Come and listen to Flash Legends, Kathy Fish, Nancy Stohlman and Tania Hershman in a special slot on Saturday July 31st and Pamela Painter, Meg Pokrass and Nuala O’Connor in a special slot on Saturday August 28th (plus hopefully another writer to be confirmed). These writers, beloved by many in the flash fiction community, will tell us about the early days of flash fiction and how their work and teaching has evolved since. And as a special treat, we’ll hear them reading some of their own stories. Not to be missed!

Kathy Fish, Nancy Stohlman and Tania Hershman: Saturday July 31st 4.00 pm – 4.45 pm BST

Kathy and Nancy have been writing flash fiction and teaching the form in numerous settings face to face and online for many years.They are both separately running workshops during our festival series and teaching together, are offering have wonderful retreats in Iceland and in France later in 2021 and in Costa Rica in January 2022. Find out more about their retreats here. And more about them in the bios below.

Kathy Fish has published five collections of short fiction, most recently Wild Life: Collected Works from 2003-2018. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Washington Square Review, and numerous other journals, textbooks, and anthologies. Fish’s “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild,” was selected for Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018 and the current edition of The Norton Reader. Her newsletter, ‘The Art of Flash Fiction’, provides monthly craft articles and writing prompts and is free to all. Subscribe here: https://artofflashfiction.substack.com.

Nancy Stohlman has been writing, publishing, and teaching flash fiction for more than a decade, and her latest book, Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2020) is her treatise on the form. In March 2021 it won a Readers View Award. Her other books include The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories, The Monster Opera, and Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities, a finalist for a 2019 Colorado Book Award. Her work has been anthologized widely, appearing in the W.W. Norton New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, Macmillan’s The Practice of Fiction, and The Best Small Fictions 2019, as well as adapted for the stage. She teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder and around the world.

Tania Hershman from the UK, introduced our Festival Director, Jude Higgins, to flash fiction in a workshop in 2012 in Bath. Hundreds of others have been captivated by flash fiction due to her over the years and she was one of the first proponents of the form in the UK in the first decade of this century. We were so pleased she was able to come to the inaugural Flash Fiction Festival in 2017. The picture here shows her performing a flash at the festival. And we are delighted that she is running a workshop on 29th May, in our festival series on Hybrid writing as well as talking about her developments in writing and teaching and reading for us in this slot.

Tania Hershman is published by Guillemot Press. Her poetry pamphlet, How High Did She Fly, joint winner of Live Canon’s 2019 Poetry Pamphlet Competition, was published in 2019. She is the author of three short story and flash collections and two books of poetry and co-author of Writing Short Stories: A Writers’ & Artists’ Companion (Bloomsbury, 2014). She is co-creator of the Twitter account @onthisdayshe, co-author of the recently published ‘On This Day She’ book (John Blake, 2021) and curator of short story hub ShortStops

Pamela Painter. Meg Pokrass and Nuala O’Connor: Saturday August 28th, 4.00 pm – 4.45 pm BST

We were honoured that eminent writer and teacher from the US, Pamela Painter, was able to join us at the inaugural flash fiction festival in Bath, 2017. And it is wonderful to have her back to read from her new and selected stories Fabrications and talk about flash fiction in our Legends spot. She is joined by inspirational writer, editor and teacher, Meg Pokrass, an American expat, living in the UK. Meg, a flash fiction writer of many years standing, is also our Flash Fiction Festival Curator. She is running a workshop in April in our Festival Series. Our third legend of flash on the final day of our festival series is Irish novelist, short story and flash fiction Nuala O’Connor who has been writing flash fiction for well over a decade and has won many awards. She has attended all of the face to face Flash Fiction Festivals running brilliant workshops on writing historical flash fiction. We’re very happy she can come to read and talk about her writing.

Pamela Painter is the author of five story collections, and co-author, with Anne Bernays, of What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Five Points, Ploughshares, SmokeLong Quarterly, New Flash Fiction Review, among others, and in numerous Flash Anthologies such as Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, Micro Fiction, and New Micro. Painter’s flash stories have been presented on National Public Radio, and on the YouTube channel, CRONOGEO, and her work has been staged by WordTheatre in Los Angeles, London and New York. Painter’s newest collection of stories is Fabrications: New and Selected Stories from Johns Hopkins University Press.

Meg Pokrass, Festival Curator, is the author of seven flash fiction collections, two novellas-in-flash, and an award-winning book of prose poetry. A recipient of San Francisco’s Blue Light Book Award, her work has been internationally anthologized in two recent Norton Anthologies, Best Small Fictions 2018, 2019, Wigleaf Top 50 (multiple times) and has been published in over 500 literary magazines including Electric Literature, Craft, Tin House, Passages North, Wigleaf and McSweeney’s. Meg serves as Flash Challenge Judge for Mslexia, Co-Editor of Best Microfiction, 2020, Co-Founder Flash Fiction Collective Reading Series (SF), & Founding/Managing Editor of New Flash Fiction Review.

Nuala O’Connor lives in Galway, Ireland. NORA, her novel about Nora Barnacle, wife and muse to James Joyce, is out in 2021 in the USA, Ireland, UK, Estonia, and Germany. Her chapbook of historical flash, Birdie, was recently published by Arlen House. Nuala is editor at flash e-zine Splonk. She has won many flash and short fiction awards including the Dublin Review of Books Flash Fiction Prize, The Gladstone Flash Prize, RTÉ radio’s Francis MacManus Award, the Cúirt New Writing Prize, and the inaugural Jonathan Swift Award. Twitter: @NualaNiC