Immersion Lab: Ekphrasis,Collaboration, & Cross Pollination: Pre-Festival Workshop with Kathy Fish. HYBRID workshop. In-person and online.

Kathy Fish is offering a three-hour pre-festival workshop from 2.00 to 5.00 pm on Friday 8th.

Kathy says: Let’s begin with the premise that flash fiction is its own unique and fluid literary form. Faced with the challenge of creating within limited word counts, you, the flash writer must draw on every available writerly tool and even invent some of your own. As art begets art, this lab will have us writing in conversation with other forms of creative expression. Join me for a lively three-part session where we will draw inspiration from music, art, and poetry. Come prepared for a fully immersive and energizing interactive experience. Expect to leave with three fresh drafts of surprising depth, beauty, and complexity.

Revision Think Tank: with Kathy Fish

Kathy will offer this 90 minute session twice during the main part of the festival. Once on Saturday, once on Sunday.
She says: “The Belgian-American poet, May Sarton said, “Revision is not going back and fussing around, but going forward into the process of creation.” This 90 minute session is devoted to sharing some tools I’ve devised for deepening and enriching your first or second draft, thus “re-visioning” your work through a new lens. Very often the response to these methods is an “ah ha” experience, the joy of discovering what one really meant to say! Together, we’ll explore new ways to achieve clarity, beauty, emotional cohesion, and resonance in our flash fiction.”

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 Non-required 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.

The Deep Zoo: Excavating and Animating Our Impossible Stories with Nancy Stohlman

Where do ideas come from? So much of what we call “writer’s block” often means we are stumped, wandering around the open field with a shovel but not sure where to dig. How do we excavate our stories from the mundane muck of everything else? Which path into the jungle will lead us to the gold? In this workshop we will divine and conjure, we will shape-shift and transfigure, and we will put our ideas through the alchemy of playful potentiality to discover and animate our deep treasures.

Going Shorter: Writing Beautiful Flash Fiction:with Nancy Stohlman. HYBRID Workshop. In person and online

What does “beautiful flash fiction” mean anyway? Aesthetically pleasing? To who? This generative class will take a deeper dive into the concepts from Going Short to examine the fundamentals of flash, try a variety of approaches to the compressed narrative, discuss what makes beautiful flash fiction, and generate your own original flash pieces. Open to writers with all levels of experience in the form, whether you are brand new to flash fiction or a veteran flasher looking for a dose of inspiration.
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. And is soon to be released as an audio book. 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.

Vanessa’s Little Red Book…:With Vanessa Gebbie

A glimpse into Vanessa’s own writing games and prompts, from fun to weird and wacky to thoughtful. 90 minutes to come and create as many drafts as we can cram in!

The Biggest Game of Word Cricket in the Whole Wide World

.A Saturday morning half an hour warm-up session for the whole assembly with Vanessa.

Vanessa Gebbie has won multiple awards for both prose and poetry, including a Bridport Prize and the Troubadour. Her flash publications include Ed’s Wife and Other Creatures (Liquorice Fish Books) and the weird/irreal collection Nothing to Worry About (Flash: The International Short Short Story Press at Chester University) 2018 as well as many individual publications online and in print. She is author of three short story collections (with Salt and Cultured Llama), a novel (Bloomsbury), and two poetry publications (Pighog and Cultured Llama). She is also commissioning and contributing editor of Short Circuit, Guide to the Art of the Short Story (Salt). She teaches widely.

Take One Dream, A Hermit Crab Hangout: with Jude Higgins HYBRID Workshop

Dreams often contain wondrous narratives and transformed into several different prose forms can become even more interesting or surprising. All you need to do is bring a small dream to this early morning hour-long workshop and Jude will introduce ways to change it quickly into several different forms using ‘Hermit Crab’ strategies.

