A Word With… is our interview series in which we chat to writers, journal editors and indie publishers about words, stories and life.
We are delighted to welcome Ingrid Jendrzejewski this month. Ingrid currently serves as the Editor in Chief of FlashBack Fiction, an editor at Flash Flood, a flash editor at JMWW, and she is one of the co-directors of National Flash Fiction Day (UK). She runs workshops on editing, prose poetry and hybrid forms, and we have had the pleasure of her running them for us a few times now. She’s with us again this weekend running a session at our Online Flash Fest on writing funny flash fictions and next month a 1-hour workshop looking at titles: Lions, and Titles and Bears, Oh My!
So here’s what she had to say to my questions…
Ingrid, as a writer, you seem to be happiest creating flash fiction stories with over 70 publications listed on your website. I'm sure there are many more. Can you tell us what you love about this form and what attracts you to writing flash?
Thank you so much for such great questions; it’s a real pleasure to chat with you!
I think what I love most about short-form writing is the process of distillation. Every observation, emotion, description, happening and thought gets reduced to such a pure form, and when everything works together, you get this end product that is somehow dense yet airy, super-specific yet open-ended, highly constrained yet limitless. There’s no room for equivocation or self-indulgence, and every character on the page gets to pull more than its own weight. A well-rendered flash feels like a parlour trick that unfolds into a new universe — it’s such an exciting thing to witness.
I wrote almost exclusively flash when my daughter was super small. I was sleep deprived and writing in little cracks of time, so I was drawn to short pieces that I could hold in my head and mull over whilst doing parenting things. Now that my daughter is older and sleeps through the night, I have a number of longer projects on the go, but I keep coming back to flash. There’s a unique thrill to writing short…I think it’s the way words take on all these extra layers and stratifications when you compress them. Writing flash is like constructing little puzzles, tiny wondrous objects. It’s addictive!
After doing a degree in creative writing you then did another in physics — can you tell us a bit about this? Did the writing drive an interest in physics or was it always something you wanted to do? How do you bring the two together now in your writing practice?
I have always loved both the arts and sciences and I found it impossible to choose between them, so ended up doing both! I’ve combined them in various ways, such as work in computer game design and research on software for helping people with limited mobility maximise information output with minimal gestures. Both involve thinking about language as well as programming and, in the latter case, information theory.
I do think this big distinction we make between ‘science’ and ‘arts’ is a bit arbitrary…. Science is nothing without storytelling…when we develop experiments, we’re creating and editing stories about how we think the world works, based on the results we get. And if we can’t tell others what we’ve learned or how we think our work fits into or pushes against the larger stories we have about what we think we know to be true, our work is useless. We have constraints and rules in our storytelling, and we trust a community of readers to respond to our work and check for errors and help make it better. Science requires creativity and flexible thinking. I am sure that my experience with writing helped immensely with problem-solving and communication.
On the other side of the coin, I think my writing has been immensely influenced by my training in science. Even in an off-the-wall piece, I have a sense of the critical path I need to follow, and what ‘evidence’ I need to include or exclude to take the reader on the journey from Point A to Point B. Writing a lab report or a scientific paper trains one to be succinct, specific, precise. As with flash, there’s no space for tangents, flights of fancy, or wheel spinning. A science degree is incredibly good training for flash writing…and I’ve been pleasantly surprised-not-surprised to find out a lot of great flash writers that I admire have a science or engineering background.
At this particular moment, I’m doing more writing and teaching about writing than I am science or programming, but I do keep a few projects going in the background, for fun. I’ve also been involved with projects like Quantum Shorts, a flash competition that looks for flash with a quantum physics theme (you can look for a new announcement from them soon) and some science/flash projects I’m running later this year.
You are currently editor-in-chief of FlashBack Fiction, which specialises in publishing historical flash fiction. What inspired you to start this journal and what has running it taught you as a writer and editor?
