Flash In Five – Corey Farrenkopf

Our latest Flash In Five comes from Corey Farrenkopf

Winnebago (click title to read)

Idea: For a number of years, during summers, I worked as a Cemetery Landscaper for the town of Harwich, on Cape Cod (MA). There’s a cemetery called Pine Grove and it’s over on the townline, and in order to get to it, you had to pass down a road that had this dilapidated yellow Winnebago in the front yard. The windows were smashed. The metal trim was rusting. Vines were starting to grow over it. Whenever I see something like that, I’m always like “This needs to end up in a story.” Most of my flash pieces start this way. With a singular image or place and then I populate them with characters and just see what they’ll do with the object/in the space.

Development: I love ghost stories and stories of the uncanny, so typically when I settle into a specific place to write about/specific image to write about, ghosts are usually the next thing to show up. Without fail, the ghosts are almost always there…either literally or figuratively. Often times, my work straddles the literary/genre line (these days it’s almost always Horror/Sci-fi/Fantasy). When I lean into genre, I feel like I can place any kind of supernatural monster in a flash…or aliens…or like ancient squid gods, but when I’m writing more literary fiction, I feel like ghosts seem to be more accepted by magazines that lean in that direction instead of Zombies or Werewolves. I might be wrong, but based on my submissions history, that seems to be the way of things. 

Living on Cape Cod, there’s always the looming spectre of turning a part of your house into an AirBNB for some extra money…or making your shed into a “unique camping experience” even though it doesn’t have electricity or insulation. A number of hotels/inns around where I live claim to be haunted and use it in their advertisements and listings, so the two ideas just blended naturally for me. Most of my stories come to me organically without a lot of pre-writing, or really much thought at all (usually when I try to outline a flash piece it just goes nowhere and dies in my head). I often just have to trust in the image/place and just start writing and see where it goes. I couldn’t tell you where the ghost doing the crossword puzzle came from, but it provided some much needed humor for this piece, otherwise it would have been wicked grim.

Editing: This went through three edits before I sent it off to SmokeLong. First I went through and polished up the language, messing around with fragmentation, reordering a few of the quick vignettes inside the story. Then my wife, Gabrielle Griffis, who is also a flash writer, took a look and gave me some developmental critiques. Then the last edit, after addressing her comments, was the standard “read it out loud and make sure it doesn’t sound like gobbledigook” edit. After Smokelong accepted the piece, we did multiple rounds of edits, most of which were focused on retooling the first two paragraphs and cutting weasel words.

Submitting: SmokeLong Quarterly was the first flash magazine I ever read, so it became the magazine I always sent my pieces to first. I dreamed of being published by them and because of this so many of my stories were drafted around their aesthetic.They were the only place I sent this one to (because their turn around time is so quick it never makes sense to do simultaneous subs with them)…and after a rewrite request, they took it. It was one of the most straightforward submission stories I’ve got. Most rack up a dozen or so rejections before they find a home.

Reflections: After writing so many stories that orbit around ghosts, you really gain perspective on the different forms a ghost story can take. Like the difference between an actual haunting and a believed haunting, actually having someone encounter a ghost or just hint at their existence in a place. There’s the humorous ghost story and the ghost story about loss that you can’t have any humor in at all or else it will sour the whole thing. The ghost story where the ghost is terrifying. The ghost story where the ghost is comforting. There are so many different directions they can take. This one really hit the sweet spot between being super doom and gloom and having a little comedic light to it. 

One of the things I like to tell people if they reach out to me about being stuck on a story is kind of like that old Raymond Chandler quote, but instead of “have a guy show up with a gun” when you’re stumped, I say, “throw a ghost in there if you don’t know where your story is going.” I live by this rule and it never steered me wrong 🙂


Corey Farrenkopf lives on Cape Cod with his wife, Gabrielle, and their tiny dog, Ooli. Corey works as a librarian. His stories have been published in The Southwest Review, Vastarien, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, SmokeLong Quarterly, Reckoning, Bourbon Penn, Tiny Nightmares, Flash Fiction Online, and elsewhere. His debut novel, Living in Cemeteries, will be published by JournalStone in April of 2024. He is also the Fiction Editor for the Cape Cod Poetry Review. To learn more, follow him on twitter as @CoreyFarrenkopf or on TikTok @CoreyFarrenkopf or on Instagram @Farrenkopf451 or, if that isn’t overwhelming enough, on the web at CoreyFarrenkopf.com

He’s always writing ghost stories.

