Day anthology is… TA DA! MAGIC!

Charms, spells, rituals, supernatural effects, sleight of hand, conjuring, a mysterious quality of enchantment. The dictionary tells us magic can mean all these things.

Can you bring these qualities into a story in five hundred words or fewer?

Does the word magic conjure (sorry) something entirely different for you? Perhaps you can bring the world of magical realism to your story? Maybe Magic is one of your character's names. Perhaps you can enthral us with some magical technical wizardry in your writing?

Whatever illusion you trick us into believing, please submit your stories by 15th February 2021.

This year’s Guest Editor is Nod Ghosh who will be working alongside National Flash Fiction Day's own Santino Prinzi.  Read more about them here, and stay tuned for their interviews in early 2021.

Our submission process for the anthology has changed this year, so please have a read of our Anthology Submission Guidelines before submitting. We look forward to reading your work!

As we move to our new hosting, certain elements of our website may not work properly for a spell as we get everything up and running.  Please bear with us as we sort out the bits and bobs.   We hope to have everything back to normal soon.

We may have some intermittent downtime over the next few weeks.

Fear not; we're not going anywhere.  We're just fixing some bits and bobs behind the scenes....

We had to cancel our NFFD 2020 live event, so we've brought our celebration online. In our Flash Feast series, we've invited some flash superstars to share some videos and posts over the course of the weekend.

In this, our final Flash Feast of National Flash Fiction Day 2020 with Nik Perring, you can find out where we pinched the name for our 'Flash Feast' series.

Here is a link to Feast if you'd like to read along.

This wraps up our weekend of celebration for NFFD 2020.  Thank you so much to everyone who participated this year, and happy flash writing and reading throughout the year!

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Nik Perring is a short story writer and the author of five books. His work has appeared in many fine places all over the world including Smokelong, Word Riot, 3 :AM Magazine, and The Fiction Desk. His re-telling Little Red Riding Hood, Carmine’s Fruit, won the Artificum Short Story Prize. It’s also been read on the radio, performed on the stage, printed on fliers and appeared, with Dave Eggars’, on a High School Distance Learning course in the US.

He has published the books: I Met a Roman Last Night, What Did You Do? (EPS, 2006); Not So Perfect (RoastBooks, 2010); Freaks!, co-written with Caroline Smailes (TFP/HarperCollins, 2012), A Book of Beautiful Words: Some Meanings and Some Fictions Too (RoastBooks, 2014); and A Book of Beautiful Trees (RoastBooks, 2015).

Nik is also an editor and a teacher of writing, working with both and adults and children, working in primary schools, high schools, colleges, universities and the BBC.

Last year, at our 2019 National Flash Fiction Day event in Coventry, we shared some flash written on the theme of 'epiphany' by men at HMP Wandsworth who were participants of Safe Ground's Flash Fiction Project workshops.  We've published these over at our online journal, FlashFlood as part of our Safe Ground series.  We'd like to revisit these stories this year as part of our online celebration of flash fiction in the UK.

You can find all fourteen of these stories on FlashFlood here.

We now welcome Safe Ground Programmes Manager Lindsay Murphy who tells us a bit about the background and philosophy of Safe Ground's Flash Fiction Project...

Safe Ground is a national arts organisation delivering high quality services and interventions in both prison and community settings. Our programmes focus on relationships and identity and use group work and creative techniques for participants to experience alternative perspectives, develop empathy and self-awareness alongside skills and competencies. We challenge people and communities to do relationships differently.

As an arts organisation, Safe Ground relies on the use of artistic practices and techniques to inform and support our programme design, delivery and evaluation. Our methodologies promote reflection, realisation and revelations. They provide participants with platforms for change and routes into transitions. Throughout our programmes moments of clarity can occur, awareness and understanding of situations can be enhanced and participants can find themselves with a renewed sense of the self. Often, participants in our programmes begin or develop skills in performance, drama and creative writing.

Part of our organisational ethos has always been to work in partnership wherever possible and appropriate. Since 2015, Safe Ground is proud to have been in a relationship with Essex University and in 2017 we coordinated a creative writing workshop with the men at HMP Wandsworth.

It was agreed that ‘Epiphany’ was appropriate as a narrative theme, to support the groups to explore moments of change and transformation, which are inherent in the work we do. These epiphanies or turning points can provide moments of clarity but can also bring up an array of issues, dilemmas, decisions to be made and pathways to be pursued. Over two, two-day workshops, a total of 12 men participated and each produced a selection of short stories for submission. Participants ranged in age from 23 to 65 and brought with them a vast diversity of cultural, educational and life experience. The flash fiction pieces produced by participants denote an array of lightbulb moments, of points of sharp realisation, of transparency and revelation.

Our colleague and design partner on this project was Jonathan Crane who writes:

“When the opportunity to work with Safe Ground in the design and delivery of a creative writing workshop for HMP Wandsworth arose, I was studying towards a Ph.D. at the University of Essex. At that time, I had just been researching the concept of ‘Epiphany’ in relation to short stories, and exploring the flash fiction form. To my mind, these elements seemed ideally suited for a creative writing project in a prison setting.

Flash fiction, I felt, could provide the participants with a short, accessible form with which they could experiment. Then, with the concept of epiphany as a central theme for the workshops, the men could be encouraged to reflect on their own experiences, as well as to explore their own realizations and transformations. Yet, more than this, by introducing the idea of epiphany as a focal point of change within a narrative, we could provide a structure which would help the men shape their own flash fiction.

Using Safe Ground’s methodologies, the workshops provided a supportive forum not only for discussion, and for the expression of ideas and experiences, but also for the sharing of work. We encouraged the men to read out their work, and to give constructive feedback on the work of others. This process then fed into a session on editing and drafting stories during which the men worked collaboratively.

When I began this project, I had hoped to share some writing technique with the participants, and to introduce them to a form which might enable their self-expression. In short, I wanted to help them to write, and to have their voices heard. I little knew that the men would embrace flash fiction so keenly and create stories which ranged from the minimalist dramatic short, to the lyrical prose poem, from the poignantly personal to the surreally comic.

It was a privilege and a pleasure to work with Safe Ground and the men in HMP Wandsworth. The men’s eloquence and honesty, their openness to discuss their experiences and insights, as well as to share their stories, not only dismantled my own preconceptions about prison and life therein, but also taught me to appreciate the small things that we so casually take for granted.

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You can follow Safe Ground on Twitter @Safe_Ground.

In 2019, Makeda McMillan of Small Green Shoots took last year's NFFD Anthology theme of 'Doors' and developed it into a project called 'Glass Ceilings, Closed Doors' aimed at young men from her area, with a goal of developing flash and poetry 'pieces around the stereotypes and barriers they face being young, BME and from a deprived area that is spiking in terms of gun and knife crime'.

Makeda received funding from the Arts Council and delivered the project last year, and by last year's National Flash Fiction Day event in Coventry, she was able to share this video and these excerpts and images that came out of this project.

We are honoured that our 2019 anthology theme synergised with Makeda's project, and can think of no better way to celebrate National Flash Fiction Day than by taking time to read and listen to these young writers and artists.

You can find out more about Mikeda, her work and her project at https://www.makedamakes.co.uk/.