Find them on social media:

https://bsky.app/profile/aniking.bsky.social

https://www.instagram.com/aniking_author/

Find out more about their upcoming flash fiction collection:

FAMILY NIGHT (Mason Jar Press, October 2026) is by turns a lyrical celebration of queerness and an exploration of family and loss, often through a lens of magical realism. Ani King’s collected flash fiction stories explore relationships and connections: a teen girl attempting to summon her missing mother home with cigarette smoke and yacht rock songs; two sisters disputing how to care for an unhealthy elderly unicorn; a woman accidentally raising two daughters from the bones of her long-dead pet rabbits.

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If you aren’t familiar with their work, here’s one of their pieces to start things off:

Nervous Thing (Ani King | Pithead Chapel)

Why I like it (MK): This piece pulls its reader deep into the central relationship between the narrator and the girl they love. It’s full of such startling specific details and I love the rhythm of it. When I talk about breathless sentences, I often talk about how they can be used to bring real emotions to life, and the effect for me here is so powerful. I feel this deep inside myself. I feel like I need to hold my breath as I read. Then there’s the image of the horse, how we weave between real and surreal, how the image progresses from one paragraph to the next. Such a rich and spellbinding piece.

For this month’s collection of stories, Ani has picked the theme “embracing the animal as a way to bring out the human.”

Do You Want to Become a Wolf (Elena Zhang | Emerge Literary Journal)

Why I like it (AK): I love this story so much that apparently I have bookmarked it three times in the same browser, included it in two newsletters in one year, and have sent it to the same people multiple times saying “you HAVE to read this!” This is a story that uses transformation in a way that I think lets the reader name that transformation: for me it hits hard as a metaphor for letting your true self come out, and inviting others to do the same, and the call for the transformed wolf’s sisters to “come and see, come and pray” gives me goosebumps every time I read it. I was also raised in a strict Pentecostal environment for the first half of my childhood, so the church details used are so relatable, I feel like I can see and live this moment.

Prompt: Take a mundane moment and add the intrusion of something animal for your point of view character. Maybe it’s physical, maybe it’s interior, but try focusing on the small, sensory details.

Changeling Bramble (Myna Chang | Fractured Lit)

Why I like it: One of my favorite things in writing is when an author entirely uses accessible, known words chained together in a way that reads and feels like they are new, as if revealing some secret combination that amps up the sense of mystery and oddness. The combination of specific, shared animal transformation and poetically arranged language bring this moment between mother and sisters out with so much tension. I really feel the confusion and urgency and urge so fully through this whole piece, and for me I think that’s because the body tells so much of the story through sensory experience: tasting death, briar thorns sprouting from fingertips, for example.

Prompt: Take a work in progress (especially if you have one that feels like it’s a little dry) go all in on poetic, sensory description with it—stick to what your character feels with their body, their senses and not what they think; to make this more challenging, try to tell the moment in this way entirely through the body itself.

The Wife Hunters (Lindz McLeod | Twin Pies Literary)

Why I like it: Like “Do You Want to Become a Wolf”, McLeod uses the animal to create a sense of kinship, of sisterhood, and brings in a layer of description of the sisters as if they are fruit to be picked or plucked, and I think this is done in a way that pushes the animal+human even further into its unique liminal space. The language is lush and, while the imagery is centered on a hunted prey animal, there is this beautiful sense of resistance and I think the metaphor is so elevated by this approach. This is another one I re-read and re-connect with regularly.

Prompt: Write a story where animal characteristics are used to convey a sense of pending danger for your main character(s).

Fox (K-Ming Chang | Vestal Review)

Why I like it: K-Ming Chang is one of my favorite writers, especially when it comes to girls, women, the body, and letting the female body be messy, unsettling, gross. In this story, there’s a layer of pending first menstruation, boys taking and not returning names (the implication is anything can be thieved away), and again, we meet a sense of unwillingness and resistance on the part of the girl. But this isn’t quiet, the narrator summons a fox demon, and in a way that’s tied to Megan Fox’s name, to the time in life the narrator exists in—the fox demon offers up violence in response to the boys and their taking, and the narrator opens up and lets the demon in, and unlike getting a period, this doesn’t hurt the girl at all.

Prompt: Write a story where someone reacts to an everyday evil or hurt by summoning something malicious. Consider this an opportunity to dig into your own cultural background for relevant options, or thing about demonizing an everyday object for use.

Full On Badger (Gill O’Halloran | SmokeLong Quarterly)

Why I like it: I love the use of the badger costume and tutu as these permissive vehicles for upending expected gender behavior. There’s something very relatable as a gender non-compliant person for me around the way people react to the costumed narrator who has shed the usual trappings of femininity, and I am such a fan of the overtness of the voice:

You love the thrill of lacy frills around your sturdy man-thighs; I love the incognito intimacy, the unbegged attention. Guys pat me, awkward but fond. Women stroke my stripey snout while confessing their furry fantasies.

Prompt: Draft a piece where your character says exactly what they want or like about something happening in the story, and then write around whether or not that statement is true. Bonus points for your character coming to a revelation about themselves by the end.

Dolphins (Shell St. James | Claudine Literary)

Why I like it: Human beings really like to use animal metaphors and behaviors to explain or justify our own actions and I love how in this story the dolphins have a presence from the start (because of the title), so when we get to the end, to the fact that dolphins don’t actually mate for life, the relationship between the narrator and the lover (or ex-lover) they are addressing has been touched on with detail that spins out so much more story than is on the page. It’s incredibly emotionally effective.

Prompt: Describe a relationship between two characters by using untrue statements about an animal, or animals in general.

Rabbit Heart (Aime Keeble | Split Lip)

Why I like it: I think this is one of the most effective, devastating uses of the animal as heart I’ve ever read. The rabbit is a prey animal known for it’s vulnerability, so I love how it works as a stand in for the heart. The detail of the rabbit’s softness in the story, plus the layer of what we collectively know about rabbits comes together here to give the effect of an even larger story within a small space. I also think one of the most brilliant things about this story is how the rabbit hearts exist in their own part of the story, that they aren’t just contained inside a body.

Prompt: Write a body part as an animal. Consider a less well-known or even less critical-seeming part of the body.

The Office Siren (Katharine Tyndall | Hex Literary)

Why I like it: I think using a mythical creature story may be a little bit of a thematic cheat, but I love how it offers an opportunity to alter and explore the marriage of human and other animal characteristics in a way that separation might not. In this case, I think the office siren is representative of experiences a lot of people have, especially women, and she acts as a vehicle for going further in response, in this case literally devouring the terrible boss. And the imagery of the office siren doing so as well as returning home is so fantastic.

Prompt: If your character were a mythical creature, especially in a mundane setting, what does that open up for them in terms of reaction behaviors? Try exploring this in free writing or a new draft.

The Geometry of Unicorns (Melanie Maggard | Ghost Parachute)

Why I like it: Oh look, another slight cheat, and this time we have mythical animal as possibility, and I especially love a unicorn! I am also impressed with how relatable Leslie Abbott’s boredom is, how I feel it in my own body, and how Maggard spins out from there in such a physical way—even though so much of this is internal, it’s active, it is constantly moving through the way Leslie interacts with her drawing, her body, and on the whole, this story is utterly magical.

Prompt: Write a scene where one of your characters imagines the freedom they would have if they could transform into an animal, and make it as active as you can.

The Coconut Crab Ate My Baby (Melissa Llanes Brownlee | Tiny Molecules)

Why I like it: This story travels to the dark side of using animal nature to explain humanity, and I think this is a masterclass in misdirection as a storytelling device to tell us something far far larger than the moment as described.

Prompt: Free write for at least 15 minutes from a starting point where your character(s) blame a tragedy on an animal. See where it ends up!

What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?

Next month’s selection will be chosen by Cole Beauchamp and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 16th June.

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The Yorkshire Writing Retreat: with Matt Kendrick and Ruth Brandt

Monday 14th - Sunday 20th September 2026 in Thurlstone (Holme Valley)

***JUST FOUR PLACES LEFT**

Join us in the idyllic landscape of the Holme Valley for a six-night writing retreat where you’ll learn from two widely experienced creative writing teachers through a series of workshops, feedback sessions and one-to-one chats. You’ll also have plenty of unstructured time dedicated to putting new words on the page.

Details / Apply

The Editorial Funnel PART 1

1st - 21st June 2026

***BRAND NEW COURSE / JUST FIVE PLACES LEFT***

My brand new course is all about editing and is a journey through the “editorial funnel” from out to in. In this first part, we’ll be pondering how we edit for narrative focus, narrative structure, originality, emotional build and structural form. Participants will get the chance to hone their editorial approach to both their own work and the work of others, playing around with a variety of techniques that take in everything from mindfulness and colouring to constructing trainlines and baking stories into cakes. This is part 1. Part 2 (which will focus on the nittier-grittier stuff like words and sentences) will follow at a later date. The course is designed for any fiction writer whether their focus is on short fiction, novels or something more bespoke.

Details / book

https://katherineplumhoff.com/

Sign up for her limited newsletter on feelings and art here. You can also follow her on Instagram or BlueSky.

If you aren’t familiar with her work, here’s one of her pieces to start things off:

Good Sign of Future Happiness (Katherine Plumhoff | SmokeLong Quarterly)

Why I like it (MK): This is such an evocative piece. First off, I love the use of the collective voice. This is a shared experience and the fact of the shared experience amplifies the emotions at play. The writing is full of attack. It’s full of strong verbs, it’s full of plosive sounds (especially the K-sound in “charging”, “crumpling”, “crunching”) and sensory notes (I particularly love “the first slanted shards of spring sun”). The way the story unfolds is full of tension. It’s unsettling. And like all good flash, it’s full of layers, so much buried inside the story for a reader to uncover on second, third, fourth read.

Things That Happened at or Around My Cousin Kelly’s Funeral, in No Particular Order (Emily Rinkema, Wigleaf)

Why I like it: My heart has been trained, Pavlovianly, to start beating faster when it sees a new Emily Rinkema story. I know she will wreck me before knowing how. Here, she starts with a tragicomic scene — sisters breaking into a church to steal an ornament for their grieving aunt — then delivers, through perfectly-wrought side characters, two painful twists. By the end of my first read, I was already scrolling up to start the story again and marvel at how Rinkema did it.

The Problem with the World Ending is No One Remembers Your Birthday (Mario Aliberto III, Trampset)

Why I like it: I’m fascinated by loneliness — how much of us feel it, despite being better equipped than ever for connection, and what it drives us to do. In this story, Aliberto threads his main character’s aching loneliness to a grade-school birthday party gone wrong, then unspools it into a future filled with lies to acquaintances at Sunday apocalypse club meetings. Yes, it’s a story about the end of the world, but it’s ultimately quite tender and sweet. And isn’t that what living right now feels like sometimes?

Pretty Story (Amy Hempel, Salmagundi)

Why I like it: A question that my writers’ group and I often bandy about is “does enough happen in this story?” I go back to Hempel time and time again to dissect how someone can make nothing happening so goddamn interesting. Here’s what I’ve gleaned from “Pretty Story”: take one question (here, “should I have a baby?”) on a character’s mind and trace the places they look for an answer. I count seven here: a dinner party, a psychic reading, a nightmare, a conversation, a party, a legend, another conversation. What’s your count?

Prompt: Think of a question your character could be grappling with. (Choose one of the NYT’s 36 [gift link] if you like; I particularly like 20 and 32.) Send them into at least five books, movies, conversations, corner stores, or parties looking for an answer.

The Beginning of the End (Devan Murphy, Electric Lit)

Why I like it: Despite the fact that I sometimes write them, surrealist stories don’t always hit the mark for me. Often it feels like the writer ran into a hard problem — like how to develop depth of character — and spawned something absurd to fill the gap. That’s not at all what’s happening here, where Murphy goes absurdist from the jump (“My mother lost her baby and my father lost his leg. So I tried to be her baby and I tried to be his leg”), then lets those vivid images reveal everyday truths about all the things (politics, violence, loss) we can’t see our way through.

Valedictorian (Sarah Chin, The Cincinnati Review)

Why I like it: Stories feel real to me when I can see, touch, smell, taste them. I love the weight of Chin’s metaphors, which come hard and fast and heavy: mozzarella sticks as prayer, mother as faulty Wi-Fi, breast as world. Physical objects deployed well as speed lane to characterization and believable setting: a hill I’ll die on.

Prompt: Think of an object (use this generator if every object you know drained out of your brain upon reading that). Then write an “it narrative” about it — trace the life of that object through all the people who handle it until it disintegrates / is destroyed. Don’t directly mention where the story is set. Let the object’s context reveal that.

Gloria (K-Ming Chang, Split Lip)

Why I like it: Who says a story has to choose between sexy and scary, heart-warming and horrifying? Life doesn’t. Girlhood certainly doesn’t. Chang’s stories exist in every dimension at once. You can read “Gloria” as a love story and a horror story. As analysis of the ways class, race, gender, orientation, and religion built our sense of self, and a fable — or a lesson — on how we tear that down. I come back to this one time and time and time again.

The Things We Take (Eric Scot Tryon, Passages North)

Why I like it: Another story where the items do the heavy lifting. So sue me! I like what I like, and I love this story, where we get the whole autopsy of a doomed relationship in a list of things the main character takes from her lover’s house: a dress sock, a pair of scissors, a Portland magnet, The Artists’ Way, a box of butter, a beta fish. Even beyond those physical things, the nouns in this story give me such a sense of place (AOL account, muddy cleats) that I could climb right in. I want stories to pin me to place like a butterfly in a curio box, and this one does that perfectly.

Sway (Barbara Diggs, Emerge Literary Journal)

Why I like it: Information asymmetry can build such beautiful tension, and Diggs deploys it here to exquisite results. A father delivers bad news at the beginning of a vacation, and we imagine it’s that he’s leaving his wife but only get that confirmation in the very last line. Diggs has talked about how this story came from an assignment to write about a natural element, but you wouldn’t know that if I hadn’t told you, as the metaphor of mother-as-tree, swaying but never coming unrooted despite disaster, fits so perfectly in this scene.

Car Shopping (James Keith Smith, Scaffold Lit)

Why I like it: This story is sparse. But we get a whole world in these perfect details: a bag of quarters in a tube sock, tomorrow’s algebra class, “because I’m your father and I said so.” It’s a loss narrative, as so many stories are. This one is particularly light and yet all-encompassing, just like grief itself.

Family Night (Ani King, SmokeLong Quarterly)

Why I like it: Perhaps something that links all the stories I’ve chosen is people behaving badly. Lying, stealing, homewrecking, abandoning babies (even if just in a daydream). It feels real to me. We are all at least somewhat horrible. King excels at capturing that fact, showing the less-than-palatable undersides of their characters — here, the racism and sexism of a patriarch — through perfect dialogue. Reading these long paragraphs of speech feels exactly like being caught in the crosshairs of a loud conversation with complicated family members, down to the swell of empathy it delivers at the end. I’m excited to read King’s upcoming collection, with this piece as the titular story.

Prompt: Tell the story of a person that you (or your character) knew in a different period of life (from childhood, a first job, or the common room of a budget hostel, for example) and treated badly. Do you / does your character think they were in the wrong? Make them do or say one thing that could be interpreted as redemption.

What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?

Next month’s selection will be chosen by Ani King and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 19th May.

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The Yorkshire Writing Retreat: with Matt Kendrick and Ruth Brandt

Monday 14th - Sunday 20th September 2026 in Thurlstone (Holme Valley)

***JUST FOUR PLACES LEFT**

Join us in the idyllic landscape of the Holme Valley for a six-night writing retreat where you’ll learn from two widely experienced creative writing teachers through a series of workshops, feedback sessions and one-to-one chats. You’ll also have plenty of unstructured time dedicated to putting new words on the page.

Details / Apply

The Editorial Funnel PART 1

1st - 21st June 2026

***BRAND NEW COURSE / JUST FIVE PLACES LEFT***

My brand new course is all about editing and is a journey through the “editorial funnel” from out to in. In this first part, we’ll be pondering how we edit for narrative focus, narrative structure, originality, emotional build and structural form. Participants will get the chance to hone their editorial approach to both their own work and the work of others, playing around with a variety of techniques that take in everything from mindfulness and colouring to constructing trainlines and baking stories into cakes. This is part 1. Part 2 (which will focus on the nittier-grittier stuff like words and sentences) will follow at a later date. The course is designed for any fiction writer whether their focus is on short fiction, novels or something more bespoke.