2024 First Chapter Comp – Longlist

Many thanks to everyone who submitted their novel opening this year. We have been transported into many different lives all around the world, and beyond our own planet.

Congratulations to the writers who have made the longlist. The novel titles are shown below – please don’t tell which is yours though as we are reading anonymously.

Longlist

  • A Beehive Heart
  • A More Onerous Citizenship
  • After Us, Them
  • Birdie of the Wheatsheaf
  • Bitter Seed
  • Delusion
  • Dwell
  • Echoes of Beirut
  • Everything is Wrong
  • Everywhen and the Dark Entanglement
  • Forced Perspective
  • Frankie
  • Going Places
  • Moon Bone
  • Nine Rooms
  • Peter Heggarty Goes Around and Around
  • Red
  • Singleton
  • Sleepwalking
  • Somnia
  • Splinters from Boxes
  • Swimming in the Dark
  • The Annihilation Era
  • The Blooding of Amelia Sharp
  • The Contrabandist
  • The Devil in Bangkok
  • The Integration Protocol
  • The Law of Kindness
  • The Possibility of Us
  • The Price
  • The Ritual
  • The Root that Binds
  • When the Sea Became the Sky
  • White Death
  • Who Will Save Us

Good luck for the next round everyone! We will now choose our shortlist of 10, which will be sent to our literary agent judge, Eli Keren, to choose the winners from.

In the meantime, from very long stories to very short! The WestWord Prize Micro Fiction Category, judged by Tania Hershman, closes this month! Info here.

Monthly Micro Feb 2024 Winners

Well done to all who made it through to the final round of this month’s micro contest. The theme was LEAVES and we loved all of the shortlisted stories. It’s so hard to choose the final winners! But choose we have to so congratulations to the following writers!

NEWS! We have an announcement about this competition…from next month onwards the stories will now be published in WestWord, our online literary magazine. We can reach more readers that way and it also looks swisher. Plus, we are in the process of migrating the Retreat West website to a new home where the community, courses and website will all be in one place so it makes sense to make this change for this competition at this time so all the stories we are publishing online are all in one place.


First place: The Silence of the Leaves by Isabelle Hichens

Why we chose it: Really different take on the theme and we loved the way it shows how easy it is to misunderstand when we make assumptions.

Second place and People’s Prize: In This Version…by Fiona Dignan

Why we chose it: Great structure and really poignant tale of loss in reverse.


Shortlisted Stories


Isabelle and Fiona win the cash prizes and Fiona also win one free entry to each category of the WestWord Prize in 2024. The first category is Micro Fiction and the deadline is next month.

And the deadline for the first ever WestWord Hermit Crab Prize is just 2 days away! You have until 23.59 GMT on 29th February to send your stories.

Plus, if you want to get writing and learning about all things tiny stories, then our 6th Online Flash Fest is this weekend! Info and tickets here.

Monthly Micro Shortlist – Feb 2024

Many congratulations to the 10 writers who made it through to the final round this month!

Our reading team are busy deciding on the winners of the cash prizes but the winner of the People’s Prize is over to you. The prompt word was LEAVES and the max word count was 175.

Read and vote below! Voting closes at 23.59 GMT on Monday 26th Feb.


All the Things He Left

His cup, which stains the sideboard with concentric circles that she doesn’t want to wipe in case she never hears the clatter of his spoon again. White, two sugars.

Spare keys. Dropped into the bowl beside the door, the one she’d thought too fancy for loose change and the odds and sods she still plucks from the sofa back and cupboards. 

His laugh. The way it explodes at the things she says and lingers in the air like the silence which follows the click of the door.His face. The way his smile slid and fell, half of him the same and the other dragged from the wreckage. 