Jude Higgins is a writer and writing tutor and has stories published or forthcoming in the New Flash Fiction Review, Flash Frontier, FlashBack Fiction, The Blue Fifth Review, The Nottingham Review, Pidgeon Holes, Storgy, Inktears,The MoonPark Review, Fictive Dream, the Fish Prize Anthology, National Flash Fiction Day anthologies and Flash: The International Short Short Story Magazine among other places. She has won or been placed in many flash fiction contests and was shortlisted in the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize in 2017 and 2018. Her debut flash fiction pamphlet The Chemist’s House was published by V.Press in 2017. Her micro fictions have been included in the 2019 and 2020 list of Best Flash Fictions of UK and Ireland she has been nominated for Best Small Fictions 2020 and for the 2020 Pushcart Prize. Her story ‘Codes To Live By’ was selected for BestMicroFictions in 20222. She founded Bath Flash Fiction Award in 2015, co-runs The Bath Short Story Award, directs the short short fiction press, Ad Hoc Fiction and is Festival Director, responsible for devising the programme for Flash Fiction Festivals, UK online and in-person events.

The Art of Immersive Flash Fictioneering: With Susmita Bhattacharya

A workshop to lose yourself in sensory details – use the senses to create flash fiction that will make your skin crawl, your nose twitch, your eyes smart… a plethora of prompts to explore immersive flash fiction writing with Susmita Bhattacharya.

Susmita Bhattacharya is an Indian-born British writer. Her novel, The Normal State of Mind, was published in 2015 by Parthian (UK) and Bee Books (India) in 2016 and was long listed for the Words to Screen Prize, Mumbai Association of Moving Images (MAMI) Film Festival in 2018. Her collection of short stories, Table Manners, was published by Dahlia Publishing in 2018 and won The Saboteur Prize in 2019. She teaches contemporary fiction at Winchester University and also facilitates the ArtfulScribe Mayflower Young Writers programme in Southampton. She was Writer-in-Residence at Word Factory in 2021. She lives in Winchester.

Writing Flash Memoir with Hannah Storm

Flash memoir offers a compelling glimpse into a moment of our lives, a unique perspective with an underlying message. In this workshop, Hannah will explain how this form of life writing can provide a lens where our writing can reveal deeper truths for us and our readers.

Turning our words on ourselves can sometimes be tricky, but Hannah will show how flash offers us a manageable way into our memories and memoir. You’ll finish this workshop with ideas for how to turn the lens on yourself and hopefully the beginnings of at least two writing drafts.

Hannah Storm has spent much of the past two decades travelling the world as a journalist, experiences which have shaped and inspired her fiction and non-fiction. Her flash writing won the ‘I Must Be Off!’ travel writing competition, placed second at the Bath Flash Fiction Award, was named in Best Microfictions and in the BIFFY 50. Her memoir, Aftershocks was shortlisted in this year’s Mslexia lifewriting and memoir award.

Her debut flash collection,The Thin Line Between Everything and Nothing was published by Reflex Fiction in July 2021.Hannah now lives in Yorkshire, England, combining work as a media consultant specialising in journalism safety, mental health and gender, with her writing.

Hannah is also chairing:

Don’t Give up the Day Job’: Flash fiction lessons from non-fiction writing work: With Hannah Storm, Sharon Telfer and Tim Craig.

How do you capture your reader’s attention – and keep it? What is your story and how will it stand out in an ever noisier world? How do you capture your reader’s attention and keep it long after your story has ended? Hannah, Tim and Sharon all came to flash fiction after many years working, respectively, in journalism, copywriting for radio, and charity communications. In this panel, they discuss the useful skills they’ve gained from their day jobs and how they’ve applied them to flash – whether that’s being clear about what you want to say, editing to the bone, or hitting the right pace and rhythm. They also talk about the differences between fiction and non-fiction and what pitfalls there might be in switching between the two.

Sharon Telfer lives in East Yorkshire, in the north of England. She won the Bath Flash Fiction Award in June 2016 with ‘Terra Incognita’ and again in February 2020 with ‘Eight Spare Bullets’. She has also won the Reflex Flash Fiction Prize. Her flash has been selected for Best Small Fictions 2021, the 2020 and 2019 ‘BIFFY50’ lists, and Best Microfiction 2019. She was awarded the Word Factory/New Writing North Short Story Apprenticeship in 2018, and placed second in the Bath Short Story Award 2020. She also has a short story in Test Signal, an anthology of contemporary northern writing (Bloomsbury/Dead Ink, 2021). Her debut flash fiction collection, The Map Waits, was published by Reflex Press in 2021. tweets @sharontelfer and posts terrible photos on Instagram, @sharontelferwriter.