Details / book

Website: mizukiwrites.carrd.co

Bluesky: @mizuki-yama.bsky.social

If you aren’t familiar with her work, here’s one of her pieces to start things off:

Beyond the Chattering Flush (Mizuki Yamamoto | Literary Namjooning)

Why I like it (MK): There’s always something so powerfully compelling to pieces that use an imperative form to tell their story. As I read, I feel thoroughly invited in, asked to experience the scenario for myself. In terms of how this piece unfolds on the page, the teacher in me picks out the wonderful variation of approach - different sentence structures, asides, moments of pause, the way the piece is speaking to its reader, everything in service to building the evocation of scenario and those quiet but powerful emotions bubbling away throughout - the whole thing so transportive and beautiful.

(MY) I didn’t set out with a theme, but looking at the list assembled, something became clear: every story here finds a way around the front door. None of them just say what they mean — they come at it sideways, through a recipe, a physics equation, a triptych of strangers, a second-person address to someone who can’t hear it. That indirection is, I think, what lets them hold so much. These are small stories about enormous things.

The Mattress (Kleopatra Olympiou | Swamp Pink)

Why I like it (MY): A woman in a Cypriot village needs to move a mattress. That is, almost literally, the entire plot — and yet it contains a whole world. What I find so devastating about this story is how each failed attempt (the cousin, the grocery store men, the priest who won’t stop to listen) reveals the social architecture surrounding a woman living alone in old age. Olympiou doesn’t editorialize. Instead, she shows us the doors closing, one by one, and the mattress still sitting there. That the person who finally helps is a stranger — a young truck driver who shrugs and does it, while she wonders what a sad old woman she must seem to him — breaks my heart a little every time.

PROMPT: Write a story built entirely around a single practical problem that resists being solved. Use scene breaks to separate each attempt. Let the object or obstacle stay exactly where it is.

Maybe This Is What the End Is Like (Emily Rinkema | Cleaver Magazine)

Why I like it: Two people playing a hypothetical game over dinner — would you eat the dog in a zombie apocalypse? — until it stops being a game. I love how Emily Rinkema makes the pivot feel so inevitable: the list of real horrors that tumbles into the middle of the story (the egg prices, the storms, the children dying, the judges being arrested) lands like cold water. And then the final line, said to the dog, said to herself: We’re okay, baby. Because it’s true, even though it’s not. One of the best endings I’ve read in a long time. And did I already say, Emily Rinkema always creates characters that pop off the page?

Covalent Bonds (Myles Varga | Necessary Fiction)

Why I like it: Three scenes, three strangers, no explanation of what connects them: a woman hunting horseshoe crabs on a beach, a boy watching a pika in a talus field, an old man by a backyard pool waiting to see a fox. What Varga does, through the bracketed italicized lines between each scene, is suggest connection at the atomic level — these lives bonded by nothing more than the fact of being alive and paying attention. I find this story genuinely moving in a way that’s hard to articulate. It trusts the reader completely, and that trust is part of what makes it work.

PROMPT: Write three short scenes featuring three entirely unconnected characters in three different places. Do not explain the connection between them. Trust that the juxtaposition will do the work.

Not What the Living Think (Beth Hahn | JMWW)

Why I like it: I read this story months ago and can’t get it out of my head. A woman dies — not from what she was supposed to die of, but absurdly, while mopping the floor in flip flops — and then just follows her dinner date home, because what else is there for a ghost to do? What I love about this is how Hahn refuses to make being dead either tragic or uncanny. Her narrator is practical, a little wry, full of ordinary longing: she rolls around in his unmade sheets, pretends they’re lovers. She wouldn’t do anything creepy like sit on the edge of his bed and stare at him while he slept. The braiding of the dead woman’s story with the long-dead sculptor’s only becomes fully visible on re-reading, which is the mark of something special.

The Wind Is Waiting (Stefan Alcalá Slater | Orion’s Belt)

Why I like it: A city where the wind takes the shape of whatever would most beautifully destroy your life, and a narrator addressing you — the tourist, the one who came here because they needed change like the scratch of a match — from the far side of their own recklessness. What I enjoy most about this story is how it refuses to be cautionary. Most stories about self-destruction warn you off. This one says: if it breaks you and you survive, this is a wonderful place to start over. Come in. We’ll be here. The author doesn’t name the city (except in their bio), but I lived in Los Angeles for a few years, and this story took me back there instinctively.

Desert Religions (Zoe Flavin | Wigleaf)

Why I like it: Two women in a rideshare, then a bright new cantina with wax paper on the inside of the quesadilla, talking about politics and desert religions and whether the world’s violence comes down to scarcity. I loved how the story embodies this kind of conversation — the kind that sounds like nothing and is actually everything. The final image, a parent holding their child violence and all on the school run, is one of those endings that keeps opening up the longer you sit with it. This flash piece really makes you think about way more than what it says on the page. It’s the kind of story I wish I could write.

Train Man (Patience Mackarness | New Flash Fiction Review)

Why I like it: A story addressed directly to someone who can’t hear it — a man who chose the accountant’s life, the redbrick house, the model railway in the attic, and is now losing himself to dementia amid its wreckage. The there is a you who anaphora is heart-breaking in the best way, conjuring all the selves that weren’t chosen. But what makes this stay with me is the narrator’s own what if running alongside his like a parallel track — the life they might have shared, the trains they didn’t ride together. Mackarness earns every word of the final paragraph, which imagines the road not taken with such aching specificity.

The Fourth Law of Motion (Jo Gatford | matchbook)

Why I like it: A woman on a 6am hotel breakfast shift. The smell of rendering bacon. The manager’s creeping smile. And then: the walk-in fridge, the wire shelving, the frozen desserts arranged in perfect triangle portions. Jo Gatford never tells us what this woman is carrying, only how it moves through her — inertia, then equal and opposite reaction. What I find remarkable is that this story apparently sat on Gatford’s hard drive for years until the word inertia arrived and unlocked it. That feels like a reminder I find worth holding onto: some stories are on their own timeline until something unlocks them.

A Recipe for Sapodilla Milkshakes (Amelia Badri | PINCH)

Why I like it: This one’s technically labelled a prose poem, but I think it’s doing exactly what flash does best. Badri uses a recipe as scaffolding for a piece about grief, diaspora, and food-memory — a Guyanese-American family in Miami, a father with a Dairy Queen heart, a grandmother whose mind was going but who could still spoon the back of her brain to recreate a long-lost meal. The italicized ingredients interrupt the prose like instructions you can’t quite follow, or don’t want to finish. The form is the feeling: a recipe for something that can never be fully replicated, for a life and a family that keep shifting under your hands.

PROMPT: Write a story in two simultaneous registers — one factual or instructional, one emotional or associative — woven together on the page. Let the factual layer keep interrupting or anchoring the other, without either one explaining the other.

Hope Street (Ari Koontz | Tiny Molecules)

Why I like it: An astronomy club described entirely in the language of faith — tithes, pilgrimage, confessions, sanctuary. Tuesday evenings as Sunday mornings. The night after a disaster when they showed up anyway, and someone said this world’s too far gone and someone else said we’ve got billions of years left. Koontz sustains this metaphor across the whole piece without a single false note, and the ending earns every bit of the feeling it reaches for. I think about this story a lot, especially the lunar eclipse — how they spread out on the lawn with blankets and hot cocoa, and how they stayed past when anyone else could keep their eyes open, then helped each other up and made sure nobody left their blankets behind. It’s one of the most quietly hopeful things I’ve read lately.

What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?

Next month’s selection will be chosen by Cole Beauchamp and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 21st April.

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The Yorkshire Writing Retreat: with Matt Kendrick and Ruth Brandt

Monday 14th - Sunday 20th September 2026 in Thurlstone (Holme Valley)

***JUST FOUR PLACES LEFT**

Join us in the idyllic landscape of the Holme Valley for a six-night writing retreat where you’ll learn from two widely experienced creative writing teachers through a series of workshops, feedback sessions and one-to-one chats. You’ll also have plenty of unstructured time dedicated to putting new words on the page.

Details / Apply

The Editorial Funnel PART 1

1st - 21st June 2026

***BRAND NEW COURSE / JUST FIVE PLACES LEFT***

My brand new course is all about editing and is a journey through the “editorial funnel” from out to in. In this first part, we’ll be pondering how we edit for narrative focus, narrative structure, originality, emotional build and structural form. Participants will get the chance to hone their editorial approach to both their own work and the work of others, playing around with a variety of techniques that take in everything from mindfulness and colouring to constructing trainlines and baking stories into cakes. This is part 1. Part 2 (which will focus on the nittier-grittier stuff like words and sentences) will follow at a later date. The course is designed for any fiction writer whether their focus is on short fiction, novels or something more bespoke.

Details / book

Instagram: https://instagram.com/katwhetter

Bluesky: @kathrynreese.bsky.social

If you aren’t familiar with her work, here’s one of her pieces to start things off:

Storm Season (Kathryn Reese | Literary Namjooning)

Why I like it (MK): This is so beautifully written within the lyrical. I love the rhythm of it, the poetry to it, how every word evokes story and character. Then there’s the swell of emotion and the quiet power within that, a yearning that builds and builds towards that brilliant final paragraph and its repeating “no-one”, how at that point the rich creativity of the writing is allowed to explode to its highest point.

The Sea (Caylin Capra-Thomas | Wigleaf)

Why I like it: the layers of myth (creation, lovers, the wizard of Oz) - a story held in a story. I love the sparse, speculative dialogue. “The more you stay away, the less you belong” is a statement that risks telling, but here it washes in only to recede again (“Is that true?”) and become one of many currents swirling through the piece.

To the Sabre-Toothed Tiger Cub Found in the Permafrost (Eliza Marley | Magpie Zine)

Why I like it: I read this aloud--I love the soundplay: “into the earth, birthed and interred” and “your body downy soft like a womb” (the simile made surprising by the movement of the vowel sound). The story (a single sentence!) is itself a museum holding not just skin and bones but earth and a record of climate, exquisitely curated.

This is Milkweed (Ani King | Exposition Review)

Why I like it: This is another sort of curation: wild attention to wild things. It navigates a complex landscape (thistles, flowers, fire, postpartum depression, conservation) both present and remembered, in a tone that holds just the right amount of intimacy.

PROMPT: Clean out your car or pack it for a journey. Make a story with what you excavate or choose to take.

Eleven Studies of Snagged Edges (Alice Ahern | Does It Have Pockets )

Why I like it: I love the form used here, seeing the same thing over and over in different ways. The way it allows for expansion, contraction, lingering, is especially suited to a work about grief snagging attention.

Sixteen Steps to Reach a Point of Singularity (Mandira Pattnaik | Does It Have Pockets)

Why I like it: I love the progression here from static attention through action (I love the agency the speaker allows herself) to a momentum that’s sensual and dizzying. I’m very interested in the absence of “I” and the sparse & careful use of “you” …watch where the “you” appears in the trajectory of this piece.

The 7-11 that Exists in Every Reality (Lynne Beckenstein | Split Lip)

Why I like it: The way this piece moves back and forward through time, without a formal structure to clue the reader in. It’s just one paragraph and super strong setting. I also like the risk the author takes in the third sentence: “Let me say clearly that these are metaphors for the uterus” - there is both so much hidden away here and so much revealed.

PROMPT: Move through one of your daily rituals. Interrogate why it is you do this thing, this way. Write a story remembering.

And Now I Feel the Benevolent Light of Marie Kondo Upon Me (Cole Beauchamp | Frazzled Lit)

Why I like it: banging title. The sing-song “never have I ever” that feels so familiar. The turn that I think is the turn, from discarding the old to acquiring a new thing. Then it turns, harder, to a wonderful, surreal, unexpected ending.

La Isla Se Mudó (Alessandra Gonzalez | Meniscus - p73)

Why I like it: so often we write about grief and loss—that’s necessary, important, vital—but this little piece contains so much joy, resilience, persistence.

PROMPT: Write about the things that bring you joy. The silly ridiculous things no-one else will understand. Loop one into another until you’ve made a daisy chain. (Hint: if you get stuck, make it up. Let yourself have the spotted alien-space-flowers.)

Things I Observe at my Joint 18^th Birthday Party (Orli Baumgart | The Turning Leaf Journal)

Why I like it: this is a vivid and real-I-feel-it-in-my-bones portrayal of depression and celebration. It’s also a stunning example of what a list can carry when it’s built with connections so tight they seem obvious. The way I leave the piece with a sense of having lived through that party, as if I spent hours there, not minutes reading.

How to Eat Like You Belong (Anjali Menon | Jade & Compass)

Why I like it: another feast of unbelonging, this one served in neat courses. Again I can’t stop thinking about joy and what persists, even despite our efforts to change. And the delicious messiness of crab simmered in coconut milk and spice, sucked from its shell.

What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?

Next month’s selection will be chosen by Mizuki Yamamoto and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 17th March.

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The Yorkshire Writing Retreat: with Matt Kendrick and Ruth Brandt

Tuesday 8th – Monday 14th September 2026 in Thurlstone (Holme Valley)

Join us in the idyllic landscape of the Holme Valley for a six-night writing retreat where you’ll learn from two widely experienced creative writing teachers through a series of workshops, feedback sessions and one-to-one chats. You’ll also have plenty of unstructured time dedicated to putting new words on the page.

​This is a chance for you and your writing to take centre stage. As such, you’ll be encouraged to structure your stay according to what works best for you. Everything is entirely optional. You might want to go out and explore the beautiful countryside. Or you might prefer to find a comfy corner of the cottage where you can snuggle up and write.

In the evenings, there’ll be social activities like informal readings or writing bingo, but again, these are entirely optional. With everything on the retreat, you do you. Our aim is that your stay becomes whatever you need it to be to feel creatively energised and replenished, and that you come away from your experience having conjured plenty of new words and made some wonderful writing friends.

Details / Apply

If you aren’t familiar with his work, here’s one of his pieces to start things off:

Go Bag (Chris Scott | Milk Candy Review)

Why I like it (MK): List stories can sometimes become a little stale through the restriction of form; here though, I love how the story comes to life through a contrast of concrete and abstract, the shift from “real” things to things like “four vivid memories” and the great use of bracketed asides. List stories can also become slightly emotionally void, but this is the opposite. There’s so much resonance here, such a wonderful build towards that final line.

The Museum (Elena Zhang | Night Shades)

Why I like it (CS): There is a dream logic to this piece -- and so much of Elena Zhang’s highly imaginative writing -- that activates something new in my brain, forcing me to make connections and consider scenes I wouldn’t have otherwise. I always want to immediately re-read her work as soon as I’ve finished it, and this is a great example.

PROMPT: Describe a mundane scene (such as a visit to a museum or the library) and tweak the internal logic of it just slightly to create something surreal or even sinister.

The Liminal Space of the Track at a Tri-City YMCA (Sarah Lynn Hurd | Ghost Parachute)

Why I like it: I love the quiet desperation of this piece, the feeling of paranoia and danger Sarah Lynn Hurd conveys, without ever explicitly acknowledging or explaining it. How something as routine as running laps can begin to feel claustrophobic, slightly terrifying, and deeply sad. This is not a piece that you expect to gut you, and somehow it does.

Buddy’s Gone (Sheldon Birnie | HAD)

Why I like it: Sheldon Birnie has such a great sense of voice, in this piece and his excellent short story collection Where the Pavement Turns to Sand, writing in punchy prose that feels very distinct and unassuming, usually masking something deeper and more complex. Here he portrays a strange and senseless tragedy that’s heart-breaking but, in his more than capable hands and casual tone, never collapses under its own weight. An impressive feat.

Out (Lillie E. Franks | hex)

Why I like it: I really admire Lillie E. Franks’ ability -- of which “Out” is a great example -- to write morbid and unsettling stories that don’t necessarily scan as horror. This story begins in seemingly familiar territory before plunging into something surreal, surprising, and haunting. Every word is employed perfectly. I’ve read it through repeatedly and found something new each time.

Of the Lovers (Addison Zeller | Your Impossible Voice)

Why I like it: This piece is eerie and hypnotic. I keep returning to it, finding some meaning that I’ll grasp for a minute, and then will suddenly change shape, eluding me once again. Addison Zeller is one of my favorite writers for this reason: He writes these odd and beautiful puzzles that attach themselves to my brain like little else. I appreciate his versatility and ability to extract emotion and mystery from even the most ordinary of images -- in the case of “Of the Lovers” two shadows through a window. Or are they?

Tongue Tied (Lauren Kardos | Fictive Dream)

Why I like it: Such a clever framing device to spin a story -- using common tongue twisters to suck the reader in and guide them along -- the significance of which becomes clearer as it progresses. I really admire the creativity with which Lauren Kardos approaches this, gradually peeling back the layers and memories to reveal what’s buried underneath.