His touch. The dent beside her on the mattress where he’d shroud himself. Like a crime scene, she’d joke, when she poked him awake, before the sirens were for him. She searches her body for fingerprints.


How We Will Leave

We will depart in triumphant glory, revelling in our bronzed age, soaring away like the horse-chestnut leaves and sycamore seeds blowing down the street, leaving the deep-rooted security of constancy for the unknown.

We will be scattered by our grandchildren chasing errant Labradors through the park-keepers crisp piles of gold and red and brown, 

We will evaporate in next door’s bonfire, blazing under rimy starlight, our glowing embers fading into the night. 

We will disappear in a gentle rotting away, our fabric absorbed by our resting place.

Whichever way we leave, remember us. 


In this version…

the ashes gust together, gathering into the urn. My hands clutch back the children’s grasp. We walk back through the formalities; hymns choke down our throats. You unburn. We get back into the car, go back into the house, where I shed black clothes like snake’s skin. The children crumple back to foetal positions in their beds.

Two weeks follow, like the blankness of snow.  Interspersed with implosions of grief. That still must happen, even in this version. But grief is only love with no place to go. In this version, the love is poured back in. Tears crawl up to our eyes. Our cheeks’ riverbeds evaporate. I hand back casseroles to our neighbours. The well-wishers eat their words.

The policewoman dribbles her tea into the cup. Her pitying face transforms to poker, as she returns to the doorstep. Knocks absorb into her knuckles. And you backpedal. Backpedal. Please Backpedal. Come back through the door. Peel off your cycling gloves. Suck a kiss from my lips. Swallow your vow of going for a quick ride.


Into The Wardrobe

Where the stale sweat in the fabric of your mother’s dress pulls your shoulders back and you feel her corset like grip to your throat. Sit still, she’d hiss as you stretched yourself mannequin straight at the thought of what would happen if you didn’t. It stinks of piss in here. Her winter coat pools at your thighs. Sometimes she brings visitors; you hear them puff like trains, the clink of their keys, their breath lingering on windowpanes with a damp sock smell of disappointment. 

Never look, your brother said, before he passed you a tenner and left. You close your eyes, slipping your feet into her fancy shoes, imagining a love that could hold you tall in kitten heels that purr like the nine lives she didn’t choose. She used to paint your nails. Hers are chewed and chipped. You feel for the varnish as you push against the wardrobe back. When you climb out, you’ll colour them Vixen.


It Always Was And Is

By the Old Hall is a sunken trench. It is full of leaves. The guidebook tells me this path has been carved by the footfall of many years. I think of how the leaves have not obliterated its presence. I imagine women who went about their daily lives, the stories they carried from dwelling to dwelling, women visiting women to birth a child, sharing gossip gleaned from listening under the eaves of the hall, dropping the words like pebbles in a pond. The guidebook talks of witch marks, the scorching of beams, women punished for their failure to protect, the ducking stool, and the scold’s bridle.

I am brought out of my reverie by a notification on my phone. I look at the message. It’s Barry asking where his clean shirt is, followed by an emoji of an angry face. I press delete, slip the phone into my pocket, and then carry on walking.


Leaves

Stumbling out, into the sunset, tear-blind and lost in the aftermath of you, thoughts ricocheting round my head like bullets. You. Her. Us. Over…when the face-slap colours startle me back, way too intense for deep midwinter. I find myself standing at the turn in the track, lifting my chin to the fiery sky where a naked sycamore claws at the crimson, its twig-sticky fingers scratching the air, telling our tale in dry-tipped semaphore. Tap-tap-tap, the sun too hot. Tap-tap-tap, burned itself free.

I sigh out loud in powdery clouds my gaze slumping low to the fallen-leaf hedgerow where under the branches piles and piles of brittle vermillion lie crisp and haunted or sugared white – fragments of fire that died in the fight, then, in slow, slow motion, I raise a boot, bring it down to release the sound… and suddenly. Suddenly, I’m laughing out loud, stamping and laughing like the child I was, laughing and dancing and kicking and spinning like the girl I was, like me before you.