Originally from Manchester, Tim Craig lives in London. A winner of the Bridport Prize for Flash Fiction, his stories have (now) placed four times in the Bath Flash Fiction Award and have appeared in both the Best Microfiction Anthology and the BIFFY50 list. He is a Submissions Editor for Smokelong Quarterly. His debut flashfiction colllection Now You See Him is forthcoming from Ad Hoc Fiction on July 1st, 2022 and will be launched at the festival. (Twitter: @timkcraig)

Writing Words of Wild Wonder: HYBRID workshop. In person and online,with Electra Rhodes

A thrilling hour of writing and creating based on a unique approach to generating, revising, and editing a piece of nature inspired work (either fiction or cnf). Come with a blank page, leave with a piece with promise!

El Rhodes is an archaeologist who lives in Wales and Wiltshire. She writes a mix of short and long-form fiction and creative non fiction. Her work has appeared in forty anthologies and dozens of journals and regularly places in competitions. She reads CNF for Variant Lit and is the prose editor at Twin Pies Literary.

What’s the Story?: with Alison Woodhouse

Do you usually start your flash from a prompt, a quote (song or a poem), an overheard conversation, a photograph, picture, image? All of these are great ways to write first drafts but what next? Whether you’re writing micro or up to the 1000 word max, you need to know your story, understand what’s happening off the page, so you can create the resonance and depth great flash is capable of. It can take many rewrites to work out exactly what the real story is, but one of the reasons flash is such a brilliant form is that you’re forced to work it out! Without knowing the story, your brilliant piece of writing remains a scene, an excerpt, rather than a dive into a rich, complex world. In this 90 minute workshop we will do close reading on a selection of flash, interspersed with writing exercises to investigate our own work. No experience needed, but if you have stories currently lingering in bottom drawers, bring them along to work on in the session.

Alison Woodhouse is a writer and teacher currently running course for City Lit and elsewhere. Her flash fiction and short stories have been widely published and anthologised, including In the Kitchen (Dahlia Press), With One Eye on the Cows (Ad Hoc Fiction), Leicester Writes 2018 & 2020 (Dahlia Press), The Real Jazz Baby (Reflex Press), A Girl’s Guide to Fishing (Reflex Press), National Flash Fiction Day Anthologies and Life on the Margins (Scottish Arts Trust Story Awards). She has won a number of story competitions including Flash 500, Hastings, HISSAC (flash & short story), NFFD micro, Biffy50, Farnham, Ad Hoc Fiction and Limnisa and been placed in many others. In 2019 she was awarded an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. Her debut novella-in-flash The House on the Corner was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in October, 2020. Her flash fiction collection, Family Frames was published by V.Press in September, 2021. Twitter: @AJWoodhouse

The Music of Flash: Influence and Interference with Christopher Allen

We asked Christopher to repeat this amazing workshop he taught at the January 8th online Flash Fiction Festival Day. Expect live singing!
Christopher says: “When we see music in literature, we most often think of tonal, rhythmic, and lyrical qualities of the narrative. In this workshop, we’ll explore the various ways music intersects and influences the ways we write and read. We’ll experiment with drafting techniques and prompts inspired by music, but we’ll also look at ways music may subtly interfere with the way we tell stories. And we might just sing.”

Christopher Allen is the author of Other Household Toxins (Matter Press) and Conversations with S. Teri O’Type (a Satire). Allen’s fiction has appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2019, Booth, [PANK], Indiana Review, Split Lip Magazine, and Lunch Ticket, among many other great places. He is the editor-in-chief of SmokeLong Quarterly and a nomad.

Smokelong Summer Party workshop: Shrink or Stretch: The Flash Fiction Dilemma with Christopher Allen and Helen Rye

Often it’s difficult to know if a narrative needs compression or expansion. In an energetic hour we’ll explore the reasons a story might need tightening or fleshing out – sometimes both – and offer practical approaches to editing.
HYBRID WORKSHOP with face to face and online.