PROMPT: Take a common figure of speech or phrase and build a story around it, perhaps revealing its contradictions through repetition, imbuing it with new meaning, or exploring what we reveal about ourselves when we use it.

Come Eat at O’Houlihan’s Because of What We Have (Dan Weaver | Burial Magazine)

Why I like it: Absurdist, uproarious, borderline stream-of-consciousness that’s typical of Dan Weaver’s writing style I love so much. One thing I particularly appreciate about his writing is that he doesn’t shy away from silliness. So many writers are afraid to access or reveal their silly side, fearing they won’t be taken seriously as a writer or artist or whatever. Dan Weaver has no such fear, and it makes his fiction so surprising and fun to read, even when it veers into darker directions.

PROMPT: Even if you don’t typically write ‘comedy’, or think of yourself as a comedy writer, try writing a short piece that you think will make a friend laugh, and then share it with them. This is a muscle a lot of writers don’t typically exercise, and injecting levity and absurdity into flash fiction (when it’s warranted) can often make pieces snappier and more memorable.

Indicator Species (Courtney Pasko | The Dodge)

Why I like it: One of my favorite pieces of nature writing in some time, perhaps because I see reflected here the Chesapeake Bay watershed that I call home. But mainly because I love both Courtney Pasko’s lyrical and vivid descriptions, and the mobius strip of hope and catastrophe that forms as the piece progresses. A highly creative and thoughtful approach that I’ve had a difficult time shaking.

Two Old Friends and a Ghost Walk into the Woods (Anna Vangala Jones | CRAFT)

Why I like it: The emotional honesty Anna Vangala Jones reveals here is refreshing and inspiring, both in its tenderness for the characters, and also in the unflinching honesty of the two (living) women who are ostensibly “friends” but may not like each other all that much. It’s a complex dynamic from which there is no tidy resolution or shattering falling-out, something that probably every reader can relate to.

A Quick Word About My Life (Trent England | Okay Donkey)

Why I like it: Last but not least, I want to share one of my very favorite works of short fiction, first published in Okay Donkey about 7 years ago. With so many literary magazines and stories floating around the void, a lot of great stuff can get buried with time. But this is one of those stories that I have held in my mind for years as a perfect example of what I hope to accomplish with my own writing. Somehow, in just a couple hundred words, Trent England builds an entire world only one or two degrees separated from our own, just slightly askew, and in doing so reveals something heartbreaking, honest, and oddly beautiful about the lives we share here in the real world. It is, to my eye, everything I look for when I read flash fiction, and I hope you get something out of it, too.

What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?

Next month’s selection will be chosen by Kathryn Reese and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 17th February.

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As always, I should stress that these are just SOME of my favourites and that, as with any “best of” list, it very much depends on which stories the picker has read (once again, I haven’t read half as much as I would have liked this year), how good their memory / record keeping is (not particularly great) and what their mood is when they come to making their picks.

So, this isn’t so much a “best of” list as a list of personal favourites that are jumping to my mind at this particular moment of writing this post.

Nine-one-one (Sarah Freligh | The Welkin Writing Prize)

Why I like it: I started last year’s post with a Sarah Freligh piece, and here I am doing the same. This is a piece told in less than a hundred words that contains a whole universe. It’s brilliantly breathless in the way it’s told. It’s woven with such a depth of emotions. And every time I read it, I notice something new.

The Box (Joshua Jones Lofflin | Matchbook Lit)

Why I like it: This piece is so powerful in the way it uses the speculative. The scenario is absurd, but that absurdity is also painfully real. There are so many uncomfortable truths here, not just about the present state of the world but also about the state of the world as it might yet become in the not-too-distant future. A piece to read followed by a moment of deep reflection.

PROMPT: write a piece about an absurd new TV show which gets increasingly out of hand. What might you say about the world through this innovative lens?

Out of Season (Georgene Smith Goodin | Fractured Lit)

Why I like it: I always love a piece that does something clever with an extended metaphor. The trick, I always think, is to find something that has enough overlap with what you’re comparing against, and the challenge is to not step outside of those constraints. Here, everything reads so brilliantly at both levels - the surface-layer description of the amusement park and the implied-layer description of the sister - and there’s such a heart-breaking build from beginning to end.

Psalm (After the Animals) (Joseph Randolph | Bath Flash Fiction Award)

Why I like it: I’m a sucker for beautiful language and there are so many details in this piece that make me want to read them out loud. “Not namewise, but gutward” is wonderfully original in how it evokes such a unique voice. The verbs are full of pinpoint specificity. I particularly love “soles clagged with rainrot.” And there’s some great use of parallelism (“Not prayer. Not name” for example) to create a propulsive rhythm.

The Devil Alive in Jersey (Catherine Buck | Craft Literary)

Why I like it: As writers, we can play it safe or we can take risks, and I always think that the gold dust is to be found in the latter. This piece unfolds purely through dialogue and that’s so tricky. There’s no padding to describe body language or scene, yet I still get such a strong sense of that here. Such clever, impactful writing.

PROMPT: write a piece that unfolds purely through dialogue where a large group of characters are discussing a rumour or a scandal.

This Is Not A Story (Karen Crawford | Roi Fainéant)

Why I like it: This is another tiny micro that contains multitudes. First, we have the “you” narrator, the insistent paragraph starters of “you stare”, “you type”, “you backspace”. Then we have the multiple stories (or not-stories) that unfold from that staring / typing / backspace - the person-specific and the universal - all brought to life in such a powerful way.

Wendy, Darling (Sumitra Singam | Tiny Molecules)

Why I like it: I was privileged enough to read this piece when it was at an earlier draft stage. It was wonderful then, but now - wow! - what a piece. I love the use of repetition here and the lyrical brilliance of the writing. I love the way it engages with the Peter Pan story. And I love the powerful emotions bubbling away underneath.

Our Mutual Friend (Ivy Grimes | HAD)

Why I like it: I often talk about ‘poise’ in writing and I’m never quite sure how to define that. This piece, though, is one of those pieces that feels so poised. There’s a restraint to the prose but there are also wonderful moments of contrast - the shift in voice brought in with that “no offense”, the play on words in “I wish I believed I was beloved”. And at the level of story, this is one of those pieces that asks a reader to engage with it, to look for the levels of meaning beneath that poised surface layer.

Wooden Horse Redux (Ron Burch | Ghost Parachute)

Why I like it: This is a fable wrapped within the absurd which like all powerful speculative fiction holds a mirror up to the real world. It doesn’t take much to figure out who the leader of this country might be, and I love how the scenario is pushed into absurdity, underpinned at the level of words and sentences by repetition and the great use of questions and asides.

Peonies (Ani King | Wigleaf)

Why I like it: With flash, we often talk about ‘breathless’ prose and when it’s done well (like here) it can be so powerful at driving a piece forward. Added to that, there’s an anaphora repetition of “you see” and everything builds and builds, the architecture beneath the piece so clever in the way the sentences get longer and longer to mimic what is happening emotionally.

the body forgets in parentheses (Molly Thapviwat | trampset)

Why I like it: This is such a creative piece. It’s creative at the level of content - I love the random shifts like “a goat showed up on my porch” - and it’s creative at the level of form, the use of forward slashes rather than full stops, the propulsive rhythm of the writing.

PROMPT: write a story that starts with an everyday action (like putting something in the post) but shift that action into the surreal (so, you might put your brain in the washing machine or bake your sadness in the oven).

Other World (Kelli Short Borges | BULL Lit Mag)

Why I like it: In my editing and teaching work, I often talk about planting the seeds towards an ending, and this is such a great example of that. The reference to the Brontosaurus in the first paragraph is almost casual, but it lingers in the mind, so that when we get to that gut-punch ending, it ties the piece together rather than veering off into a new narrative strand. This piece is about other worlds and what’s amazing here is how many worlds are contained within this space. The real world. What Mr. Smyth hopes for in a parallel universe. And all the real and hoped-for worlds of all the kids.

Margaret Mulaney and the New Faces (Cuyler Meade | trampset)

Why I like it: Sometimes, flash can be flashy. Sometimes, it’s woven with complexity. But sometimes, an understated, simpler approach is the way to go. I love how this story unfolds without pyrotechnics, the sadness and the situation building in such a structured and powerful way.

Three Belts (Kathy Fish | Re)

Why I like it: Like most of the flash fiction world, I’m continuously in awe of Kathy Fish. With every piece she publishes, it feels like she finds something completely original to say or a completely new approach. Here, we have a list piece that demonstrates the possibilities and power of all-out concision. I love the tight rhythm of this and how each sentence fragment interacts with the ones either side of it. I love how a reader is asked to see what’s contained in the gaps in between. I love the random elements, the shift of tone in “The horse, remarkably, again” and the endpoint of anesis. So much craft to unpick here and such a great overall effect.

PROMPT: write a story about a big or traumatic event that unfolds through the form of a staccato list. Each item should be a sentence fragment - nouns or nominal phrases. Start with the time and place. Include one splash of dialogue. Include at least one random element that doesn’t necessarily connect with the story but adds depth. Include one abstract element like “destiny". Create interesting juxtapositions and keep the rhythm taut.

Eugenia (Susan Holcomb | Flash Frog)

Why I like it: It feels to me that when we think about how to create something unique, we can focus on story, form or character, and I’d love to see more of the latter. This piece does that so well - such a unique character who I fell in love with right from that opening sentence (“She’s a poet and a bass guitarist, the coolest in my LA mommies group”). I love how that’s explored both in the present and the past. And I love how this reflects backwards onto the emotional landscape of the narrator.

PROMPT: write a story about a unique character who goes against the grain of the general grouping to which they belong. What is that character’s backstory? How does that character’s presence affect the others within the group?

The Last, Great Letter Writer (Sean Ennis | Pool Party Mag)

Why I like it: I don’t know what it is about this piece, but I just really like it. I’ve read it several times over the last few months and it never fails to slightly unsettle but also to give me a sense of resonance and satisfaction. This is another piece with so much poise, but also some wonderful tonal shifts. I love the postscripts at the end of the letter. I love the way the letter is couched within a brief musing from our narrator.

Bird in the Desert (Kip Knott | Ghost Parachute)

Why I like it: This is such beautiful writing, so lyrical, so much flow from one sentence to the next. It’s full of brilliant imagery like “It’s a silver river full of silver fish gleaming beneath a silver sliver of a moon.” I love the use of repetition and how the sentences shift through different rhythms, everything building towards the endpoint, a vast emotional swell.

Butterfly Time (Sage Tyrtle | trampset)

Why I like it: When we contemplate the speculative, we often think about the need to world-build right at the start. But what I love here is how we begin in the real world and shift, slowly, into that speculative parallel. That’s such a clever approach, giving a strong sense of journey. And what’s so impressive here is the number of journeys building alongside that - the journey of the “Girl Who Didn’t”, the journey of a reader’s understanding, the emotional journey, the thematic journey - all of that tied together in an ending that contains so much rawness and meaning.

PROMPT: write a story that starts in the real world and slowly shifts into something more speculative, shifting a reader’s understanding of scenario with every paragraph and weaving together different journeys.

Go Bag (Chris Scott | Milk Candy Review)

Why I like it: Another list piece (perhaps I’m particularly drawn to these?) that unfolds in such a brilliant way. I love how this list contains both the concrete and abstract, how there are things that are included and things that aren’t (“no bridges, no tunnels”). I love the use of bracketed asides. The connection between list items here is deliberately much more cohesive than in Kathy Fish’s piece above, and I love the journey in that. Another piece that builds towards such a resonant emotional swell.

You are pulling your hair again (Melissa Llanes Brownlee | Fractured Lit)

Why I like it: And another one-sentence piece (another thing that always draws me in, but only when done well). Like Sarah Freligh’s piece above, this has so much propulsion to it and so much structure in how this single sentence flows. I love the textural contrast brought in by the splashes of dialogue and I love how subtle that shift is from focus on “you” to focus on “I”, how the dialogue acts as a pivot for that. Again, such skilful writing that demonstrates so much understanding of writing craft.

BONUS STORIES

Baby Change (Sumitra Singam | JMWW)

But This is not a Story (Tommy Dean | Flash Flood)

Cotton Mouth (Janna Miller | Fractured Lit)

Deer in the Headlights (Allison Field Bell | Roi Fainéant)

I Regret to Inform You I Made These Plans When I Gave a Shit and Things Have Changed (Mario Aliberto III | Fractured Lit)

Love ; sigh (Claire Y. Guo | SmokeLong Quarterly)

Maybe Someday I’ll Stop Writing About A House On The Border Of A Swamp (Corey Farrenkopf | Milk Candy Review)

Me and Barnaby, Alone (Travis Flatt | New Flash Fiction Review)

My mom said if it’s okay with your mom you can come over and watch Kitchen Nightmares (Katherine Plumhoff | Whale Road Review)

Receipt (Mizuki Yamamoto | Does it Have Pockets?)

Revelation, 1859 (Sharon Telfer | Bath Flash Fiction Award)

Tascadora, Texas, 1935 (Myna Chang | The Sunlight Press)

Time Only Looks Human (Lynne Jensen Lampe | Okay Donkey)

The Wishmaker (Shauna Friesen | Tiny Molecules)

What about you? What are your favourite pieces from this year? Please feel free to share your own personal picks in the comments - I always love to hear other people’s suggestions.

Next month’s selection will be chosen by Chris Scott and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 20th January.

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Opportunities to work with Matt

Editing

NOVEL / NOVELLA EDITING: First steps review, structural review, line edit, proof edit, submission review

EDITING FOR COLLECTIONS: structural overview report, line edit, proof edit

SHORT FICTION EDITING: Structural review, line edit, detailed edit, proof edit

Shome Dasgupta’s most recent book, a poetry collection called Cajun South Brown Folk, is now available from Belle Point Press.

If you aren’t familiar with his work, here’s one of his pieces to start things off:

Chapel of Ghosts (Shome Dasgupta | Tiny Molecules)

Why I like it (MK): I use this story as an example on my Lyrical Writing course because it’s so inventive in the way it plays around with words. I love the word order of the opening and how that sets up the tone of voice. I love the use of repetition in phrases like “We were nowhere and that’s all we knew--being nowhere and doing nothing until nothing got us in trouble”. There’s a rhythm to the writing here, a poeticism that’s simply beautiful. And the overall effect is, for me, so wonderfully ethereal and completing spellbinding.

The Oak of a Man (Lisa Thornton | Ghost Parachute)

Why I like it (SD): This story covers a multitude in such a short space, and I was immediately caught by its emotional force starting from the opening sentence. The imagery, detail and rhythm all come together to make for a mesmerizing ending, one which made me go back and reread the piece several times.

The Invention of Kissing (Jeffrey Hermann | matchbook)

Why I like it: The idea behind this very short piece of fiction—seven sentences—I found to be absolutely engaging and fascinating. It’s abstract and seemingly open ended, but I like how it made me think of the first kiss, not any first kiss, but the first kiss. A concept I’ve never thought about before. How exactly did it really happen?

The Curse (Swetha Amit | Maudlin House)

Why I like it: The plot of this story is unique and uncanny while covering relatable thoughts when it comes to familial relationships, traditions and customs. I enjoyed how what I see as a casual and recreational activity develops depth and significance, that only we (as the readers) can understand as we are able to travel under the surface with this narrative, while perhaps, the audience has no clue about what is really taking place in the main character’s mind and body.

Incompleteness (Amy DeBellis | hex)

Why I like it: Wow—the symbolic layering immersed in this story is stunning. The distance between the narrator and the spouse is heavy and delicate at the same time, and there’s a certain magical realism tint which adds a whole new dimension to this piece as it relates to memory, both physically and mentally.

After The Flood (Sarp Sozdinler | Flash Frog)

Why I like it: This story is relatable in so many ways especially when it comes to flooding, and that’s why I was drawn toward it—understanding such sentiments. The daydream gives this sense of odd delight or joy during such a stressful setting, one full of unease and tension. I found the contrast here to be gravitational and surreal.

The Field Of Children’s Voices (Helena Hatian Jiang | Gone Lawn)

Why I like it: There’s so much movement in this story, and the use of the various senses grabbed me as they conveyed this feeling of isolation even though this particular world is full of life in every which way. The last line is lovely, creating the perfect image for the tone, and it led me to go back and focus on the use of diction.

How To Glue A Horse (Benjamin Niespodziany | HAD)

Why I like it: This is a fun one to read—an unusual take on a piece using instructions or directions as the narrative, and the title itself is captivating. The steps seem pretty straightforward, almost calming or soothing, and I think I would be able to glue one together, but I would just need to make sure I have all the supplies.