Morning Runner

The soldier jogging by the PÄ“blinge Sø  says ‘Hi’. She smiles. When they reach the busy intersection at Gyldenløvesgade, he takes her hand; she’s not used to so many bicycles. She leaves him there. Back at the hotel, her husband is still asleep. She tugs the bag, packed last night, from under the bed, closes the door behind her, leaves him there. At the stall by Vesterport Station she pauses, looks at her â€˜phone, nods to the blue-haired barista, time for one last strong coffee before she leaves to take the metro to the airport. She switches her â€˜phone to silent. Will he even notice that her hairbrush and trainers have disappeared? She should have left a note. And is he still running, her Danish soldier with his flat open face and sparky blue eyes? Is he waiting for her by the Pêblinge Sø, waiting to see if she would keep her word? Or did he just shrug and sprint away? She should have sent a note.


Plenty of Sunlight

At the nursery, Rhonda hovers by a stand of poinsettias. Her son and his wife will think she’s coping if she decorates. 

‘Excuse me,’ she says to a man her age in a nursery uniform. ‘Will the red leaves last till Christmas?’

‘Brats,’ the man says, or at least that’s what Rhonda hears. 

‘Sorry?’ She glances around for naughty children.

The nursery man steps closer, touches a red leaf. ‘Bracts,’ he says quietly. ‘The leaves. They’ll last two, three months.’ He brushes his hands on his pants. ‘More if you’re a real green thumb.’

Rhonda shakes her head. ‘I’m not any kind of thumb. My husband was the gardener.’ And the awful sensation comes again, like being sucked down the plughole of a giant bath. She blinks and breathes.

‘You’ll do fine.’ The man’s eyes are bright against weathered skin. ‘Full darkness at night. Water every morning. Plenty of sunlight.’

‘Ah,’ she manages.

He holds out a poinsettia and she takes it, suddenly pleased. The pot is warm as summer against her palms.


Six Encyclopaedic Facts About Black Holes

  1. Black holes form at the end of stars’ lives.

Her life was 2 days 6 hours 46 minutes and 7 seconds. 

  • Gravity near the core of a black hole approaches infinity. This theoretically suggests infinite curvature of spacetime.

If I continue to refine her lifespan into milliseconds, nanoseconds etc, I could divide time infinitely. Does this theoretically suggest I could keep her alive indefinitely?

  • Black holes are huge concentrations of matter packed into tiny spaces.

Like a premature baby. Like the baby-shaped hole she leaves.

  • The gravitational influence of a black hole distorts spacetime. The closer you get to a black hole, reality as we know it, breaks down.

[See entry for grief]

  • Although black holes are theoretically infinite, quantum physics propose they emit thermal radiation and thus eventually shrink over astronomical timescales.

Time can be a healer, and this is both true and untrue. (Another quantum paradox?)

  • Black holes are among the most mysterious cosmic objects, much studied but not fully understood.

[See entries for love, grief, motherhood]


The Silence Of The Leaves

They look at my painting and see so much in it. Their voices fill the room with vacant clichés. Their eyes are gleaming, they’re holding the truth, they know me. In the soft rounded teeth of the edges, they say they see the fragility of the lives I carried inside me. They say that the two shapes are hugging,united forever. They say the colours are so telling. The yellowing tones, the blemished hues show untimely decay. In those yellow strokes, they hear my tears. Yet, the shades of green show youth. They say I’ll be ok because green is the colour of hope. They say painting that picture was therapeutic for me. And then, there are the grey, broken contorted stalks. They say those show how they were cut off from me. They think the dark red pot is my womb, that place that was not good enough for my baby twins to grow. They think they see so much. But I just wanted to paint the portrait of two leaves in a pot. 


Vote using the form below, or if you have any problems using it you can vote here: https://form.responster.com/RU13Iz

February 2024 Monthly Micro Longlist

Many thanks to everyone who sent us a story this month for the prompt LEAVES. We received 67 entries so the cash prizes are:

  • 1st Place: £73
  • 2nd Place: £48

Congrats to the writers of the following stories that have gone through to the longlist! No telling which is yours though! As always, there are some fantastic titles here!