Helen Rye lives and writes in Norwich. She has won the Bath Flash Award, the Reflex Fiction Prize and third place in the Bristol Short Story Prize. She is a submissions editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, a prose editor for Lighthouse Literary Journal, and literary odd-jobs person at Ellipsis Zine and TSS Publishing. She is completing an MA in Prose at UEA, where she holds the Annabel Abbs scholarship. S

Narrative Kindling; With K.M.Elkes

The link between walking and writing for inspiration is long established. This workshop introduces the idea of gathering ‘narrative kindling’ – those prompts and observations seen on a walk that can help ignite or develop our stories. Increase your receptiveness to the multitude of prompts that surround us all and learn how certain prompts can help trigger associations and stories and characters already lurking in your brain. The workshop will literally be on the hoof, demonstrating how narrative kindling can help us create new stories, revive old ones or take work in progress in a new direction. (an alternative version of this workshop will be run if the weather is inclement).

K.M. Elkes is the author of the flash fiction collection All That Is Between Us (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2019). His flash pieces have won or been placed in competitions including Bath Flash Fiction Award, Reflex Fiction Prize, Fish Publishing Flash Prize and the Bridport Prize. He’s been published in more than 50 flash anthologies and literary magazines, including Best Microfiction 2020 anthology. He’s a Best Small Fiction and Pushcart Prize nominee.

As a short story author, he’s been successful in competitions such as the Royal Society of Literature Award, Aesthetica and Manchester Fiction Prize. He was longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2019.
KM Elkes is a short story tutor for Comma Press and has run writing workshops at the Working Class Writers Festival, Exeter Literary Festival as well as previous Flash Fiction Festivals.
His work reflects his rural, working-class background, exploring themes of transience, isolation and the power of nature.

Writing the Prose Poetry Series or Sequence. With Carrie Etter. HYBRID workshop. In person and online.

How can a sequence of prose poems explore aspects of a single situation or create a richly lyric narrative? Drawing on her experience of composing Imagined Sons and looking at sequences by Claudia Rankine, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Allison Benis White, Carrie Etter will lead a discussion about the prose poetry sequence’s possibilities and get you thinking about and writing toward creating an effective sequence of your own.

Funding Your Writing in the UK: with Carrie Etter

In this early morning half-hour, Carrie Etter shares her experiences obtaining grants for writing projects in short fiction and poetry from Arts Council England and the Society of Authors and explains the guidelines to the funding bodies’ current schemes.

Carrie Etter is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently The Weather in Normal (UK: Seren; US: Station Hill, 2018), and a chapbook of flash fictions, Hometown (V. Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in Iowa Review, The Guardian, The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, The Times Literary Supplement, Westerly, and many other journals and anthologies internationally. Originally from Normal, Illinois, she is Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, where she has taught since 2004.

Writing a Novella-in-Flash: Saturday, ‘Developing your Characters’ and Sunday, ‘Developing your Story World’, With Michael Loveday

If you want to make tangible progress with a novella-in-flash this weekend, join us on Saturday, or Sunday, or both! The content will be different in each session but both will be based on Michael’s craft guide Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash plus his one-to-one online mentoring programme, and will help you get underway with a new novella-in-flash idea or go deeper/further with an existing one. What you can expect: lots of writing and exploration prompts, discussion (in pairs or small breakout groups), handouts to take away, and opportunities to ask questions within the full group. If you attend both sessions, you’ll get double the writing done and be that much further forward. But rest assured, you’ll still make useful progress if you can only attend one. Saturday afternoon’s session will focus primarily on understanding your main characters for your novella, getting to know them more closely than characters from one-off flash fictions, and making the key figures richly ‘three-dimensional’ and interconnected. Sunday’s will be about conjuring a story-world of landscapes, settings, and significant objects, and allowing an awareness of the story’s locations to influence the developing narrative.