PROMPT: Without thinking about possible plots, characters, narratives, settings, or story ideas, draft ten titles as if you were about to write a piece for each title and use the titles themselves to create a story.

The Weight Of A Tooth (Robyn Perros | Isele)

Why I like it: This is a neat story in so many different ways—one being that I really had no clue which direction this narrative would be going, and I enjoyed how what seemingly started off as a sweet story about a child and her lost tooth turns into a deeper meaning with weight and heavy underlinings.

PROMPT: Using twenty found objects, write a story where in each line, one of the items is mentioned until all twenty of them are included.

Wicked Americana (Sacha Bissonnette | CRAFT)

Why I like it: There’s so much going on behind the scenes here—a story in itself in what’s not being said, and the setting and plot play perfectly with each other. The subtle hints leave much that’s open for interpretation which makes for a pensive read, indeed, and I like how the roles of relationships, in various ways, add this circular nature to the story.

Beyond the Chattering Flush (Mizuki Yamagen | Literary Namjooning)

Why I like it: It’s meditative and thoughtful and full of light, and it creates this open space in my mind where I can breathe with more ease as I picture the images written here, almost like a yoga routine. When there’s so much going on around us—all the clatter of this and that, I appreciate how this piece kind of separates me from it all.

PROMPT: Find a loud setting—one that’s full of messy noises, a crowded coffee shop or a busy restaurant and try to separate each clatter and describe them, comparing them to a quiet and peaceful place in nature.

What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?

Next month’s selection will be chosen by me and will be a bumper edition spotlighting my twenty (plus bonus stories) favourite pieces from 2025.

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Funny Bones: Infusing your Prose with Humorous Techniques

Tuesday 2nd December 2025 (19:00-20:30 GMT) OR Saturday 6th December 2025 (09:00-10:30 GMT)

How do we make our writing funny? What are the different techniques we can use to weave humour into our prose? ​This 90-minute workshop is a whistle stop tour through things like daffynitions, comic triples, humorous imagery, humorous voice, adnominatio, spoonerisms and anesis. With the aim of giving writers plenty of new ideas and writing tools, we’ll think about how we write funny stories and how we can use humour to add textural contrast in more serious ones. We’ll also explore the universe of tone, the lyrical-humour overlap, and how we avoid the Where’s Wally effect.

Price: Pay What You Can (Pricing options - (A) £20, (B) £16, (C) £12)

Details / sign up

Other opportunities to work with Matt

COLOURFUL CHARACTERS: 12th-25th January 2026

GO WITH THE FLOW: 2nd-15th March 2026

Details

Editing

NOVEL / NOVELLA EDITING: First steps review / structural review / line edit / submission review

EDITING FOR COLLECTIONS: Structural overview report / line edit

SHORT FICTION EDITING: Structural review / line edit / detailed edit

Instagram @happilander

Twitter @happymil_

bluesky @happilander.bsky.social

If you aren’t familiar with her work, here’s one of her pieces to start things off:

Things My Scientist Boyfriend Taught Me (Mileva Anastasiadou | Passages North)

Why I like it (MK): I love the tone of voice, how it’s wonderfully conversational but also wonderfully threaded with philosophy and depth. There are so many sentences here that stop me in my tracks and make me ponder. The moments of imagery are beautiful. “He’s homeless, he tells me, a tree uprooted, an untethered orbit” is a particular highlight and I love how that’s paralleled in the final sentence. This relationship is one of opposites and we see that opposition at so many layers, in the contemplation of electrons “repel[ling]” each other, in the difference of experience between the two characters, and in the form of back-and-forth sentences. There’s so much here to discover on second, third, fourth reads. A real gem.

Application To Eat The Sweetest Peach In the World (Anna Mantzaris | Milk Candy Review)

Why I like it (MA): Because I love the little sensory details and how the whole story is built up around those sensory details, about a peach, like it’s an exercise in mindfulness. Because it’s a story told only through questions, and although those questions are about a peach, they are also about life.

PROMPT: Write about a thing. Describe the details, be as specific as possible, and make it come alive though the story. Then try to talk, though that thing, about bigger issues, emotions, truths, life.

Dog (Michael Czyzniejewski | Literary Namjooning)

Why I like it: Because of its amazing structure and the impact of the structure on the emotions it evokes. The story is divided into two parts, the ‘if’ part and the ‘then’ part, and it feels like taking two quick breaths, then a deep breath at the end with a brilliant last line which makes the story come together. Or better, the story feels breathless, like you try to take a deep breath because you ran out of air, and at the last minute you realize you’re full of oxygen and you exhale in relief.

Everything So Different and the Same (K.C. Mead-Brewer | Fractured Lit)

Why I like it: Because in such few words, it says a lot. Because it’s about a tree and subtly about so much more, about truths and emotions you realize just by watching a tree. Because that line, how trees can’t cure cancer, but they still matter, and so maybe one day I can forgive myself for being as useless as they, has stuck in my mind forever. Because of the huge emotional impact this story had on me, and I am grateful this story exists in the world and expressed feelings I didn’t know I felt. Whenever I come back to it, I tear up.

My Mama Wanted a Zebra (Francine Witte | Lost Balloon)

Why I like it: Because I was blown away when I first read it a few years ago. Because it starts with a great title that drew me inside the story at once, and the title serves as a first sentence too. Because of the beautiful metaphor; it happens a lot, we go for zebras and we get cows and we try to somehow transform the cows into zebras, but the cows will forever be cows however hard we try to paint stripes on them.

The Blob Takes Manhattan (Chelsea Stickle | Fractured Lit)

Why I like it: Because it starts simple, then goes big. Because it takes an old monster and revives it. Because it says a lot about how we deal with ‘monsters’ as a society. Because monsters do what they have to do to stay optimistic but how we react to them makes the difference. Because it speaks of big issues in a subtle and understandable way.

PROMPT: Write a story about something out of the collective consciousness, a mythical creature, an ancient god, a fairy tale character, and make them come to our world. Make it sound like it’s an adventure, then at the end, reveal a universal truth which would be harder to swallow if told directly.

The Ghost of Johnny Cash Sings of Fire (Benjamin Drevlow | trampset)

Why I like it: Because I love Johnny Cash and I deeply appreciate the reference. Because it’s a breathless story, and it’s about a troubled father-son relationship and about how symbols work. Because I love how it builds up and, at the end, it kind of slows down again, just like a sad song, a parallel in the story to real life.

We Don’t Meet in Buda (Kelli Short Borges | Centaur)

Why I like it: Because I love how the location integrates in the story. Because I spent some years in Budapest and the story felt like a walk in the city of my youth. Because I felt nostalgic and I could see forever too. Because the story evokes nostalgia even if the reader has never visited the city, and how it is about more so much more than that. Because that last line feels like a crescendo.

Not Afraid, She Said (Pat Foran | Gooseberry Pie)

Why I like it: Because I love the tone and the atmosphere and how the poetic language works to evoke emotion. Because of how the punctuation and the repetition works in favor of building up the feeling. Because it’s about how frightening love can be, but the character refuses to be afraid, to give in and be defined by the fear. Because this story is hopeful in a sad way. Because through language I am convinced it’s all worth it.

The Way My Mother, Who Refuses to Die, Is Like A Ford Taurus (Danielle Barr | Okay Donkey)

Why I like it: Because it talks about death in a funny way. Because the first sentence is captivating and because I love how the mother refuses to give in to death even though she’s already dead, how she rages against the dying of the light. Because I love how it’s made obvious throughout the story that the consequences affect the others. Because upon reading it a second and third time, I discovered a new layer, about how that fight for a lost cause reveals a character trait that seems senseless at first but proves to be necessary for change and progress.

PROMPT: Write a story about a very difficult subject and make it funny. Try to keep the balance, you should write funny but also keep noting how serious the issue is. Bonus points if you can insinuate something more, another issue as big as the first one.

In Bed (JR Walsh | Flash the Court)

Why I like it: Because I love how the story unfolds in a dialogue. Because it starts out about religion and it ends up about love. Because it’s about faith and how faith works. Because in dialogue stories I’m usually confused about who says what, but here it’s all perfectly clear. Because I love how it ends and how silence counts as dialogue too.

What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?

Next month’s selection will be chosen by Shome Dasgupta and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 18th November.

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Website: www.kathrynsilverhajo.com

Facebook: @kathryn.silverhajo

X: @KSilverHajo

Bluesky: @kathrynsilverhajo.bsky.social

Instagram: @kathrynsilverhajo

You can order Kathryn’s flash collection, Wolfsong, from ELJ Editions: https://elj-editions.com/wolfsong/ and her YA novel, Roots of the Banyan Tree, from FlowerSong Press: https://www.flowersongpress.com/books/p/roots-of-the-banyan-tree-by-kathryn-silver-hajo-1

If you aren’t familiar with her work, here’s one of her pieces to start things off:

She’d Always Been Sure He’d Outlive Her (Kathryn Silver-Hajo | New Flash Fiction Review)

Why I like it (MK): There’s so much skill to telling a big story in a tiny space, and here in just a few dozen words, we have a sort of magic trick - it doesn’t feel like it should be possible to fit this narrative in this space with so much emotional clout. I love the way the title hangs over the piece that follows; I love the creative specificity of “planting purple-plum kisses”; and I love the effect of that tree-branch aside right at the end (“a heartbeat and a nail trim”) to stretch the moment of pause.

Egg Five Ways (Emily Rimkena | Identity Theory)

Why I like it: The story is as simple, perfect, and layered as an egg itself. Each of the five sections mirrors a phase of the narrator’s life with her partner with observations like, The perfect fried egg is steamed, you tell me the morning after we meet and, I make you scrambled eggs with cheddar cheese, but you tip your head away. We’re carried through an entire marriage in a few paragraphs. The final section circles back to the earlier part of the relationship, with, It all starts here, you told me once, tossing an egg into the air between us, before landing on the deeply moving ending that burrows into your heart and refuses to be forgotten.

21 Allen Drive (Diane Gottlieb | Smokelong Quarterly)

Why I like it: I find myself returning again and again to this brilliant story in which a series of deceptively simple, lyrical descriptions and details invite the reader into the peaceful, rural setting and even into the kitchen of the titular house. We have a strong sense of the place, people, and animals who reside at 21 Allen Drive. The repetition of the words, “The way…” in multiple contexts effectively builds tension and keeps the reader engaged right up to the explosive ending. In under 200 words, Gottlieb tells a fulsome story that echoes long after the last line.

Settle and Slake (Mikki Aronoff | Craft Literary)

Why I like it: The playfulness! The original and inventive language! The use of the 1st person plural to draw an intimate portrait with universal resonance. Aronoff’s protagonists take us on a wild ride through daily life in the nursing home where they live, die, play, connect, cope, and make the most of their experience. “Settle and Slake” is filled with poignant, witty observations that had me laughing throughout, with lines like, We cock our heads, all the better to hear, cock finger-pistols at foreheads as we watch the news, cackle at the design of cocks, gobble chicken fingers—plucked if we’re lucky. A delight from start to finish.

PROMPT: Write a story using the 1st person plural to describe an experience that is both particular to your characters and which most readers will be able to relate to on some level. Bonus points for making it funny.

Sweater Weather (Mario Aliberto III | Smokelong Quarterly)

Why I like it: “Sweater Weather” takes a moment in time—a father enlisting his young son to help prepare for the coming hurricane—and explodes it into a minefield of complex emotions. The close third-person narration and conversational tone offer the reader a front-row seat into the father’s thoughts that reveal his internal struggle to the reader, while limiting what he says aloud to cursing the Florida heat where they’re sweating their balls off, compared to the cool autumn up north where he’s from. We feel for both father and a son in this richly layered story whose harshness paradoxically hints at the possibility of tenderness.

Why I Still Wash Used Saran Wraps and Dry Them on the Dish Rack (Christine Chen | Forge Literary)

Why I like it: I’m a big fan of Christine Chen’s Ah Ma and Ah Ba stories, and here, the repetition of Because of… creates a rhythm that draws us deep into the narrator’s world where poverty drives her mother to find inventive ways to survive. She brings home leftover food from her cafeteria job, washes used paper towels and dries them on the clothesline, repurposes plastic containers into rice bowls and vases for growing herbs. We feel we know the tough, hard-working Ah Ma, who will do anything to give her children a better life than she’s had, and nowhere do we feel this more than at the moving conclusion.

Or Else (Melissa Llanes Brownlee I Five South)

Why I like it: With the first six words of the story, we are slammed against the wall knowing something ominous is at the heart of the narrative. The second shock is learning that the main character is a young boy thrust into a drama that places a huge burden on his young shoulders. If he fails in his imposed mission, he could face severe physical and emotional consequences. Ultimately, he’s faced with an impossible dilemma that will force him to decide between obeying the demands of his family and following his heart. “Or Else” is a deeply thought-provoking, tender story that I’ve read again and again since it was published.

PROMPT: Write a story in which the narrator is carrying a painful burden that finds echoes in another layer of the story such that the two griefs converge by the end.

If You Weren’t Such a Good Boy You’d Remember (Sudha Balagopal I Adroit Journal)

Why I like it: I love being transported to another place, another world, another time, in a story. I love the rhythm and romance of trains, love word repetition when skilfully employed. The use of the word “our” to begin each of the seven paragraphs establishes the relationship between the narrator and the “good boy,” as well as their mothers, whose own friendship is a subtext woven throughout the story. That collective sense continues throughout the gently rocking train ride of this piece, where sexual attraction, friendship, duty, and rebellion clatter against each other and keep us hoping, wondering, and worrying all the way through.

Color Permanence (Meg Pokrass I Centaur Lit)

Why I like it: I was deeply drawn into the narrator’s emotional journey—her sadness, capacity for joy, her longing for what might have been possible. “Color Permanence” explores the complexities of grief, loss, and desire through the lens of eye color—the unchanging dog-brown of her husband’s eyes, the aquamarine she dreams her baby had, the ever-changing colors of her lover’s irises—now baby blue, now lurid emerald green. The aching heart of this deftly layered, mysterious story is encapsulated by this wonderful line: The entire week…felt like a foreign movie in which nothing happened, yet everything changed. And by the end, we feel somehow changed, as well.

PROMPT: Write a story in which a secondary character is someone important to the narrator but also a metaphor for an emotion or experience that has the capacity to shift and shape the main character’s perception of reality.

Stroked (Claudia Monpere I Ghost Parachute)

Why I like it: The tenderness of the relationship between the main character and her father is what resonated most for me in this story—the way she places his hand on her rippling belly, involves him in naming her unborn baby, her devotion to a parent who may never come back from a major stroke. By focusing tightly on the father-daughter dynamics we are intimately drawn into this multigenerational family portrait that highlights the way new life often seems to spring up just when another is on the wane. It’s as if—consciously or unconsciously—we reach for something life affirming in the face of loss and grief. Ending this piece with a lullaby felt just right.

Bullet List for My Aged Kidnapper (Patricia Bidar I Flash the Court)

Why I like it: Trauma has a way of rattling around inside our bodies and minds wreaking havoc, resistant to being pinned down. Here, the narrator addresses / confronts her abuser in a one-way conversation I took to be the words she wishes her kidnapper had to reckon with—that police and old lovers had to reckon with. Layered within the piece is how power dynamics stack the deck against women, especially working-class women who aren’t the “kind of victim they had to care about.” After the bullet list, the narrator shifts to the “we” POV, noting that she and her kidnapper are both old now, living similar lives. Life buzzes on but this thing between them will never be diminished, at least not for her. But perhaps by giving voice to it she can find a measure of peace, a reclaiming of self.

What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?

Next month’s selection will be chosen by Mileva Anastasiadou and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 21st October.

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Story Shapes (workshop): Pyramids, Fishes, Spirals and Trees

7th October (19:00-20:30 BST) or 11th October (09:00-10:30 BST)

How do we find the right shape for our stories? What are the different images we might bear in mind to help with narrative and emotional build? How do we create a strong sense of structural balance? This 90-minute workshop considers different ways of thinking about a story in terms of shape. With the aim of giving writers plenty of new ideas and writing tools, we'll cover story vs plot, Freytag's pyramid, Vonnegut story graphs, tension and pacing, narrative time, and the golden ratio.