Longlisted Stories

  • A Storm in a Tea Cup
  • All the Things He Left
  • Belittle v Be Nice v Beaten
  • Fall out
  • Glimpses
  • Handkerchief
  • Heart of Splintered Oak
  • His Last Gift
  • How We Will Leave
  • In this version…
  • Innocence
  • Into the Wardrobe
  • It Always Was and Is
  • Leaves
  • Leaves of Grass
  • Let Them Fall
  • Morning Runner
  • Plenty of Sunlight
  • Request to Allow Me to Continue Mothering My Little Blue Baby
  • Six Encyclopaedic Facts About Black Holes
  • The In Between
  • The Silence of the Leaves
  • Wilderness

We’ll be back with the shortlist for voting on Monday. Good luck everyone!

In the meantime, get polishing your stories for the Hermit Crab Prize at WestWord, which closes at the end of the month.

And get writing new words this weekend at our workshop, Mamas and Papas, looking at the crucial role parents play in stories.

Flash In Five January 2024 – Gaynor Jones

This month our Flash In Five comes from Gaynor Jones.

Something Like Drowning (click title to read)

Idea: Like other flash pieces before, this one started life in a Kathy Fish workshop. I honestly can’t remember the prompt, but I recall something about writing a scene in three different ways. I was in the very early stages of my novella-in-flash, which is centred around a young girl who lives on a farm. In Kathy’s workshop, I had sketched out two girls and a boy climbing haystacks. I’m interested in the cusp between childhood and adulthood and the complex feelings and behaviours that emerge at that time.

Development: I took the initial idea of danger in a farm surrounding, and then started flicking back through my childhood memories. I didn’t grow up on a farm, but my Dad lived in a rural area and every other weekend was spent at his house, and at the farm down the road. I made a list of all the things that had felt risky – my Dad walking on the frozen canal to collect a piece of his gate that had been thrown onto it, stroking the cows one day then seeing strange blotches on their skin, the dogs that ran wild. I as very young during this time, so I then melded these memories with later teen ones, which involved drinking a LOT of cider.

Editing: You may not pick up on it on a first read, but I took great care with the language on this one! The initial story flew out quite easily, but as we all know, in flash it’s important to make every word count, and to present a cohesive story in a tight space. The main thing I worked on was separating out each moment into we / you / I. At the start of the piece, I used ‘we’ to show the relationship between the two girls. Then as more risk comes in I shifted to ‘you’ to try and put across a sense of blame and distance. Finally, when my protagonist has betrayed her friend I used ‘I’. Then there’s this sentence: I read them and it was like a knife / hadn’t / sliced / something / between us. I was trying to create a more staccato rhythm – I was thinking of the girl gasping, or her heart breaking, something that slowed down the story. I guess it looks a bit pretentious and dramatic written down, but then aren’t teen girls often a bit pretentious and dramatic?

Submitting: It’s a way back so I don’t really remember any thought process before submitting. I’m fairly certain I only tried it at competitions rather than publications as I felt (and still feel) it’s one of my strongest pieces. Of course, I was very excited to be placed third in the 2019 Anton Chekov Award for Short Fiction, but also a little disappointed when I realised that there was no prize money for runners up. Maybe that sounds bad but as a freelancer money is always tight! I thought I’d give it a second try at the Aesthetica competition, which I’d heard was very prestigious, and once again I was very excited that it made the shortlist and once again there was no prize money 😆 But, as it was published in their print anthology it counts towards my ALCS.

Reflections: I really like this story, I feel like it represents a significant shift, where I really know both what I wanted to write about, and how I wanted to write it. The ‘voice’ in this story carries on in other pieces of mine and I think it’s an archetypal Gaynor story


Gaynor Jones is the recipient of a Northern Writer’s Award from New Writing North for her short story collection, Girls Who Get Taken, and an Arts Council England DYCP Award for her novel-in-progress.

She has won first prize in several writing competitions, including Bath Flash Fiction and the Mairtín Crawford Short Story Award, and has placed or been listed in others including the Bridport Prize and Aesthetica.

She loves stories that feature wayward teens, middle-aged women who’ve had enough, and the darker sides of suburban life.

Website: www.jonzeywriter.com