Michael Loveday is an editor, coach, and tutor in Adult and Higher Education. He judged the 2019 and 2020 Novella-in-Flash Awards at Bath Flash Fiction, has taught workshops on the form for a number of literary organisations, and has published several novella-in-flash craft essays for SmokeLong Quarterly since 2018.
His craft guide Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash: from Blank Page to Finished Manuscript was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in Spring 2022. Previous publications include a hybrid flash fiction/prose poetry novella Three Men on the Edge (V. Press, 2018), which was short listed for the 2019 Saboteur Award for Best Novella, and a poetry chapbook He Said / She Said (HappenStance Press, 2011). He mentors writers one-to-one in writing a novella-in-flash, through his online programme: https://novella-in-flash.com/

Panel discussion on the Historical Novella-in-flash chaired by Johanna Robinson with Diane Simmons, Joanna Campbell and David Rhymes

Johanna Robinson is an editor/proofreader from Liverpool, and has been writing short fiction since 2016. Her novella Homing, about a Norwegian family in the Resistance during the Second World War, was runner-up in the Bath Novella-in-Flash Award in 2019, and is published by Ad Hoc fiction. She won the, Bath Flash Fiction Award in 2020 and also the TSS Cambridge Prize for Flash Fiction and her stories have been included in a number of magazines and anthologies, including SmokeLong, Ellipsis Zine, Reflex Press, Retreat West, Strix and Mslexia.She is currently working on a historical novel-in-flash,

Diane Simmons studied creative writing with The Open University. She is Co-Director of National Flash Fiction Day and a director of the UK Flash Fiction Festival. She has been a reader for the international Bath Short Story Award, an editor for FlashFlood and has judged several flash competitions including Flash 500, NFFD Micro and Micro Madness, New Zealand. Widely published and anthologised, she has been placed in numerous short story and flash competitions. Finding A Way, her debut flash collection on the theme of grief, was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in February 2019 and was shortlisted in the Best Short Story Collection category of the 2019 Saboteur Awards. Her novella-in-flash, An Inheritance was published by V.Press in 2020 and shortlisted in the Saboteur Awards in 2020.

Joanna Campbell is a full-time writer from the Cotswolds. Her short story collection, When Planets Slip Their Tracks, was shortlisted for the Rubery International Book Award and longlisted for the Edge Hill University Prize. Her novel, Instructions for the Working Day, will be published in August 2022 by Fairlight Books. Her novella-in-flash, Sybilla, won the inaugural National Flash Fiction Day Novella-in-Flash Award and will be published in June 2022.
Her novella-in-flash, A Safer Way to Fall, was a runner-up in the inaugural Bath Novella-in-Flash Award and published in the anthology, How To Make A Window Snake, by Ad Hoc Fiction. Her short stories have won first place in the Exeter Writers competition, the Bath Short Story Award Local Prize, the London Short Story Prize, the Magic Oxygen Literary Prize and the Retreat West Short Story Prize.Joanna’s flash-fiction won second place in the 2017 Bridport Prize, for which her short stories have been shortlisted many times.

David Rhymes lives in Navarra, Spain and earns his living as a freelance translator, trainer and instructional designer. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. His historical novella-in-flash set in the 1980s, The Last Days of the Union,based on a real-life event, was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in February 2022 and his historical novella-in-flash, Monsieur set in the 18th century won the Retreat West Novelette-in-Flash contest, 2022. David’s individual flash fictions have appeared in Bath flash Fiction, Reflex Press and Fiction and Fish Prize anthologies and he has won prizes in the Bath Flash Fiction Award, and Barren Magazine competitions. Other shortlistings include the Bridport prize, LISP, Desperate Literature and Smokelong Quarterly flash fiction competitions. @dsrhymes.

What’s the Worst That Can Happen? – Humour Writing: With Karen Jones

Many writers think they can’t write humour, especially flash writers, because flash is so often seen as dark, sad, bleak, but I believe everyone can write humour if they find a way to get into it. In this workshop, we won’t be analysing what’s funny or studying funny stories – what people find funny is too diverse to be sorted into boxes that way. This is intended to be a fun, generative workshop full of prompts and exercises to get you creating characters to people funny flashes and situations that can easily lead to humour. What’s the worst that could happen? Usually something hilarious.