Details / sign up

Other opportunities to work with Matt

STORY SHAPES (workshop): 7th October 2025, 19:00-20:30 BST (open for bookings)

STORY SHAPES (workshop): 1th October 2025, 09:00-10:30 BST (open for bookings)

EMOTIONAL DEPTHS (panel discussion): 3rd November 2025, 19:00-20:30 GMT (open for bookings)

LYRICAL WRITING: 10th-23rd November 2025 (open for bookings)

FUNNY BONES (workshop): : 2nd December 2025, 19:00-20:30 GMT (open for bookings)

FUNNY BONES (workshop): : 6th December 2025, 09:00-10:30 GMT (open for bookings)

Details

Editing

NOVEL / NOVELLA EDITING: First steps review / structural review / line edit / submission review

EDITING FOR COLLECTIONS: Structural overview report / line edit

SHORT FICTION EDITING: Structural review / line edit / detailed edit

Website: http://bronwengriff.co.uk/

X: @bronwengwriter

Bluesky: @bronwengriffiths@bsky.social

If you aren’t familiar with her work, here’s one of her pieces to start things off:

The Many Shades of White (Bronwen Griffiths | trampset)

Why I like it (MK): The fractured form is the perfect mode for jumping from moment to moment in this character’s life, each moment perfectly formed and building on the ones before, each of them beautifully connected to the shades of white referenced in the title. I love the way the reds slowly creep in among the whites and how that builds towards such a natural point of transformation.

Childhood Cranes (Andrew Bertaina | In Short Journal)

Why I like it: This is a beautifully poetic piece, filled with longing for the past. The imagery of the cranes is subverted by the fact that we learn these are not cranes but egrets. In addition, the beauty of this remembered place is tempered by regret and difficulty. The narrator is a professor teaching a class and this point of view brings an additional layer to the story.

PROMPT: Describe a beautiful memory or place and add more difficult and complex memories and thoughts to your piece.

I Just Want Pals to Josh Around With (Kevin Richard White | X-Ray Lit)

Why I like it: This is such an honest story about how men relate to each other. We need more stories like this. I like the way that almost all the sentences in this piece begin with ‘maybe we could’. White writes about how men conceal their emotions and pasts from their friends, but this is a hopeful piece with wonderful touches of humour.

Tascadora, Texas, 1935 (Myna Chang | The Sunlight Press)

Why I like it: Despite the grim setting - the Dust Bowl of mid-West America in the 1930s - this flash has a luminous, magical quality. The mother’s wheezy breath, ‘her words like wind across barbed-wire’ is absolute perfection. There is sadness and loss in this piece but also a tremendous last line giving us a much needed ray of hope.

Redemption Street (Kathryn Kulpa | Gooseberry Pie)

Why I like it: Written from the point of view of a child, there is a marvellous sense of place in this flash. In a few short sentences we feel we know this street and its inhabitants, and at the end, Kulpa manages to surprise us with a brutal and shocking event which, although terrible, has a kind of gruesome fascination.

The Partitioning of Dreams (Susmita Bhattacharya | Flash Back Fiction)

Why I like it: Though this flash piece covers a terrible event (The Partition of India, a baby who dies at the roadside) it also conveys resilience and tenderness. In a few short paragraphs Bhattacharya overs the narrator’s whole life - the initial episode itself, the ‘forgetting’ of the death of the narrator’s brother and her own forgetfulness in old age. A whole history in one tiny piece.

PROMPT: is there something in your own life or your parent’s or grandparent’s life which has been forgotten, something you could resurrect? Try writing a whole history in a few short lines.

Between Us Girls (Dallon Robinson | Milk Candy Review)

Why I like it: Dallon vividly captures the life of teenage girls - their disputes, fears and strong bonds of friendship. A piece which gives me a warm feeling and reminds me of my own time as a teenager.

Forest in Apartment Number Ten (Laila Amado | Metastellar)

Why I like it: there is a surreal, fairy-tale quality to this longer flash piece. I love the way Amado mixes up what feels like an ordinary apartment and a woman baking cookies (which she can post up on her Instagram page) with memories of a grandmother and her gingerbread house. Amado turns the story of Hansel and Gretel on its head in this story, and the last line is a stunner.

PROMPT: re-write a fairy-tale and set it somewhere you know well - your home town, your house, a shopping centre you frequent. Write in the second person POV.

Interlude (Jun Ying Wen | Empty House Press)

Why I like it: Such an intimate and loving portrait of a relationship, and time passing, about what might be lost today or the next. In one sentence, ‘One time you ran to the top of a building just to convince someone into tomorrow,’ we learn so much about the character of the narrator’s lover (or this could be a friend or sister). The imagery used in this flash is superb. ‘Your name a path through the cornfield of their mouths.’

Our Daughters Never Seem to Come Home to Us (Ani King | Flash Flood)

Why I like it: a flash about girls who were once ‘untethered by waves’ but are now grown and ‘dragged under the hours.’ King tells this story from the point of view of the girls’ mothers, remembering when their daughters dived into lakes, ‘every one of them a champion.’ King cleverly uses the metaphor of the water to convey both freedom and surrender. A piece many women will relate to.

What’s Wrong with Sienna (Mandira Pattnaik | Fractured Lit)

Why I like it: the breezy, light-touch style with its compound nouns (husband-not-baby, woman-his-wife, hailstorm-not-rain) drew me into this piece right away and made me smile but the style conceals a deeper, darker mood. The land is dying in a drought and the wife, Sienna, feeding her baby is wanting only to be somewhere else.

What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?

Next month’s selection will be chosen by Kathryn Silver-Hajo and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 16th September.

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Opportunities to work with Matt

I HEAR VOICES (workshop): 2nd September 2025,19:00-20:30 BST (open for bookings)

I HEAR VOICES (workshop): 6th September 2025, 09:00-10:30 BST (open for bookings)

STORY SHAPES (workshop): 7th October 2025, 19:00-20:30 BST (open for bookings)

STORY SHAPES (workshop): 1th October 2025, 09:00-10:30 BST (open for bookings)

GO WITH THE FLOW: 13th-26th October 2025 (open for bookings)

EMOTIONAL DEPTHS (panel discussion): 3rd November 2025, 19:00-20:30 GMT (open for bookings)

LYRICAL WRITING: 10th-23rd November 2025 (open for bookings)

FUNNY BONES (workshop): : 2nd December 2025, 19:00-20:30 GMT (open for bookings)

FUNNY BONES (workshop): : 6th December 2025, 09:00-10:30 GMT (open for bookings)

Details

Editing

NOVEL / NOVELLA EDITING: First steps review / structural review / line edit / submission review

EDITING FOR COLLECTIONS: Structural overview report / line edit

SHORT FICTION EDITING: Structural review / line edit / detailed edit

Website: https://opencorners.ca/about

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@jenwithwords

X: @jenwithwords

Bluesky: @jenwithwords.bsky.social

Her latest chapbook ‘Light Chemical Sea’ will be out in Fall 2026 with Bull City Press. Sign up here to receive a one time email that will notify you when the book is released.

If you aren’t familiar with her work, here’s one of her pieces to start things off:

The Time Pirate Who Waits Ashore (Jenny Wong | Flash Flood)

Why I like it (MK): I love how the title creates intrigue - when you only have 100 words to play with, titles are a much greater part of the piece, and this title adds something concrete to what follows. I love the immediate sense of character created by “she sips morning coffee from a gun barrel” but how that information is made unreliable by the preceding “Rumours say”. Then we have the contrasting juxtaposition of “reality”, the shift into sadness but the theme of pirating continuing to build, everything tumbling together towards that powerful final sentence.

(JW) When I started this list, I was attempting to collect stories that showcased the five senses and I was determined to find two stories per sense. However, I soon shifted away from this hard constraint onto picking pieces that simply resonated with me at that more sensory level. The final stories I’ve selected, although still rich with sensory details, orbit around surreal imagery, themes of memory, and moons.

Claire de Lune (Elena Zhang | In Short)

Why I like it: In a single 26-word sentence, a story is told. This, in my opinion, is no easy feat and it is executed beautifully. The title prompts the first few song notes to play in my head as I read, and a few words in, the aboutness of the scene rushes to the surface. I am never directly told who, what, where, or why, and yet all the gaps have been filled and before I know it, the story is over, and I go back to re-read it again.

PROMPT: Pick one of the 5 senses and write a single sentence scene that revolves around it. Try to answer where, when, who, and why?

I Love the Bones of You, Mum (James Montgomery | Splonk)

Why I like it: This should probably be more like “Why I LOVE it”. This story seamlessly blends the surreal with the real. It depicts the gentle care of an aging mother, but in such a unique and fascinating way. I am in love with the idea of cleaning her bones on the “delicate cycle” and the easing of said bones back into her body like tent poles. These images evoke visuals of thin skin over a sparse frame, and speaks to something both fragile and resilient. The subject matter could very easily slip into the macabre or the clinical, but never does, and the fact that what is happening is so surreal adds depth to the spare lines of dialogue, giving color and shape to the narrator, the mother, and their time-bound relationship.

I can't drink coffee without thinking (Sylvia Santiago | Gone Lawn)

Why I like it: Grand adventure and wild roadtrip tales are great, but I have a fondness for those quiet stories that nestle in between obvious milestones. This piece pays beautiful tribute to those little moments that stick with you. It’s not the concert or sights along the drive that are focused on, but a single decision which allows underlying emotions to break a moment wide open, revealing unspoken things that have been lost, but still ripple into the current day.

Other World (Kelli Short Borges | Bull)

Why I like it: This story starts deceptively normal. A school teacher is driving to work, the detritus of toddlerhood in the back seat. But here is where the story takes a turn. The teacher talks to his students about alternate universes and it’s fascinating what each student reveals when talking about the universe that comes to their minds. It’s clever, quick, and a unique way to give an instant background story to a character. But it’s the ending, where the teacher’s desired universe is revealed, that reminds the reader how normal appearances can hide such underlying devastation.

One Night the Moon Starts Crying (Francine Witte | Fractured Lit)

Why I like it: The idea of small town folks and a crying moon immediately piques my interest, but beneath it is a helplessness as they succumb to days of downpour and run out of ways to deal with it. I love how this story holds small wisdoms and social commentary at the end about moving on, temporary phases, and how to bring light back into the world.

Alice Carries the Moon (Emma Phillips | Literary Namjooning)

Why I like it: A beautiful and surreal depiction of a girl and a treasured moon that condenses into a complex relationship between her and her mother. There is something very relatable as she struggles to hang onto something that she knows is both powerful and precious in the wake of everyone else attempting to bring her back to earth. Also, who doesn’t want to hold a moon?

Plastic Rivers (Shome Dasgupta | Centaur Lit)

Why I like it: I like how this piece explores music, how it changes perceptions, takes us back to small towns and small joys with old technology. There is a strong feeling of movement in this piece. I feel swept up and carried along for the ride and even the clever use of em dashes give a visual blip between scenes as I am shown various scenes of memory.

Sunset Fatigue (Mileva Anastasiadou | Milk Candy Review)

Why I like it: I’m a big fan of alternative stories and endings to well known characters. The Little Prince is no exception. What happens after all of the adventures? With the underlying themes of aging and loss alongside sunsets this piece is already packed with emotional resonance, but then there is also the repetition of “But this isn’t a ____ story” that starts nearly every paragraph, which gives a feeling of searching, of hinting that the story isn’t over, but is still changing.

PROMPT: Tell a story whose paragraphs begin with the same phrase which allows a new unusual detail to be added to the storyline.

In April, Hartley wakes to find two bumps (Cole Beauchamp | Flash Boulevard)

Why I like it: A fantastical event about a woman growing antlers, not-so-random facts, and clinical events all weave together, relate, and layer upon each other for quite a thoroughly enjoyable story. I both loved and felt frustrated by the parts where the doctors tell Hartley there is nothing wrong and everything is normal even though there is something clearly happening to her body, a transformation that is very obvious to her and yet everyone else cannot see. It speaks to me about how much of what goes on with women’s bodies is explained away even if there is truly something going on.

At the edge of mist (Marcelle Newbold | Gone Lawn)

Why I like it: Dream sequences are one of my favorite things to read because they bring longings and unsaid thoughts to the surface and can play in a setting where the happenings can be free of real-world constraints. This dream is brief, and yet it is filled with small details about the inhabitants. There are pieces of the person being missed, a boat, a crinkle of silver foil, and yet, even in the dream the presence is felt but the dreamer never actually sees the person.

What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?

Next month’s selection will be chosen by Bronwen Griffiths and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 19th August.

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Opportunities to work with Matt

BEYOND THESE SHORES (panel discussion): 5th August 2025,19:00-20:30 BST (open for bookings)

I HEAR VOICES (workshop): 2nd September 2025,19:00-20:30 BST (open for bookings)

I HEAR VOICES (workshop): 6th September 2025,09:00-10:30 BST (open for bookings)

GLORIOUS WORDS: 8th-21st September 2025 (open for bookings)

GO WITH THE FLOW: 13th-26th October 2025 (email me on matt@mattkendrick.co.uk to get your name on the priority list)

LYRICAL WRITING: 10th-23rd November 2025 (email me on matt@mattkendrick.co.uk to get your name on the priority list)

Details

Editing

NOVEL / NOVELLA EDITING: First steps review / structural review / line edit / submission review

EDITING FOR COLLECTIONS: Structural overview report / line edit

SHORT FICTION EDITING: Structural review / line edit / detailed edit

Bluesky: @chriscottom.bsky.social

Website: chriscottom.wixsite.com/chriscottom

If you aren’t familiar with his work, here’s one of his pieces to start things off:

My Lover is an Airmail Envelope (Chris Cottom | Flash Flood)

Why I like it (MK): The tone of voice in this piece is glorious. One thing I always admire in Chris’s writing is the ability to marry together the humorous and the lyrical. We start with the former - “My lover is the colour of springtime sky, bordered in pillar-box red and Oxford blue” - then a lovely shift into the more humorous - “I’m no Miss Chaste of Paperchase. I’ve been besotted with Basildon Bonds and manhandled by buff manillas.” The humour here is sound-based - internal rhyme, alliteration - so much skill to how that’s captured on the page. I also love how there’s so much character and narrative exploration within the extended metaphor.

Zoo (Jeff Landon | New Flash Fiction Review)

Why I like it (CC): Who can resist gentle-giant Jude? He’s mock tough but vulnerable; in love with his ‘genius’ caretaker, Sookie; and both viciously dismissive and sweetly protective. Landon has spoken about mixing humour and pathos, and ‘Zoo’ is a sublime example. After softening us up with line after line that’s laugh-out-loud funny, he socks us in the guts with a ‘last day of summer’ closing section of gorilla-strength sadness.

Hemiboreal (Elsa Nekola | The Cincinnati Review)

Why I like it: The setting! The sensory detail! I love the way the author forces us to reset our perspective after the interruptive ‘when we were still married’. I love the concluding sense of acceptance, how the narrator draws comfort from remaining in a place that’s bigger than any relationship, a place that, through its privations, had sustained their ‘slapped-together’ marriage. I love that the piece is addressed, without rancour, to the partner who left.

Abbreviated Glossary (Gay Degani | originally published in Melusine | republished by Kathy Fish)

Why I like it: The sub-headings! How they do so much work! The white space that invites us so deeply into the story. This was probably the first time I read a piece of short fiction with sub-headings, and it knocked me out. The link that directed me to the piece referred to it as ‘a classic’, so it had a reputation to live up to. Which of course it did, big time, moving from sensuality to double-whammy heartbreak in only 150 words.

PROMPT: Write a piece with one-word sub-headings. Make sure they work really hard. Set yourself a constraint for each section, like no more than three lines. Or two.

On the Line (Meghan Phillips | matchbook)

Why I like it: How the homey opening details both establish the period perfectly and set up the danger. How the narrator doesn’t tell us who she is, but reveals her emotions through her actions and thoughts. How there’s only one line of dialogue and it’s from the lineman, adding to the distance and poignancy. How we sense the protagonist’s loneliness long before she tells us. How the only connection she can make with her absent lineman is through being lonely too.

Your Life as a Bottle (Sarah Freligh | Pithead Chapel)

Why I like it: How it’s both breathtakingly concise (six sentences, 168 words) and incredibly detailed. How we learn all we need to know about the second-person narrator through the way she copes with ‘the cute girls with good teeth and cleavage’ and the way she heads to a bar to drink herself pretty; how, for all her reliance on bottles, there’s a glimpse of the little girl she must once have been as she ‘marries’ her ketchups ‘in a little ceremony’; how the closing sentence delivers the title.

