Author Archives: Jude

Embracing Your Inner Wild: Creating Untamed Flash Fiction

By popular demand we have included a pre-festival three hour workshop with acclaimed flash fiction writer and teacher Kathy Fish, who is also leading three other shorter workshops during the rest of the weekend and contributing to a panel on Flash Fiction Around The World.

Kathy says: “The flash form is uniquely suited for innovation and experimentation. This session is aimed at writing outside your comfort zone, both in language and in content. What happens when we unbind ourselves from the constraints of tame, domesticated realism and let our imaginations run wild? We will explore playfulness of language and structure as well as trying our hands at surrealism, magical realism, absurdism, etc. Expect to come away from this session with three fresh and surprising drafts in hand.”
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2019 Flash Fiction Festival UK, Booking Open Now

Sunny days at Trinity

The third Flash Fiction Festival is taking place the weekend of 28th-30th June, at Trinity College, Bristol, the same lovely venue as last year in Bristol UK. And we hope many of you who came last year will come again. This is what Vanessa Gebbie, who has run workshops at our previous two festivals and is running one this year said this morning on social media:
“Flashers UK and beyond, get in there. It’s not just friendly, it’s focussed, hugely useful, inspirational, brilliant for networking and great, great fun!”

This year, we’ve flash fiction teachers and writers coming from New Zealand as well as from UK, Ireland, US, Germany, Italy and Cyprus. And there’s even more to choose from. Plus an extra, three hour pre-festival workshop with Kathy Fish on the Friday afternoon before the festival, which you can book separately. Take a look at the workshop page and the programme. It’s all very exciting.

Presenters Carrie, Nancy and Meg

    We also have more team members to help everything run smoothly. Helen Rye is in charge of entertainments. Expect evening Karaoke after the day’s events are over in a bar decorated with fairy lights. Alison Woodhouse is helping with hospitality with a focus on the bar, and Danielle Miles is officially in charge of the bookshop and the raffle. Have a look at the gallery of pictures to get some idea of the atmosphere last year. We expect it will be just as fun and as vibrant this time.
    If you haven’t got a copy already, you can read some stunning micros that were prompted by the Festival workshops in 2017 and 2018 in Flash Fiction Festival One and Flash Fiction Festival Two. The books are available in print from the Ad Hoc Fiction Bookshop and digitally on Kindle and Nook. And anyone coming to the festival this year, will have the opportunity to submit to Flash Fiction Festival Three, which will be published by the end of the year.
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Festival Raffle

At this year’s festival in July at Trinity College, Bristol we raised money for Comic Relief to support the money raised by Funny Bone, the anthology of funny flash fiction published by Peter Blair and Ashley Chantler at Chester University. We raised £250 which was a great outcome. Read in Full

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Flash Fiction Festival 2018

We were thrilled with the success of the Flash Fiction Festival, this year entirely funded by Bath Flash Fiction Award, and directed by Jude Higgins with the help of a great festival team.The festival took place at Trinity College, Bristol 20th-22nd July. Everything was brilliant, including the weather. The full programme of events began with readings on Friday evening and continued with workshop, talks, book launches and general fun with very popular impromptu festival karaoke organised by Helen Rye and Christopher Allen.

    Participants and workshop leaders travelled from many different parts of the world to come to the festival. Here’s Roberta Beary, who came from Ireland, with our festival curator, Meg Pokrass.

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A Letter from Laurie Stone

Dear Flashers,
 
I am looking forward to seeing you in Bristol this July and learning about your writing. I will be hosting a workshop on hybrid narrative and crafting sentences that work at the level of separate stories. Festival director Jude Higgins has asked some of us to post ideas ahead of our rendezvous. Read in Full

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Sculpting Flash Fiction with Nancy Stohlman

I’m so excited to be part of the second annual Flash Fiction Festival!

I’m going to be teaching two classes that both come primarily out of my 15 years as an editor. The Sculpting Flash Fiction class is my love letter to the art of editing—for me this is where the real magic happens. My own first drafts are fast and uncensored, but the sculpting of those ideas is the real dance and my favorite part. I hope to not only give some concrete tools for editing flash fiction but also to inspire an appreciate for this part of the process, which I fondly call the “puberty” of our work, where everything changes and starts to find itself.
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Flash Fiction and the Loss of Ego
John Brantingham

In late Spring in the High Sierra where I live in the summer, the snow melts off and turns the mountains into a world of mud. In those places of recent fires, this is the season for morel mushrooms, which love the nutrient rich ash. I have a ranger friend who hunts them through the soggy mud, and she cooks them on a portable stove right there in the dark shade of the giant sequoia trees. Fire is an important part of the pulse of the forest. Without it, the giant sequoias would not reseed. Without it, new growth would never have enough light to thrive.
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Flashing Historically – Nuala O’Connor

I’m an Irish novelist, short story writer and flash writer. At the Flash Fiction Festival I’ll be facilitating a workshop on Historical Flash Fiction. The last two novels I’ve written have been set in the nineteenth century, and my novel-in-progress is Edwardian, so for a few years I’ve been steeped in the language, social history, fashion, mores and environment of those times. I love research and, in the throes of it, often come across snippets that can’t be used in the novels, but that I know might work as flash. So, more and more, I’m writing historical flash as well as historical novels, though I’m always pleased, too, when an idea for a contemporary flash hoves into view.
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