Karen Jones is a prose writer from Glasgow with a preference for flash and short fiction.She has been listed and placed numerous times in short fiction awards including the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, Bath Flash Fiction, Bath Short Story, To Hull and Back, TSS 400, HISSAC. She recently won the Cambridge Flash Fiction Prize and the Flash 500 contest and has previously reached the prize-winning stage with Mslexia, Flash 500, Words With Jam, Ink Tears and Ad Hoc Fiction. Her work is widely published in magazines and anthologies. Her story ‘Small Mercies’ was nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize and is included in Best Small Fictions 2019 and the BIFFY50 2019. She is a special features editor for New Flash Fiction Review and her novella-in-flash When It’s Not Called Making Love was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in 2020 and shortlisted in the Saboteur Awards in 2021.

Writing Climate Change with Deborah Tomkins

Climate Change is the biggest issue of our time – everything else pales into insignificance alongside the present and future effects of rapid global warming. But how do we write sensibly about something so enormous, which includes habitat loss, species extinction, sea level rise, crop failures, and migration, to name just a few? It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the scale of the climate emergency, and to believe that anything we write is trite and shallow in comparison.
In this workshop we will explore how to conquer that inner voice, and to address some of the issues in workable ways, bringing the huge and incomprehensible down to a manageable scale. We will include our emotional responses, together with what kind of story-telling works. Can writing change the world?

Deborah Tomkins has been writing fiction about the environment and climate since 2007. In 2017 she founded Bristol Climate Writers, a group which includes fiction writers, nature writers, journalists, memoirists, science writers and poets. They meet monthly and also run workshops for the public. Deborah’s climate novel Crusoe, Can You Hear Me? has been a finalist and shortlisted in international novel competitions. Her climate-themed novella-in-flash First, Do No Harm was longlisted in the Bath Novella-in-Flash Award 2019. Her flashes have been published by Ad Hoc Fiction and elsewhere.

Defence Mechanisms in Flash Form and Content with Stephanie Carty

A brief introduction will be given to what defence mechanisms are, what triggers them for your characters and why.
We will explore how they appear in flash fiction and allow complex psychological mechanisms to be compressed into very few words.
Then we will discuss how the form you choose for a particular flash (e.g. a list of rules or a story told backwards) can be a reflection of your character’s defence mechanism, telling a story to your reader in itself.
We will generate some examples together that you can later build into a flash.

Stephanie Carty is a writer and Consultant Clinical Psychologist / NHS Head of Psychology in the UK. Her short fiction is widely published. She has been placed and shortlisted for many competitions including the Bristol Short Story Prize, Bath Short Story Award, Aesthetica Creative Writing Award and Bridport Prize. Her novella-in-flash Three Sisters of Stone won Best Novella in the Saboteur Awards 2019.

Stephanie’s writers’ craft book Inside Fictional Minds: Tips from Psychology for Creating Characters was published in June 2021. Her short fiction collection The Peculiarities of Yearning will be published February 2022.

Foraging for Inspiration: With Judy Darley.

One of the questions I’m asked most is where I get ideas from. The truth is that inspiration can come from anywhere, if you’re open and ready to gather the ideas as they come! As someone who is, in all honesty, easily bored, I’m constantly on the lookout for entertaining distractions that can convert into story fuel, from overhead conversations to momentarily misunderstood glimpses (the weirder the better), to objects that could be important to a character in a tale. I publish weekly writing prompts on my SkyLightRain blog, and collect small found objects and images that lead to piece of narrative prose. In this workshop you will be provided with a variety of writing prompts and investigate ways you can combine different sources with your own unique experiences to build up an original story.
Suitable for beginners and up. I hope to take pariticpants on a short stroll of the grounds to forage for inspiration, returning to the workshop room for half an hour or so for the writing exercises etc. Some mobility therefore needed.

