Flash Festival Festival, 2026

So another Flash Fiction Festival is over. On the way to Bristol I popped into Tewkesbury and Chelmsford, both for the first time. As ever, there was a mix of first-timers and old-hands, of barely published and heavily published authors, all happy to talk with each other. Many countries were represented. Jude Higgins and her many helpers deserve all the praise they get for organising, and for setting the tone.

It's my 5th festival. On average I've had a Flash piece published each 2 months other that period. Much in the Flash world has changed since I first attended, and my writing's changed too. Very roughly -

• 2022 - I found out that other people write flash too! And they can write better things for a 10 minute exercise than I can do in weeks. But overall I thought I could produce some decent stuff. I realised that my writing poetry and short stories complicated my production of Flash.
• 2023 - I worked at trying to understand more types of Flash/Micro pieces, especially in the prose-poetry direction.
• 2024 - Now that I could appreciate more types of Flash, I realised I was quite a long way behind many of the other attendees.
• 2025 - I found I was trying to add as many types of Flash tricks as I could to each piece I wrote. A mess. Looking at the stats I realised I hadn't made much progress over the years. I'd hoped for an increase in volume of output even if the quality was the same.
• 2026 - I went to novella-in-flash sessions though I've no intention of writing one. I noticed that I'm sending Flash to the same magazines that I always have, so I'll try to widen my range.

I came back with -

• "One for the river" by Tom O'Brien (Ad Hoc, 2021)
• "Things like this" by Dave Alcock (Arroyo Seco Press, 2026)
• "A box of stars beneath the box" (National Flash-Fiction Day 2016 Anthology) by Calum Kerr, Nuala Ni Chonbchuir, Santino Prinzi (Cumbo Press, 2016)
• "Ripening" (National Flash-Fiction Day 2018 Anthology) by Santino Prinzi and Alison Powell (Cumbo Press, 2018)
• "Flash Fiction Festival eight" by Jude Higgins & Diane Simmons (AdHoc, 2025)

Poetic prose

Here's the first sentence of "All the Colors of the Dark" by Chris Whitaker -

From the flat roof of the kitchen Patch looked out through serried pin oaks and white pine to the loom of St. Francois Mountains that pressed the small town of Monta Clare into its shade no matter the season.

In The Republic of Letters Tyson Duffy writes "Just read the sentence aloud to feel in your mouth how awkward the words are together. By the time you reach the end, you attain a kind of empty-headed, Nirvana-like state of senseless bafflement". He asks "What is “loom of St. Francois Mountains”?" and "How is a small town pressed into its shade?"

When I read "Small Worlds", a novel by Caleb Azumah Nelson, I wondered about the poetic language. Generously, I thought that the narrator (a thoughtful 18 year old much of the time) might think that way. He likes spatializing emotion - "the way desire might spill into the space", "somewhere between content and melancholy", etc. Other examples of imagery and poetical phrasing include -

• Del's lips hold a brief home on my cheeks and we pull each other close. We give no goodbyes, we know death in its multitudes
• It's funny what you remember, what palaces you make to store the fragments
• I am the beach disappeared by the tide, I am the breath between two notes
• the way thunder asks you to check the sky for rain
• June veers towards July
• light clasps onto her neck
• shyness visits upon us
• it was the time of day when the sun was leaving the sky

I don't mind some of this, but some is more than purple prose - it's off the end of the colour spectrum. I don't think it's the kind of prose that poets (Plath, John Burnside, etc) write.

CB1, 5th July 2026 - Ellen Renton

The headliner Ellen Renton comes from Edinburgh with an MA in Creative Writing: Poetry from the University of East Anglia. I liked many of her pieces, including phrases like "there's no chorus to this song, or if there is, the music never reaches it". Among the open-mic contributions there was an Italian poem translated, and some poems translated from an Ethiopian language for which 2 translations are needed: one a plain translation and another conveying the deeper meanings. There was a witty, rhyming poem about bees that I liked. Overall it was one of the most interesting CB1 evenings.

My art attempts

I recently went to an exhibition of work by first year art students. Some brave work, and several pieces I'd happily hang on my wall. I recalled that I've dabbled with art, getting nowhere. Here's just about everything that I didn't throw away. It's all well over 30 years old. I don't recall the titles, some of which may have been better than the pieces themselves ...

I recall trying to make the kink near the top of the male figure on the right look both like a mouth and a neck

Battersea power station

2 pictures (at least one of Venice) interleaved

Bristol, traced from a photo of course

Here's a painting of the same scene

A fired maquette in the style of Henry Moore - a reclining figure

Around Cambridge, UK

I used to borrow from Cambridge University library. I miss it.

Here's where old punts end up, submerged under a bridge on Coe Fen.

The Milton society had a yearly ritual of burning Eliot's works.

The seasonal wheel is caught being half-dismantled.

A sign telling people not to park their bikes.

Until recently the engineering department still used chalk-and-talk - lots of serious maths.

A sign from the engineering department.

Another engineering department sign.

From the Zoology department. Ants communicate using body fluids.

Continuous narrative

This is "Cupid and Psyche" (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) by Jacopo del Sellaio, from about 1473. Fifteen scenes from the same story are merged together, Psyche appearing 11 times. A tree in the foreground of one scene may form the background of another.

Time goes left-to-right along the lower part of the painting. Higher up, more liberties are taken. This style is called 'continuous narrative' - because, I suppose, there are no dividing lines between the different scenes/times.

I think it's an idea that's sometimes replicated in poetry, the same phrase representing a cause in one moment of time, and an effect in another. Recall and foreboding are intermixed with the present.

It's attempted in prose too. I've looked at this in more detail in an article about Molly McCloskey's "A Nuclear Adam and Eve" - a short story that jumps back and forth in time, as hinted by its title.

Face sculptures

I've seen many public artworks that are big heads. I've seen several that are faces (or masks, or even deathmasks I suppose). My favourites are like this one that I saw last weekend in Burghley gardens, with holes instead of eyes.

Here's what goes on behind the mask. Depending on the light conditions you can see another face.

This is in the middle of Krakow. It's called "Eros bound" - the face has bandages around it. Two people can put their faces in the eyeholes and be photographed.