Roll and Curl (Ingrid Jendrzejewski | Bath Flash Fiction)

Why I like it: I love this glimpse of small-town America; how the story isn’t about news of a death, but a moment before that; how the bossy narrator lets her customer laugh a little longer, have three more minutes to enjoy the familiar ‘spring rain’ of the hairspray. I love the compassion in the final two sentences, how we leave the story early, knowing the narrator isn’t just handing Mrs Philips some tissues, but helping her to retain some dignity through what’s about to happen.

PROMPT: Set your story in a shop or other high-street outlet. Show us the humanity behind the pat ‘have a nice day’ phrases scripted by head office. Show us some customer care with real heart.

An Alternate Theory Regarding Natural Disasters, as Posited by the Teenage Girls of Clove County, Kansas (Myna Chang | Bending Genres)

Why I like it: The juxtaposition of the tornado with the ennui of the collective narrators, expressed through no less than seventeen verbs in the first two paragraphs, starting in medias res with ‘ripped’, ‘peeling’, ‘powdering’, before slowing right down to ‘shimmered’, ‘assess’, ‘sipping’. The specificity, the fabulous proper nouns: ‘Crystal Toynbee’, ‘the Two Dudes Enchilada Hut’. The repeated ‘It was the summer’. The tornado-like structure: fast, swirling beginning, circular ending.

Pantoum for 1979 (Brenda Miller | Short Reads)

Why I like it: I’d never heard of pantoums until I took a (wonderful) Sarah Freligh course in 2024. The advance-and-retreat structure completely blew me away. I printed it and used highlighters to mark the repeated or near-repeated phrases. The form is, as Miller has observed, ‘perfect for topics that are rather obsessive’, like this young narrator moving to a house where ravens will wake her up, where Francisco will touch her ‘just once on the hip’, where she’ll bake ‘loaves and loaves of bread’.

Prompt: Go on, try it. A piece with four-sentence paragraphs in which you echo the second and fourth sentences of one paragraph in the first and third sentences of the next. Warning: it’s obsessive.

The Meat Ration (Kate Horsley | The Cincinnati Review)

Why I like it: How the opening emotional bleakness matches the setting, with its marram grass like an ‘unruly beard’; how the ersatz food evokes the drab colours of wartime austerity; how Hilda appears horribly pragmatic in the way she acquires better fare for her son’s birthday. The story would be complete in just two paragraphs, but Horsley goes further, twisting the knife, conjuring Frank back from the sea, his love dissolving in the reality of what ‘making-do’ means in practice for his widow.

A Poet Rejuvenates The Parts Other Treatments Cannot Reach (Caroline Greene | Free Flash Fiction)

Why I like it: Because it captivated me immediately with its edition of Keats ‘brindled with notes’ in a ‘long-ago teenage scrawl’. Because it’s a sensory feast, rich in both descriptive power and emotional resonance, from the opening ‘sardonic smile’ to the ‘edge of undiscovered lands’ and back to ‘the girl-next-door’, mirroring Keats’s own love life as well as his ‘search for fellow poets hidden in the hills’. Because I absolutely loved the exultant triple ‘Yes’ of its glorious conclusion.

What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?

Next month’s selection will be chosen by Jenny Wong and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 15th July.

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Opportunities to work with Matt

UNIQUE SELLING POINTS (workshop): 5th July 2025,09:00-10:30 BST (open for bookings)

BEYOND THESE SHORES (panel discussion): 5th August 2025,19:00-20:30 BST (open for bookings)

COLOURFUL CHARACTERS: 4th-17th August 2025 (open for bookings)

I HEAR VOICES (workshop): 2nd September 2025,19:00-20:30 BST (open for bookings)

I HEAR VOICES (workshop): 6th September 2025,09:00-10:30 BST (open for bookings)

GLORIOUS WORDS: 8th-21st September 2025 (open for bookings)

GO WITH THE FLOW: 13th-26th October 2025 (email me on matt@mattkendrick.co.uk to get your name on the priority list)

LYRICAL WRITING: 10th-23rd November 2025 (email me on matt@mattkendrick.co.uk to get your name on the priority list)

Details

Editing

NOVEL / NOVELLA EDITING: First steps review / structural review / line edit / submission review

EDITING FOR COLLECTIONS: Structural overview report / line edit

SHORT FICTION EDITING: Structural review / line edit / detailed edit

Bluesky: @jamesmontgomery.bsky.social

Website: jamesmontgomerywrites.com

If you aren’t familiar with his work, here’s one of his pieces to start things off:

911, what’s your emergency? (James Montgomery | Maudlin House)

Why I like it (MK): Telling a story entirely in dialogue is such a hard thing to do. Without the possibility of anchoring details (where are we, who is talking), everything needs to be implied through the spoken words; this is like a magic trick, the narrative building through its small tensions and notes of surprise, so much hidden in the white space and ellipses between the words.

(JM) For this month’s Mondettes, I have chosen ten stories from before 2020. There's such a wealth of treasure in the archives of so many lit mags, and I wanted to use the opportunity to shine a spotlight on some that, I personally feel, have been in the dark a little too long.

Dissolve (Santino Prinzi | Moon Park Review)

Why I like it (JM): Never-endingly beautiful, with such immersive details, and a particularly important story to tell during these times. Lesley C. Weston’s accompanying artwork is simply gorgeous, too.

; ;;;; ;;; Spells I Love You in Semicolons (Georgia Bellas | Matchbook)

Why I like it: A story that takes risks should always be applauded, and this is certainly one of those. I admire how it extends a hand to the reader, an offer to collaborate in its drafting. I find that level of trust inspiring.

Our Bright Lights On (Lynn Mundell | Milk Candy Review)

Why I like it: Pure magic. The imagery is so powerful, so hopeful. And I love the choice of setting—a prenatal yoga class—in which to tell this story.

PROMPT: Choose an everyday setting that brings a specific group of people together and have something supernatural occur. See where it takes you, and what it reveals about the group.

Deaths I’ve Imagined (Kathleen Lane | Monkeybicycle)

Why I like it: Another one that trusts the reader implicitly. Funny, honest and surprising, this hermit crab ingeniously builds to that inevitable ending.

PROMPT: Create a hermit crab story that lists imagined happenings on a particular theme. Think about how the list gives a sense of that character’s inner life and their unique way of seeing the world.

Thunder (Adam Lock | Fictive Dream)

Why I like it: Wonderfully told, this tale about navigating social dynamics and discomfort leads to a moment of genuine connection. The characters of Rebecca and Karl feel so real.

Sometimes, I Think About Mrs Grozny (Emily Devane | Flash Frontier)

Why I like it: A historical flash that’s impossible to not love. Here, a child uses the world they know to make sense of the enigmatic new music teacher, Mrs Grozny. I admire the musicality and playfulness of this piece too, with its ‘crOTZCHets and qUAYYvers’.

PROMPT: Bring together two characters—an adult and a child—who are from very different worlds. Explore why one leaves such a lasting impact on the other.

Good Boys (Tamara Schuyler | SmokeLong Quarterly)

Why I like it: Devastating. A cruel, distressing read, which deals with issues of child and animal abuse, but one that’s masterfully told. Your heart breaks for this cycle of violence.

Everyone Was In On It Except You (Neil Clark | Cheap Pop)

Why I like it: Neil is one of those rare writers where his stories entertain in terms of content and enthral in terms of technique in equal measure. Every story of his lands in spectacular fashion, and this one is no exception.

Hi, Hi, Hi! (Meg Pokrass | New Flash Fiction Review)

Why I like it: Here, Meg so effortlessly tinges humour with sadness. There’s a lot of tension at play in this piece—fleeting moments of connection vs. unmet expectations, imagination vs. memory—but it never once feels weighed down by these.

How To Tell A Story (Kaj Tanaka | Jellyfish Review)

Why I like it: A fitting flash to end on, perhaps. It questions the purpose and nature of stories, and—most importantly—leaves most unsaid, inviting the reader to engage with its evocative imagery without seeking absolute meaning or answers.

What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?

Next month’s selection will be chosen by Chris Cottom and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 17th June.

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Opportunities to work with Matt

UNIQUE SELLING POINTS (workshop): 1st July 2025,19:00-20:30 BST (open for bookings)

BEYOND THESE SHORES (panel discussion): 5th August 2025,19:00-20:30 BST (open for bookings)

COLOURFUL CHARACTERS: 4th-17th August 2025 (open for bookings)

I HEAR VOICES (workshop): 2nd September 2025,19:00-20:30 BST (open for bookings)

GLORIOUS WORDS: 8th-21st September 2025 (email me on matt@mattkendrick.co.uk to get your name on the priority list)

GO WITH THE FLOW: 13th-26th October 2025 (email me on matt@mattkendrick.co.uk to get your name on the priority list)

LYRICAL WRITING: 10th-23rd November 2025 (email me on matt@mattkendrick.co.uk to get your name on the priority list)

Details

Editing

NOVEL / NOVELLA EDITING: First steps review / structural review / line edit / submission review

EDITING FOR COLLECTIONS: Structural overview report / line edit

SHORT FICTION EDITING: Structural review / line edit / detailed edit

Bluesky: bdiggswrites.bsky.social

Website: barbaradiggswrites.com

If you aren’t familiar with her work, here’s one of her pieces to start things off:

Granddaddy at War (Barbara Diggs | FlashBack Fiction)

Why I like it (MK): I think there is something so powerful about the first time you become aware of a particular writer and this was one of those pieces. This has haunted me since my first read. The writing is precise. The sense of characterisation is so vivid. And the way the emotions are so restrained pushes a reader to think not only about the injustices of the past but about how those same prejudices are still present today. Historical flash at its finest.

And At Christmas I’ll Visit the Nursing Home, Pretend An Elderly Couple Are My Grandparents (Jo Withers | SmokeLong Quarterly)

Why I like it: The curious title immediately pulled me into this story. The narrator’s determination to live out her dream of having a family dinner–even a fake, dysfunctional one–on a milestone birthday was in equal parts touching and funny. Withers tells us so much about the narrator in wonderfully slant ways: through the detailed family personas the narrator crafted, the way her fake mom and sister reacted to the scenario, and her “incandescent” happiness when an outsider saw her faux family as the real thing. This ending brought me back to the title: I wondered whether the elderly couple would readily join in the farce for their own interests, and the three of them would live happily ever after in their fantasy.

Honey? (Daniel Fraser | Cincinnati Review)

Why I like it: I love stories that involve metaphorical hauntings and ghosts, and this one is so unique I kept returning to it again and again. As the narrator moves through the house in search of his wife's purse, he–and we–feel haunted. But by what? Lights that are on, then off. A tap mysteriously left running. An attic that “wasn’t there before.” The echoes of children, now grown and gone. And a wife whose presence is felt, but who is never seen. Is she even there? For me, the real ghosts in this story are time and memory. Everything is fleeting.

Some guilty pleasures on this side of the border (Moisés R. Delgado | CRAFT Literary)

Why I like it: This poignant story asks and answers the question: What makes home, home? It’s a piercing question, especially for those who have made their home in a foreign land. I love how Delgado shows through sharp detail that home is less linked to a nationality than to the people in our lives and the seemingly small things–from nightly weather reports to a familiar ice cream brand–that give us pleasure and root us to a place.

Retirement Living (Roberta Beary | 100-Word Story)

Why I like it: I was wowed by how much meaning and emotion was packed into this 100-word, one-sentence story. This piece has so much tension: not only the protagonist’s relationship with her mother and the violence she experienced but also the give-and-take rhythm that raises the emotional stakes. I was also blown away by how seamlessly the story segued into the final revelation that despite the mother’s insistence on using euphemisms, she did not, in fact, minimize the abuse that occurred, but showed her love and understanding as she was best able.

Prompt: Write a story where the characters don’t understand each other because of differences in communication. But how far apart are they really?

Bullets (Avitus B. Carle | Passages North)

Why I like it: I adore how this story twists the idiom “bite the bullet.” Here, the collective narrator, a group of young women, very deliberately bites on bullets, not to grit their teeth and suffer silently through an unpleasant experience, but to use the bullets as weapons against those who seek to diminish them, as their mothers and grandmothers did before them. I love the resoluteness of the language, the powerful, clipped sentences reminiscent of bullets. It shows so well how style and structure can play as much of a role in creating a story as the words used.

Dead Things I Gave Birth To (Michelle Brady | Fractured Lit)

Why I like it: Here is another excellent ghost story, but this time, the haunting is the narrator’s past actions. The narrator’s matter-of-factness clobbered me, especially the lines: “I never knew his name, just his crime,” and “We could only see heat, so I didn't know what color his clothes were," as well as the impersonal, yet deeply meaningful, name the narrator gave the ghost–One. Oof. The title is also brilliant. It brings home the fact that the narrator and the ghost have an irrevocably intimate link despite not knowing each other. Describing his killing as a birth is a stunning, chilling truth.

Only Water, Then Sky (Melissa Fitzpatrick | Atlas and Alice)

Why I like it: Oh, I love this story. It’s poetry, it’s multiple metaphors, it’s harsh, and it's gorgeous. I love how the second-person POV allows us to become the fish, innocent and ignorant in its watery world and then permits us to experience the exciting, visceral thrill of having a new understanding of the world, even if this experience is almost certain to cause its downfall. This story could represent so many different experiences in life.

My Life is Not a Horror Movie Starring Lupita Nyong’o (Elisabeth Ingram Wallace | Wigleaf)

Why I like it: The sensory detail in this story is off the charts: "weevils rabble in a beam of sunlight," "warm olive oil dripping yellow on the floor," and "the hollow cough of broken pipes” are just a few of my favorite phrases. We see how gorgeous, specific details like these can do so much heavy lifting, because this piece is lean. The narrator tells her story by contrasting her life experiences to the protagonist's in a horror movie. But even as the narrator describes a scene that’s undoubtedly frightening in the film, she often follows it with the barest hint of her own experiences whose implications are just as chilling. Wallace shows that less is definitely more, particularly when it comes to evoking feeling.

Prompt: Write a horror/thriller flash that has no explicit references to violence or fear.

The Story Where the Mother Dies in Childbirth (Emily Rinkema | Milk Candy Review)

Why I like it: Okay, last “haunting” story. This time, the narrator is haunted by the absence of her mother, whom the title implies died in childbirth. I love how the reader is swept up in the whirlwind of ways the narrator kills off mothers in her stories. The intense repetition and the detailed descriptions of the deaths convey how much the narrator is haunted by her own loss, however unconsciously. One has the impression of the narrator as a person trying again and again to imagine what it might be like to have a mother, but ultimately unable to do so.

Textiles (Daniel Turtel | Electric Lit)

Why I like it: A story for our times. Here, a mansion sits on a hill, overshadowing the town below. The townspeople know that a cruel and dangerous former politician lives there, but they are to pretend he is a wealthy textile maker. They are outraged and plot rebellion, but only in furious whispers over free drinks. Written in first-person plural, we readers are drawn into the collective narrators’ complicity and forced to consider chilling questions about what we purchase with our collective silence in the face of a lie and why. The ending gave me goosebumps. The bartender, too.

Prompt: Write a story about a character who is asked to tell a lie for an unsavory person or potentially suffer negative consequences. What do they decide? How do they feel about their decision?

What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?

Next month’s selection will be chosen by James Montgomery and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 20th May.

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Opportunities to work with Matt

COLOURFUL CHARACTERS: 4th-17th August 2025 (email me on matt@mattkendrick.co.uk to get your name on the priority list)

GLORIOUS WORDS: 8th-21st September 2025 (email me on matt@mattkendrick.co.uk to get your name on the priority list)

GO WITH THE FLOW: 13th-26th October 2025 (email me on matt@mattkendrick.co.uk to get your name on the priority list)

LYRICAL WRITING: 10th-23rd November 2025 (email me on matt@mattkendrick.co.uk to get your name on the priority list)

Details

Editing

NOVEL / NOVELLA EDITING: First steps review / structural review / line edit / submission review

EDITING FOR COLLECTIONS: Structural overview report / line edit

SHORT FICTION EDITING: Structural review / line edit / detailed edit

Sumitra’s collaborative hybrid chapbook “Are You Willing?” with Amy Marques is available from Bottlecap Press

Sumitra’s free trauma-informed writing workshop will go live on March 17 at 5pm EST, via the amazing Writer’s Workout - a free, virtual conference hosted on YouTube (https://www.writersworkout.net/).

If you aren’t familiar with her work, here’s one of her pieces to start things off:

My Grandmother Paati Says She Will Show These Vellaikaarans How To Do Colonisation Properly, Isn’t It? (Sumitra Singam | The Welkin Writing Prize)

Why I like it (MK): the voice in this piece is stunning. I love how the “Isn’t It?” in the title does so much to anchor that. Then, within the space of just one hundred words, we have a whole life on a postage stamp - a sense of past, present, future - all brought to life with such clear, specific details.