Judy Darley is a British short fiction writer, poet and journalist who can’t stop writing about the fallibilities of the human mind. Her flash fiction has been published in the UK, Canada, US, New Zealand and India. Judy is the author of short fiction collections Sky Light Rain (Valley Press) and Remember Me to the Bees (Tangent Books). Her third collection, The Stairs are a Snowcapped Mountain, will be published by Reflex Press in 2022. She is Flash Fiction Editor at Reflex Press and has co-judged competitions for National Flash Fiction Day and Oxford Flash Fiction Prize. You can find Judy at skylightrain.com and on Twitter @JudyDarley

Working Titles, Or Making That First Impression Count

Crafting a perfect title is an art unto itself. As an editor and judge, I often see writers short-change a really great piece of writing by not taking enough care over what they call it. With flash especially, this can mean the difference between acceptance and rejection.
In this workshop, we interrogate what makes a good title and discuss common mistakes writers make when naming their pieces. We’ll work through sixteen different strategies (at least!) for generating titles, and also look at how a good title can be your secret weapon in the editing process.
Whilst it’s not necessary for attendees to have written anything before, I encourage writers to bring at least one short piece of work with them to this workshop – draft or complete – to think about; we’ll be putting ideas into practice as we go along.

Ingrid Jendrzejewski is a co-director of National Flash Fiction Day. She currently serves as the Editor in Chief of FlashBack Fiction, and a flash editor at JMWW, and has served as both non-fiction editor and editor-in-chief of the Evansville Review. She has published over 100 shortform pieces and has won multiple flash fiction competitions, including the Bath Flash Fiction Award and the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Orlando Prize for Flash Fiction. Her short collection Things I Dream About When I’m Not Sleeping was a runner up for BFFA’s first Novella-in-Flash competition. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Vestal Review’s VERA Award, and multiple times for Best Small Fiction.

Whose Story is This?: Utilizing the Uncommon Narrator in Flash with K B Carle HYBRID workshop. In person and online.

As one of the former editors of FlashBack Fiction and Fractured Lit., I have noticed that several stories fall into the same formula of narration. These stories are told using 1st or 3rd person point-of-view, featuring a narrator belonging within the age range of young adult to an adult before the expected age of their midlife crisis. But what about the children?! The lives that reach beyond this scope of age?!

In this generative workshop, participants will study how flash writers utilize the uncommon narrator in their stories. Attendees will also receive prompts and have the opportunity to write, experimenting with point-of-view, the power of the unnamed narrator, or reimagining the concept of humanity all together!

K.B. Carle lives and writes outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her stories have appeared in HAD magazine, Good River Review, Bending Genres, Waxwing magazine, and have been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and the Pushcart Prize. Twitter @kbcarle.

Beyond the Bodice: 5 reasons you should be writing historical flash: with Sharon Telfer and Emily Devane

Historical flash is a rich and exciting place to write. More and more general magazines are publishing it, the range of specialist outlets is growing, and historical pieces have won major prizes like the Bath Flash Fiction Award. If the term conjures images of corseted ladies swooning against dandy highwaymen or dusty sentences detailing obsolete uniforms, think again. We are built from our past stories. History’s concerns are our concerns.

In this 90 minute workshop an extended version of the half hour offered on one of the online Flash Festival days, we’ll spin you through (at least) five reasons why you should give historical flash a go. We’ll point you to bold and inspiring stories, take the fear out of research, and set you some exercises to speed you on your way.

Emily and Sharon are editors at FlashBack Fiction, the showcase for historical flash. FlashBack began in December 2017 when a group of writers decided to do something about the lack of markets for historical flash. FlashBack stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions and the BIFFY 50 lists.

Sharon Telfer lives in East Yorkshire, in the north of England. She won the Bath Flash Fiction Award in June 2016 with ‘Terra Incognita’ and again in February 2020 with ‘Eight Spare Bullets’. She has also won the Reflex Flash Fiction Prize. Her flash has been selected for Best Small Fictions 2021, the 2020 and 2019 ‘BIFFY50’ lists, and Best Microfiction 2019. She was awarded the Word Factory/New Writing North Short Story Apprenticeship in 2018, and placed second in the Bath Short Story Award 2020. She also has a short story in Test Signal, an anthology of contemporary northern writing (Bloomsbury/Dead Ink, 2021). Her debut flash fiction collection, The Map Waits, was published by Reflex Press in 2021. tweets @sharontelfer and posts terrible photos on Instagram, @sharontelferwriter.