FlashBack Fiction great out of a Twitter thread in which someone was looking for places to send historical flash. I believe I was looped into the conversation as a flash writer who had published a few historical pieces. In trying to come up with markets, we came to the collective realisation that there weren’t many places that specialised in historical flash, and several writers of historical flash didn’t feel their work fared well in traditional flash journals. After joking around about some good names for such a journal, we landed on FlashBack Fiction, and I checked to see if it was available, and the rest is, as they say, history!
Working on any journal or competition gives one a good feeling for common themes and things that commonly go wrong in flash. However, with our historical focus, this project has particularly underscored the incredible power that specific detail and thoughtful diction have to pull a reader into a very particular time, place and historical context. Sometimes it’s only one or two carefully chosen words that communicate everything we need to know about where and when a piece is set.
Another thing that I’ve learned is how rare and precious humorous, light-hearted, or joyful stories are. We get a lot of gloom and darkness in our queue, perhaps because a lot of the stories that get passed down about history focus on tragedies, wars, inequality, suffering, etc. It can be hard to match senses of humour or pull off a happy ending without coming off twee or sappy, but when it works, our whole team celebrates.
Finally, I think our project has taught me a lot about how important voice is. Early on, we started inviting readers to include recordings of their stories, and I think that can really open a story up to new readers, particularly in a project like ours where we have submissions from around the world. Sometimes listening to the story read aloud by the author or someone the author chooses can make the story leap off the page.
Another project you're involved in is the annual National Flash Fiction Day (UK), which celebrates the form with the publication of an anthology each year and also the Flash Flood, which publishes flash stories every 10 minutes or so for 24 hours. It has been running for many years now - were you involved from the start or is it a more recent project for you? And how did you get involved with it?
National Flash Fiction Day was founded by Calum Kerr in 2011, and was one of the first places I had flash published. In 2106, I placed second in the Microfiction Competition and after that, I was invited to judge the next one and read for FlashFlood. It felt very surreal moving so quickly from one side of the editorial process to the other, but then in just a couple years more, I ended up a Co-Director of the project.
I have a real soft spot for it because of its commitment to celebrating flash and promoting a welcoming, supportive flash community within the UK and beyond, so when Calum decided to step back in 2018, I was very keen to see it continue. Diane Simmons and I took over the reins (joined by Tino Prinzi in the first couple years), and we’ve tried to build on what Calum started. In the years we’ve run National Flash Fiction Day, we’ve grown the submission pool for the microfiction and anthology projects, massively increased the reach of FlashFlood and have started a ‘Community Flash’ series, re-launched The Write-In (a weekend prompt-writing extravaganza), and held a tenth anniversary novella-in-flash competition.
For 2024, we are returning to our roots with an in-person anthology launch and some free in-person workshops, but we’ll also be continuing with the online celebrations that took off during the covid pandemic. We’re also very keen for local flash communities around the world to run their own National Flash Fiction Day events locally or online, and are happy to advertise other NFFD events, such as the give-aways Retreat West held in the past. The more people celebrating flash, the merrier!
Our next celebration is scheduled for 15 June 2024. If you’d like to get involved, our anthology and microfiction competitions open for submissions in December and FlashFlood opens for submissions for one week only in April. You can find more information at https://www.nationalflashfictionday.co.uk/
You recently ran a workshop for us on prose poetry for flash writers, and are judging the Prose Poem Prose Poetry Competition later this year. What can you tell us about how prose poetry and flash complement each other, and differ?
Oh, this is such a wonderful question! There is a wealth of critical and academic writing on the subject, as well as lots of different thoughts held by editors of poetry, prose and everything in between…. Since we don’t have days to debate, I’ll limit myself to something that’s hopefully useful from a practice point of view.
For me, if I’m thinking practically as a writer, I think it’s useful to see shortform prose writing as a sort of spectrum, with poetry on one end and heavily narrative-driven pieces on the other.
On the narrative end, the aim is to get across things like story, plot, character arcs, and all the other ingredients of classic short stories and narrative flash. You might include things like Aesop’s fables, three-minute-mysteries or even jokes in this category: getting the plot information across is of utmost importance here.