(SS) For this month’s Mondettes, I have chosen ten stories by writers from the Global Majority (thanks to the amazing work of Rosemary Campbell Stephens who came up with this term).

The Flight of Swallows (Sher Ting | Flash Flood, 2022)

Why I like it (SS): I love that this amazingly crafted piece is Sher’s debut flash. I love the specificity of the details she has chosen to bring this deeply intimate story to life, even in the emotional distance she shows us, and the inclusion of Mandarin characters.

Beloved, There Is A Song Where The Ocean Meets The Sky (Tom Okafor | Flash Flood, 2023)

Why I like it: I love the way the poetry in this piece gracefully makes way for the plot, and how that is given to us so tenderly and carefully.

Interlude (Jun Ying Wen | Empty House Press)

Why I like it: There is so much unsaid, or merely hinted at, in this tiny piece, and yet, through the startling imagery (“the cornfield of their mouths”), we get such a vivid and evocative picture.

PROMPT: Tell a story about a quiet afternoon with a friend.

Sweeter Than Sugar (Laila Amado | Boudin, The McNeese Review)

Why I like it: A twist ending is so hard to do well, but this feels so natural and so earned. I love the specific details in the opening, and how this ties back to the present.

Funnel Cloud Baby (Andy Lopez | Flash Frog)

Why I like it: This piece uses the weather to give us a much deeper story, and the more you read, the more layers of this story become revealed. It feels deep and endless, particularly hard in this word count.

Tell the Bees (Varsha Venkatesh | Exposition Review)

Why I like it: I love this completely unique take on this theme. I love the hope and joy inherent in the request the narrator makes, even if the characters’ style of relationship hasn’t allowed for that before.

What Happened Was (Christina Cooke | Split Lip)

Why I like it: A great title can truly elevate a story, add another layer to it. We are set up to think we are going to be given a direct narration of “what happened”, and the writer cleverly sets out subverting this.

PROMPT: Write a story which does the opposite of its title.

The World According to My Grandmother (Pegah Ouji | Asian American Writers’ Workshop)

Why I like it: This piece seems like four separate vignettes, but Pegah has used such clever imagery and themes to link them so that we get a fuller picture as we read.

Grief Is a K-Drama Playing on the TV in Another Room (Sylvia Santiago | HAD)

Why I like it: I love the clever way Sylvia has shown us how overwhelming emotion can be ungraspable, like a foreign language.

Dreams of the Fallen Angelic Youth (Shiwei Zhou | Hex Literary)

Why I like it: This story makes the absurd and surreal so mundane that you have no choice but to connect with the deep humanity in it.

PROMPT: Write about someone relating their, or others’ dreams

What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?

Next month’s selection will be chosen by Barbara Diggs and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 15th April.

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Opportunities to work with Matt

Lyrical Writing

How do we craft writing so infused with musicality that it deserves to be read out loud? How do we get a reader to speed up or slow down? How do we sustain rhythm and flow from one sentence to the next? This flash fiction course explores various tricks and techniques which can be used to lend a lyrical quality to our prose.

• 9th - 22nd June 2025

• Tempo | Rhythm | Sound | Motifs

• Online, fully asynchronous course and workshop

• Pay-what-you-can pricing. £105 recommended

Details / Book

Editing

NOVEL / NOVELLA EDITING: First steps review / structural review / line edit / submission review

EDITING FOR COLLECTIONS: Structural overview report / line edit

SHORT FICTION EDITING: Structural review / line edit / detailed edit

If you aren’t familiar with her work, here’s one of her pieces to start things off:

Changeling (L Mari Harris | Flash Frog)

Why I like it (MK): there is such a vividness to the way the characters in this piece are brought to life, so many cleverly-picked details that expand outwards so that I see these people as completely unique human beings. I am drawn into their world as a result, a world of simmering tensions which are built up in such a skilful fashion. At the level of language, I love the tonal shifts (the splashes of humour, the moments of sad reflection) and how every level of the story is working in harmony with the others.

Good Neighbors (Cody Shrum | Have Has Had)

Repetition can be hard to pull off well. It has to propel the story forward or else it falls flat on its face. But this story utilizes repetition perfectly. We see people trying to be “good neighbors,” wanting to be members of their community. Each paragraph increases their level of involvement. Their hearts are pure, but their actions grow more intrusive. Their community continues to ignore them, until outside violence takes the “good neighbors.” We are left with all the good things they did that the community happily uses without a thought to who was responsible for these positive things. If that isn’t a microcosm of the world we live in, I don’t know what is. Shrum handles this perfectly.

Hum (Tara Isabel Zambrano | New Flash Fiction Review)

I come back to this tale over and over again. Zambrano creates a relationship that is a little absurdist, a little ethereal, a little fantastical. In lesser hands, this story would not work. To pull this off, you have to firmly root this story in realism. I never like to give too much away when I tell people to read this story. I want them to experience every brilliant line for themselves.

Every Which Way, the Wind (Pat Foran | Reckon Review)

Foran has an uncanny ability to write stories that make you feel you’re inhabiting his heart and soul, and you will question whether you’re reading fiction or non-fiction. Equally astonishing is Foran’s ability to understand a truly great piece cannot be just about the writer. It has to pull the reader in, too, to the point where the reader viscerally experiences the piece for themselves. While I have many favorite Foran stories, this one is probably one of my favorite favorites. What he achieves is such a short space is nothing short of miraculous.

Hero (Mike Wilson | XRAY Lit)

Rarely does a story make me jealous that I wasn’t the one who wrote it, but the first time I read Wilson’s story I was very jealous. And even more stunned. What Wilson achieves here is nothing short of stellar. Each sentence, each image, circles and propels. Slowly at first, then gaining momentum, until its explosive, sudden stop.

Sisters (Cezarija Abartis | matchbook)

I am such a sucker for a really great breathless paragraph, and Abartis’s “Sisters” is such a wonderful example of what can be achieved. The breaking of an heirloom bowl roots us in the story of a family of women tenuously holding on amongst squabbles and not feeling seen as individuals. And yet we are given hope at the end with that yes that is so much more than a sister forgiving her sibling for something that hasn’t happened yet.

A Queer Girl’s Guide to Reading Fairy Tales (Rebecca Turkewitz | The Cincinnati Review)

What happens when we imagine our way into an age-old story? How can we find ways to make it relevant to our modern existence? What I love about this story is how it resonates with the reader, allowing a way into commonalities of what it means to be a hero, a heroine, to exist within the world and within oneself. The repetition of “You may” sets the stage for finding a way into strength and resilience, building on everything possible in what feels like an impossible world.

A Brief Natural History of the Girls in the Office (Sarah Freligh | Milk Candy Review)

Freligh has a gift for walking that line with her pieces: Is it a micro fiction or is it prose poetry? When a piece transcends its standard form confines, that’s when you realize you must pay attention. This is one of my faves by Freligh. We see what probably amounts to decades of a group of women in the “wild,” surviving day by day, enjoying small moments, taking hits as they come, each image taut, perfect, defining.

Twelve (Leonora Desar | Passages North)

The cusp of adolescence is such a difficult time to write about well. Desar is a fave of mine because of her strong voice and deft skills. She never leaves you unsatisfied as a reader. Every image builds towards an emotional reaction as these girls begin to navigate life, adulthood, and the parents in their lives who are far from perfect.

Phylum (Rita Bullwinkel | Bomb)

I love one-word titles and “Phylum” perfectly represents a relationship that is unclear, even disputed between how the couple sees themselves and their relation to each other. Repetition is used to build the fracture of this man and woman throughout the story: “I was the type”, repeated in scenes and tying back wonderfully to the title.

Andy Warhol Sightings (Valerie Fox | Juked)

In a great flash, every single image must build to create the whole. Fox’s stellar use of specific moments throughout these Andy Warhol “sightings” encapsulates an extraordinary life played out in very ordinary circumstances. We’ll all supposedly be famous for fifteen minutes, but in the end, we all end up in the same place, and Fox hits you with that at the end.

What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?

Next month’s selection will be chosen by Sumitra Singam and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 18th March.

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Opportunities to work with Matt

Go With The Flow

How do we create flow in our writing, sentences that slip one into the next like a river of words? This flash fiction course explores sentence craft at a molecular level, thinking about the connection of ideas, rhythmic patterns and thematic cohesion.

• 5th - 18th May 2025

• Anchors | Bridges | Stitches | Threads.

• Online, fully asynchronous course and workshop.

• Pay-what-you-can pricing. £105 recommended.

Details / Book

Editing

NOVEL / NOVELLA EDITING: First steps review / structural review / line edit / submission review

EDITING FOR COLLECTIONS: Structural overview report / line edit

SHORT FICTION EDITING: Structural review / line edit / detailed edit

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/finnwritesstuff.bsky.social

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/finnianburnett/

Website: https://finnburnett.com/

If you aren’t familiar with their work, here’s one of their pieces to start things off:

How to Erase Indelible Ink From The Skin of Your Arms (Finnian Burnett | Off Topic Publishing)

Why I like it (MK): this is a poem that could easily read as flash; I love how it sits in the hinterland between the two forms. The build of character and emotion is brilliant, wonderfully underpinned by the creative imagery and the use of repeating motifs.

It Never Matter What Happened at Home (Sumitra Singam | Forge Lit Mag)

Why I like it (FB): I love the flow of this piece, the breathlessness, the way dialogue is incorporated into the overall narrative. It’s sad, hopeful, poignant, and even though there’s a great loss, there’s a way forward, too.

PROMPT: Start a story with “It never mattered…”

Let’s Sing All the Swear Words We Know (Anita Goveas | Lost Balloon)

Why I like it: This is a lyrical journey through a life from infancy to early adulthood. I love the almost sing-song quality of the second person repetition and the use of second person to pull me into the life of the narrator.

Elevator Pitch for a Dystopian Young Adult Novel (Sage Tyrtle | Tiny Molecules)

Why I like it: I’m always a fan of a good hermit crab and this story in the form of an elevator pitch doesn’t disappoint. I love the subversion of societal expectations, the removal of the male “heroes” to the background, and the “phalanx of girls” fighting oppression. I often quote the last line of this story in my daily life.

The Burial of Mrs. Charles D. Jackson (Barbara Diggs | Bath Flash Fiction Award)

Why I like it: This story is luscious with visceral details—the way certain fabrics move around a body, the smell of food, the gathering of women around a widow. The unraveling of the title’s double-meaning leaves me with such a feeling a joyful vindication.

Obit (Rebecca Harrison | Crow & Cross Keys)

Why I like it: I share this story in my creative writing classes more than any other story. It has so many levels—so much to discuss. On a craft level, I love the way the author breaks the fourth wall to address the reader. “Who among us hasn’t tried?” Tiny details stand out and some of the word choices are brilliant. On the surface, it’s just an obituary, but on a deeper level, it’s an indictment of the way society treats creatives while they are alive. Pure brilliance.

Prompt: Write a piece lauding someone—an obituary or a speech giving someone an award.

Let’s Say (Julia Stayer | SmokeLong Quarterly)

Why I like it: Stream-of-consciousness, layer upon layer, and a crushing story showing that traumatic events are often traumatic on all sides.

The Flavours We’ll Lose (Brecht De Poortere | Reflex Press)

Why I like it: This gorgeous dystopian story gives us a relationship in the middle of tough times. The small dips into world-building and the horrors of epic climate disaster, and in the middle of this, a small child having a birthday and a mother who wants to make it special.

I’ve stashed an envelope with five $100 bills, for the day you call (Cole Beauchamp | MoonPark Review)

Why I like it: I was fully invested in this love that can’t be, in the hope of the characters overcoming the challenges, in the story under the story, the things left unsaid. My heart hurt after reading this story and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for a long time.

Prompt: Two people, deeply in love, can’t be together for some reason. How do they keep the feelings alive?

Blood Flows Slower Than Water (Jo Gatford | Flash 500)

Why I like it: It’s hard to pick just one story by Jo Gatford to love the best. I chose this one because of the richness of the language—it flows like menstrual blood and doesn’t shy away from talking about the genuine power of women and their bodies.

I Married A Taxidermist (Jude Higgins | Flash Flood)

Why I like it: The rich detail, the absolute understated tone of the entire story, the absurdity, and the last line which made me laugh out loud with its double meaning.

What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?

Next month’s selection will be chosen by L Mari Harris and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 18th February.

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Glorious Words

How do we choose the right words to sharpen up our prose? How do we make our writing unique without it becoming obscure? Is the road to hell really paved with adverbs? This flash fiction course explores language in all its guts and glory, focussing on unique images, concision versus specificity and how to create original tone.

• 31st March - 13th April 2025

• Specificity | Imagery | Tone | Miscellany.

• Online, fully asynchronous course and workshop.

• Pay-what-you-can pricing. £105 recommended.

Details / Book

Editing

NOVEL / NOVELLA EDITING: First steps review, structural review, line edit, proof edit, submission review

EDITING FOR COLLECTIONS: structural overview report, line edit, proof edit

SHORT FICTION EDITING: Structural review, line edit, detailed edit, proof edit

Since choosing my “top” twenty, I’ve since thought of a few more stories which I’ve added as “bonus” picks below. No doubt, I’ll keep adding to this, for my own benefit as much as anyone else’s.

Poison Ivy (Sarah Freligh | Fictive Dream)

Why I like it: the vastness of story contained in such a small space, incorporating past and present and future in such a seamless, breathless way; this was a piece that spoke to me on so many levels.

PROMPT: find a story from your archive of “abandoned pieces” that only focuses on one time period then create a backstory echo that you might weave around that scene.

An Implicit Comparison Between Two Unlike Things (Stephanie Yu | Swamp Pink)

Why I like it: I love how wonderfully meta this is, how it is as much a contemplation on the art of crafting a story as it is a contemplation on life and death; this is a piece with so many layers, the sort of piece to read over and over because there is so much hidden in these depths.

A Case for Forbidden Words (Ifreen Raveen | SmokeLong Quarterly)

Why I like it: the rhythm of the writing is so brilliantly insistent – there are anaphora lists (“Calling for help. Calling for death. Calling for mothers.”), there are mirrored pairs (“Men crying, women wailing”), there are repeating motifs (“And that word is Azadi”). I love the use of the imperative, commanding a reader to experience the story for themselves.

The end (Shaun Levin | New Flash Fiction Review)

Why I like it: I’ve mainly picked these pieces by what has stayed with me. This one has such a unique feel to it, and I love how it travels through different tones (the humour at the start, the sadness that creeps in later on), how so much of the story is dedicated to not telling the story.

PROMPT: write a piece where a character uses humour to avoid something they would rather not think about.

The Dead Guy’s Phone Keeps Calling Me (Francince Witte | Gooseberry Pie)

Why I like it: the way it shifts from sentence to sentence, each new element ramping up the underlying tension, the title hanging over everything like a shadow.

This is the spot where – (Nora Nadjarian | Fractured Lit)

Why I like it: the personification of the “moonlight-sequinned sea”, the interplay between dialogue and description, the way the M-dash of the title creates a sense for a reader of holding their breath, waiting for that final paragraph to understand what happened here.

PROMPT: write a story where a feature of the landscape is personified in some way, thinking about what the voice might sound like and what they might have to say to a specific character (perhaps an apology, perhaps a confession, perhaps a secret, perhaps a criticism, perhaps a demand)

Whale Fall (Shauna Friesen | Gone Lawn)

Why I like it: I’m a sucker for original language and wow does this piece have that in spades. I could quote most of the piece as highlight sentences, but here are some favourites – “The bubbling blubber slits”, “Chunk me like a jaw-shaped moon”, “a gore-slab pushed trenchward”, “octopuses yarn their arms through the loom of my ribcage”.

Girl Locks (Claudia Monpere | Split Lip Magazine)

Why I like it: this is such a chilling story full of powerful imagery. That imagery (“He is the language of crosshatch and locks” / “in buttery kitchen sunlight”) is so uniquely creative – I love how the choices fit both character and scenario in such an effective way.

This Isn’t the Start of the Story (Sumitra Singam | Heroin Chic)

Why I like it: ooft! Such a powerful piece. The anaphora repetition of “it doesn’t start” works so well to build emotional resonance, other repeating elements building at the same time (“Ma’s Ma” / “Ma’s Ma’s Ma”); the whole thing brought to the page with such lyrical skill.

Chaos (Patricia Q. Bidar | Fractured Lit)

Why I like it: writing from a collective point of view is such a great choice to tell this particular story; what I find so clever here is how we are constantly asked to re-evaluate everything with the narrative, how the stakes and emotions shift around underneath.