Emily Devane is a writer, teacher and editor from Ilkley, West Yorkshire. Her stories have won prizes, including The Smokelong Quarterly Micro competition;he Bath Flash Fiction Award; a Northern Writers’ Award and a Word Factory Apprenticeship. Recent stories have been published in New Flash Fiction Review, Janus and Lost Balloon, and her work has been chosen for the Best Microfictions Anthology. Emily teaches creative writing at Moor Words and co-runs Word Factory’s Strike Short Story Club.

Writers HQ Flash Face Off Workshop with Kathy Hoyle

Come and write with Kathy Hoyle – aka ‘Flashy Kathy’ from Writer’s HQ!

A fun, interactive workshop based on our infamous weekly Flash Face Off event. Two opposing prompts to inspire you, plus a dash of Flashy Kathy magic to push you out of your writing comfort zone. It’s bonkers, it’s brilliant, it’s open to everyone!

(Writers HQ is kindly donating a full year’s membership for our festival raffle in aid of Bristol Refugee Rights)

Kathy Hoyle’s work has appeared in a variety of publications including Spelk, Virtualzine, Lunate, Cabinet of Heed, Ellipsiszine, South Florida Poetry Journal, Reflex Fiction and The Forge Literary Magazine.She has won the Retreat West Themed Flash Competition, the Crossing the Tees Short Story Competition, placed Second in The Edinburgh Award for Flash Fiction and third in the Cambridge Flash Fiction Prize and the HISSAC Prize. Other stories have been long or short listed in several competitions including, The Bath Flash Fiction Award, The Exeter Short Story Prize, the Fish Publishing Flash Fiction Prize, Flash 500, LISP, Strands, the National Flash Fiction Day Novella-in-Flash Competition and the Bath Novella-in-Flash Award.She works as a host for Writers’ HQ where she spends most of her time luring unsuspecting novelists into the dark art of short fiction via regular Flash Face Off events.
She holds a BA (hons) and an MA in Creative Writing and lives in a sleepy Warwickshire village with a labradoodle that’s almost as crazy as she is!

My Flashes and Other Animals with Nora Nadjarian

Have you ever wondered what the purpose of a lion’s mane is? Why do sharks swim with their fins above water? Do gorillas really have 16 different types of call? Did you know that koalas get their name from an Aboriginal term meaning, ‘no drink’? Or did I just make that up?
In this generative and fun workshop we will enter the fascinating world of the animal (and bird) kingdom and seek out some amazing characteristics for inspiration.  We may even make up some of these characteristics and enter the realms of the surreal! We will be looking at examples of flash fiction where animals or birds feature as characters, relate in some way to humans, speak, are used as metaphor… The possibilities are endless and you will be given prompts to write your unique pieces.
Open to all skill levels.

Best known for her short story collection Ledra Street (2006), Nora Nadjarian has had poetry and short fiction published internationally. She has been cited or published in the Guardian, the Irish Times and the Telegraph and has also won prizes and commendations in international competitions
Her work was included in A River of Stories, an anthology of tales and poems from across the Commonwealth, Best European Fiction 2011 (Dalkey Archive Press), Being Human (Bloodaxe Books, 2011) , Capitals (Bloomsbury, 2017), The Stony Thursday Book (Limerick, 2018) and Europa 28 (Comma Press). Her latest book is the collection of short stories Selfie (Roman Books, 2017). Her short plays Mermaid and Catalina were performed at the Old Red Lion theatre in London.
Nora has represented Cyprus at literary events and festivals in Europe and elsewhere, including Frankfurt Book Fair and Dresdner Bardinale She presented her latest work at the Literarisches Colloquium (Berlin) in July 2019. The Hay Festival selected her to represent Cyprus in the project Europa28: Visions for the Future in 2020.
In 2022 she won the Anthropocene Valentine’s Day poetry competition, was a finalist in the Mslexia poetry competition and was nominated for the Forward Prize for best single poem. She has work forthcoming from Broken Sleep books and Poetry International, and was recently involved in a Poetry Society/EUNIC project where she produced new work in collaboration with Jacqueline Saphra.She has a special interest in the teaching of creative writing. In recent years she has facilitated several creative writing workshops – in English, Greek and German – at schools, universities and prisons in Cyprus and Germany.