On the poetry end of the spectrum, the aim is perhaps less story-driven. Maybe the story is a little more off-the-page or implied. Maybe there is no story beyond what the reader brings to it. Maybe the piece strives instead to get across a mood or an emotion, or to paint a picture or scene. Maybe the piece is doing something else entirely…perhaps asking us to question how we construct meaning from the symbols we arrange on the page when we write.
In the middle of this spectrum, there’s a lot of fuzzy overlap between prose poetry and flash, where elements of story are important, but how the story is told is equally important. Pieces that live in this middle zone can get published either as prose poetry or as flash. Different editors and different publications set the cut-off line in different places, so it’s important to read back-catalogues to get a sense of who is publishing what under what label. I’d personally argue for letting the piece be what it wants to be and then only worry about labelling it if you have to make a decision about whether to send it to a poetry or prose editor.
On your website you run an annual Christmas Puzzle, with the festive season not too far away now, can you give us a hint of what this year's might be; and what inspires you to run these each year?
This is such a quirky project that is close to my heart! I started writing silly Christmas puzzles for my family about 15 years ago, and over time, they’ve grown into things that resemble armchair treasure hunts or puzzlehunt style experiences that I make available online. In the UK, you might have heard of GCHQ’s Christmas Challenge, the classic picture/puzzle book Masquerade, and Pablo’s Armchair Treasure Hunt; my puzzle is in the same vein, though I attempt to make them a little easier! At the end of the day, my family is still the audience I’m writing for here, so it’s pitched to their level of puzzle expertise.
Each year, there is a story; Christmas is under threat in some way and the elves need your help in some way…recovering a password or hacking the North Pole mainframe…something like that. Part of the puzzle is to figure out how the puzzle works, and how to get the final solution. Usually, there are lots of mini puzzles that you can put together to solve the ‘meta’ or final puzzle, and these can use all manner of tricks…first letters of words, rhymes, rebuses, and common codes, ciphers, and writing conventions (like Morse code, braille, nautical flags, the NATO alphabet, pigpen, Caesar shifts, etc.). Or perhaps something that looks like an everyday crossword puzzle or sudoku will contain a secret message reading across the diagonal.
Generally, the bulk of the puzzle is contained in a pdf document so you can print it out and do it in your armchair, though there is often a final online element where you can authenticate your answer (and get a congratulatory message verifying that Christmas has been saved, so that you can rest easy). The form and length of the puzzle has a lot to do with how busy I am each year!
Also, I should note that if these puzzles look absolutely intractable to you but you love puzzles, I’m happy to chat with people about getting started with puzzlehunts and armchair treasure hunts. There’s a small but lovely community of setters and solvers out there, and many more elaborate and polished puzzles than mine!
Incidentally, I think setting puzzles has a lot in common with flash writing. You want to lead the solver through the puzzles in a satisfying way…they need enough information to be able to put the pieces together and solve the puzzle, but not so much that the answer is obvious and there’s nothing to do. I feel like I do the exact same thing as a flash writer when I try to tell a story but leave satisfying gaps for the reader to fill in….
What can we expect from you next?
Woosh, that is a great question!
In terms of my own work, I’m fiddling around on some longer projects behind the scenes, but I’m sure I’ll crack and publish more short-form work before I finish. (My heart always returns to flash!) In particular, I’m making progress on something that started as a novella-in-flash that just kept growing…it’s now approaching what might be considered novel-like territory, but I’m not going to jinx it by invoking the ‘novel’ word just yet. I’m trying very hard to stay true to my principle of ‘write what wants to be written and then stick a label on it only when you need to package it up for an editor’!
I’m also doing a lot of writing-adjacent work this year, including some competition judging and various workshops and events, some of which I’ll be announcing soon. You can find out at www.ingridj.com, and of course at Retreat West where I’ve got two upcoming workshops, one on comedy and flash and one on titles….
Thanks so much Ingrid for your time and insights. It’s really inspiring to hear about your approach to not labelling stories and just writing!
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