PROMPT: write a story using a collective point of view which focuses on an event or crime in a small community and use the collective POV to examine the way the truth of the situation might shift over the course of time.

Moonlit Field (Andrew Bertaina | Literary Namjooning)

Why I like it: this piece was chosen by someone else earlier in the year, but I couldn’t not include it in my top 20 for 2024; it is so beautifully lyrical. Writing these breathless, one-sentence stories requires so much skill to make them read as seamlessly as this one.

The Interview (Emily Rinkema | Variant Lit)

Why I like it: picking just one piece from Emily Rinkema was tough because she has had several gems published this year. I’ve ended up choosing this one because of the unique scenario set up so brilliantly at the start and explored in different ways as the piece moves through its different gears.

PROMPT: what unexpected position might you be interviewed for? Imaginary friend? Chief mourner at a funeral? Godparent? Dance partner at a disco, nightclub or ball? Fellow passenger of a train compartment?

Open Them If You Don’t Believe Me (K.C. Mead-Brewer | Matchbook Lit)

Why I like it: the author’s note that accompanies this story talks about the story’s shape as a tree, and I love that comparison. Normally, in pieces like this, balance is achieved by creating segments of roughly equal length, but here the drastic difference between segment lengths really stands out.

Teaching a Young David Petraeus about War (Adam Straus | HAD)

Why I like it: there is such a powerful sense of message here, so many layers beneath the story. This is a triptych of paragraphs that relate at the level of theme rather than the level of story and I love the way they chime together.

Splinter (Didi Wood | Fractured Lit)

Why I like it: this is another single-sentence story, but one with a very different emotional tone. I love how the choice of writing this as a single sentence is so effective at building the emotions of the piece. I also love how that single word title connects with the story in so many different ways.

National Anthem (Chloe Chun Seim | Milk Candy Review)

Why I like it: this story is both vast and intimate – it covers childhood, adulthood, what is real, what is imagined; it evokes a specific place but also looks outwards to the “nation”. It is also so wonderfully balanced – there are two competing elements here (the shooter / the discovery of identity) braided together in such a clever way.

The Princess of Tides (Amy Barnes | Literary Namjooning)

Why I like it: certain writers craft pieces that only they could write, and Amy Barnes is one of those writers. This piece has everything that makes her writing unique – it is beautifully lyrical, it is full of odd details, it delves into character, it resonates at the level of emotions.

Revision (Beth Kanter | New Flash Fiction Review)

Why I like it: this piece hit me from its opening sentence. Straightaway we are into the “revision” referred to in the title, imagining Anne Frank’s life if the world had been different, the implied tension between the reality and the imagined scene, all of it ending with a note of cautious hope that is so universal.

PROMPT: take a real life figure who died young and imagine them when they are old; what story might emerge from this?

The Things You Think Are Precious (Kathy Fish | Ghost Parachute)

Why I like it: the way this piece continuously pushes away from the revelation it is driving towards is so effective. Kathy Fish is a writer who never fails to bring a whole universe to life in the space of a few short words, and here we have that and so much more. I love the tonal shifts in this (“I was an only child, something they all considered mildly exotic” is a particular highlight) and the way the characters walk off the page in such vivid fashion.

After too many wines at the student club, your friend shows you a photograph of her infant daughter (Gillian O'Shaughnessy | The Welkin Writing Prize)

Why I like it: This was the piece I picked as the winner of this year’s Welkin Mini. As I say in my judge’s comments, I was mesmerised by the layers of the story, how we shift through so much narrative in just one hundred words. The title does so much heavy-lifting. There is so much implication in the small details - the curling edges of the photo, the colour contrast in that garden. I love how the end of the piece asks us to reflect back and ponder.

BONUS STORIES

Baby (Ani Banerjee | Swamp Pink)

Crossroads Diner Blues, 1937 (Myna Chang | Centaur Lit)

Double-Barrelled (Subhravandu Das | Vestal Review)

Nice Little Girls (Jo Gatford | Cease, Cows)

Australia (J.W. McCollum | Flash Frog)

Triple-Digit Fire Weather (Dawn Tasaka Steffler | Gooseberry Pie Lit Magazine)

The Papermoon (Joel Hans | HAD)

Changeling (L Mari Harris | Flash Frog)

Parallel Universes (Katherine Huang | Whale Road Review)

The Reluctant Reader’s Guide to Charles Dickens (Emily Devane | Flash Flood)

Vulcanized (Thomas Mixon | Variant Lit)

What about you? What are your favourite pieces from this year? Please feel free to share your own personal picks in the comments - I always love to hear other people’s suggestions.

Next month’s selection will be chosen by Finnian Burnett and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 21st January.

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Opportunities to work with Matt

Editing

NOVEL / NOVELLA EDITING: First steps review, structural review, line edit, proof edit, submission review

EDITING FOR COLLECTIONS: structural overview report, line edit, proof edit

SHORT FICTION EDITING: Structural review, line edit, detailed edit, proof edit

Twitter: @NoraNadj

Website: www.noranadjarian.com

Her recently published collection of poetry ‘Iktsuarpok’ is available from Broken Sleep Books at https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/nora-nadjarian-iktsuarpok

‘ …the overriding impression the collection left with me was one of colour and light, joy, even. I think this is partly because of the vividness of her observation and description which, in defiance of the dictum about happiness writing white, actually seems to work best on that theme.’

Sheenagh Pugh

If you aren’t familiar with her work, here’s one of her pieces to start things off:

Doors (Nora Nadjarian | Frigg Magazine)

Why I like it (MK): the brilliant personification of “sobs” and how that gives such originality to the way the piece explores its emotions; the slight surrealness to the overall effect; the brilliant tone of voice, the way it’s infused with so much attack.

In a Nest of Kindly Arms (Pat Foran | Does It Have Pockets)

Why I like it: Almost a prose poem, it draws you in with its simplicity and the arresting image of the ‘nest of kindly arms’. The word-play, alliteration (sing/song/sound) and the haunting repetitions (‘So soothing, this singing…So gentle, this breaking. If this singing heart is actually breaking…’) made me want to read this over and over.

Ordinary Miracles for a Good Christian Boy (James Montgomery| Flash Flood)

Why I like it: It’s a gorgeous example of how to make every word count in flash. I love how effortlessly the religious theme is intertwined with vibrant descriptions of the Pride parade. All the questions build up to that devastating ‘…yes, God is’ and the final questions leave so much food for thought: ‘so weightless? So lifted? So blessed?’

PROMPT: Write a piece where two apparently disparate topics are intertwined in a story told only in questions.

Pet Shop Boys (Tim Craig | New Flash Fiction Review)

Why I like it: The story is told from the collective ‘we’ POV and we know right from the start that it will not end well. I can just see these characters, tell their background, their habits, and I love how they come to life in such a short piece through use of specificity (‘pulling the ring on another Stella’, ‘Sue Ryder’) and how these young kids talk (‘no wonder your teeth are fucking black Shahmeer’). The dark thread of racism runs beneath the surface and the ending perfectly sums up how such a tragedy can simply be shrugged off.

The Papermoon (Joel Hans | HAD)

Why I like it: One of those pieces that make you realise rules were made to be broken and that the more unusual the format, the more likely the reader is to be drawn in. Here we have a story told entirely through the use of a series of nouns following the definite article. The staccato-like brevity of each line is used to great effect.

PROMPT: Write an entire story using two-word sentences.

The Roman Tub (Francesca Leader | Literary Namjooning)

Why I like it: It brilliantly conveys the serenity of ‘me-time’ at the Roman Bath juxtaposed with the tension between the couple and the hubbub of the world ‘outside’. There are so many unusual turns of phrase that make you sit up and take notice: ‘midday pavement broils’, ‘marble quietude’, ‘volcanically-hot water’.

Where the Dust Goes  (Diane Gottlieb | Brevity)

Why I like it: It masterfully builds up the timeline of a day where the uneasiness and the tension creep into the narrative after the ‘crazy blur of squirrel’ is first mentioned. The references to dust and the information given for each part of the day get more and more ominous: rain, the dark, ringing phones, unanswered phone calls and answering machines blinking red. By 10:09pm we know something is very wrong and then it’s 10:10pm. In the minute that has passed, a woman’s life has changed forever.

Mollusk (Didi Wood | Okay Donkey)

Why I like it: The breathlessness of the format matches the helplessness of the victim and the elusive nature of the many-armed Mr Mollusk, the abuser. An account full of the stench and tang of seafood, the feeling of being underwater in ‘a bottomless murk’ while being sexually abused by ‘your parents’ best friend’.

Folklore (Christopher Murphy | MoonPark Review)

Why I like it: I love how refreshingly different this is to anything I’ve read before. A whole story is written through use of repetition and variations on the theme of ‘things we should/shouldn’t talk about’.

The Wonder (Dawn Miller | Atticus Review)

Why I like it: The beautiful, fable-like story of the sighting of a lynx in a small town, told through the collective third person ‘we’ POV. We ‘encounter’ the animal only through rumours of what it did, what it looked like (‘Some said its long whiskers, like errant handlebar moustaches, flanked its heart-shaped face’), details of where it was seen and by whom. The rumours are humorous at first but the story takes a vicious turn when the lynx is increasingly blamed for things it did or didn’t do, and we are left wondering who the real predators are here.

But we didn’t stay in the same place (Addison Zeller | Cease, Cows)

Why I like it: It successfully deals with the hugely overdone theme of a breakup through clever use of the cards the former partner sends, the images, the messages, and how they are signed off when there is little or nothing left to say. Also because I adore: ‘Her arms dangled like a feather boa over the ends of a picnic table’.

What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?

Next month’s selection will be chosen by Catherine O’Brien and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 17th December.

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Opportunities to work with Matt

Editing

NOVEL / NOVELLA EDITING: First steps review, structural review, line edit, proof edit, submission review

EDITING FOR COLLECTIONS: structural overview report, line edit, proof edit

SHORT FICTION EDITING: Structural review, line edit, detailed edit, proof edit

Twitter / X: @KristinTenor

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kristin.tenor/

Instagram: @kristintenor_writer

BlueSky: @kristintenor.bsky.social

Website: www.kristintenor.com

This Is How They Mourn

Winner of the 8th Wavelengths Contest, This Is How They Mourn, is Kristin Tenor’s debut flash fiction chapbook. Seventeen stories portray various shades of a Midwestern Gothic. Written with economical, yet powerful, prose, you shall mourn with these heartfelt characters long after reading the last page. Stories within have been featured in Best Microfiction 2024, Emerge, Flash Frog, X-R-A-Y, Wigleaf, and Bending Genres.

Available for pre-order now at https://www.thirtywestph.com/shop/thisishowtheymourn.

If you aren’t familiar with her work, here’s one of her pieces to start things off:

Pancakes (Kristin Tenor | Wigleaf)

Why I like it (MK): the way the insistent repetition of “she doesn’t know why” and “she wonders” build the emotional resonance beneath the narrative; how so much tension is created between the horror of what the mother is doing and the banality of the father flipping pancakes; the deep sense of regret woven through the voice.

Cancer Arm (Kathy Fish | Fictionaut)

Why I like it (KT): What I love most about Kathy’s work is the quiet ache she infuses into her narratives, and this piece is no exception. The repetition of “It’s Thanksgiving…” and the well-placed white space allow us to effortlessly travel through time with the narrator reminisces and makes connections between the defining moments of her past, present, and inevitable future. I also love how the simmering fear of a cancer diagnosis rubs against the traditional family holiday meal. Kathy always has a way of depicting the ordinary with such specificity and honesty it evokes one’s own nostalgia and yearning for understanding.

New Old (Tara Isabel Zambrano | The Southampton Review)

Why I like it: The father’s physical metamorphosis as he grieves the mother’s passing subverts our expectations; however, we buy into it because his characterization and his loss are both so palpably rendered. The ending image of “the mother swimming around in the father’s veins…wanting to come out, wanting to stay in” is so evocative.

Black Communion (Venita Blackburn | Harper’s Magazine)

Why I like it: The first line, “It was Communion Day when Pastor Short announced before the congregation his engagement to a woman who was not our mother,”—immediately sets the story’s thorny dynamics into motion. Also, the narrator’s voice draws the reader in as we find ourselves sitting in the pew watching this all go down right alongside her (and her mother and sister). The revelation made at the end speaks volumes about power and authority. So good.

PROMPT: Write a story which begins with a declarative sentence that clearly defines the conflict at hand. Then follow the path of consequences. What, if anything, cannot be spoken? What lies just beneath the surface?

My Dead (Peter Orner | The New Yorker)

Why I like it: I’ve been a big fan of Peter Orner’s work for a long, long time. I love how much tension and conflict he weaves into this brief narrative right from the get go—we realize Beth and the narrator are already a bad fit for one another within the first few lines, especially when he says, “We headed out into the night exalted, until, like I said, our conversation dried up completely.” And the promise of a séance—how can one not be hooked by a detail such as that? Besides the immediacy, I also appreciate the narrator’s confessional tone. We definitely know he’s a changed man by the end.

Farm Reports (Amy Barnes | The Bureau Dispatch)

Why I like it: I love how the passage of time works in this piece. The dated fragments create a linear chronology; but, it’s the complicated generational dynamics and juxtapositions between the narrator’s family and that of her aunt’s which show us how she matures and grows into the woman she eventually becomes. Also, the recurrence of corn throughout weaves this all together so seamlessly. Wonderful.

PROMPT: Write a series of fragments which cover the defining moments of a ten-year relationship, then print a copy and cut the fragments apart. Experiment by rearranging the fragments in descending order; otherwise randomly place them against one another to see how the narrative tension ebbs and flows. 

Moonlit Fields (Andrew Bertaina | Literary Namjooning)

Why I like it: What a beautiful, beautiful elegiac piece. I love how the rhythmic breathlessness juxtaposes against the narrator’s quiet meditativeness. The repetition of the word “and” as well as the sensory imagery—“her voice curling around the words, so much like the rhythm of the train;” the illuminated window, a square of light—masterfully create not only this reminiscent stream-of-consciousness, but also connection and empathy within the reader as well.

Contingencies (Susan Perabo | Craft)

Why I like it: The anaphora of “this is what you do” ratchets up the urgency and tension sentence by sentence until the culmination becomes almost too much to handle. The second person point of view also immerses the reader into the rawness of this woman’s emotional journey as she tries to figure out how to navigate her husband’s volatile mood swings. The echo of the last three sentences have incredible staying power. I come back to this piece often.  

Sea Watchers (Sarah Freligh | Pithead Chapel)

Why I like it: Every word, every sentence of this microfiction amplifies the tension brewing between this man and woman who visit the same beachside motel every summer. I especially love the line “…they come back here each summer to wait for what will never wash up” as well as the combination of sadness, regret, and restlessness it suggests. Coupling this piece with the Edward Hopper portrait which inspired it adds an even deeper dimension to the overall emotional landscape expressed here.

We, Moons (Leesa Cross-Smith | Oxford American)

Why I like it: The collective voice in this piece reads almost like a Greek chorus and curates so well the obsessions and intricacies of what it means to be a woman. There’s a pulsing rhythm as one reads this piece aloud. I especially love how Cross-Smith varies the sentence length throughout. The short, simple sentences punctuate and amplify the powerful urgency being conveyed.

PROMPT: Think of a group you belong to or, perhaps, once belonged to. Make a list of the challenges and/or obstacles the members of this group might face collectively. Now set a timer for ten minutes and write as many continuous statements as you can beginning with the word “We …” without stopping and/or crossing anything out. See how the constraint of working against the clock adds an element of urgency and breathlessness to the delivery of your narrative.

Like Hummingbirds (Shome Dasgupta | X-R-A-Y)

Why I like it: It’s difficult not to empathize with this narrator as he tries to come to terms with the loss of his brother. How many times have we also asked ourselves if there was anything else we could’ve done to help a distressed loved one only to already know the truth—not a thing. I appreciate the intimacy created by the narrator directly addressing his brother. I also like how the piece dips in and out of past memories to characterize the strong bond between them. And, of course, the hummingbird metaphor—how delicate and profound.

What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?

Next month’s selection will be chosen by Nora Nadjarian and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 19th November.

Share

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Opportunities to work with Matt

Editing

NOVEL / NOVELLA EDITING: First steps review, structural review, line edit, proof edit, submission review

EDITING FOR COLLECTIONS: structural overview report, line edit, proof edit

SHORT FICTION EDITING: Structural review, line edit, detailed edit, proof edit