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.

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 MairtĂ­n 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

Flash In Five – November 2023 – Avitus B. Carle

This month our Flash In Five comes from Avitus B. Carle

How We Survive (click title to read)

Idea: â€œHow We Survive” has gone through several revisions, which is why I struggled to remember the origins of the initial idea. I did some detective work and discovered that the story originated in Meg Pokrass’ microfiction masterclass workshop! The prompt was to write a story addressed to someone off the page with one of the examples being â€œYou’ve Stopped” by Tommy Dean. I love repetition in flash and how the echoes of a word or phrase can portray so much of the character, whether that be an exploration of the truth, a signal of denial or a mind that’s been broken, or reflections on something that’s come to an end.

Development: I was deeply immersed in my apocalypse era of writing and wanted to explore the complexities of relationships, especially breakups. Since my character is addressing someone off the page, why not have them tell the story of their survival to the reader? My next question became, how to make this particular breakup stand out without relying on the apocalypse as the event or moment of conflict that makes this breakup interesting. In what way can I complicate this specific breakup that still makes my character unique and complicated enough to hold the readers’ attention without being predictable? I decided that my character and her love interest would be the last people on earth, she wanting a relationship while her love interest has already found love with someone who is unexpected, yet perfect, for a romance at the end of the world. I then wanted to focus on how my main character navigates an unrequited love and separation from the only other human left on earth.

Editing: Initially, this was supposed to be a micro. However, Lorraine is a force. The more I explored the lives of these three characters, the more I wrote until I exceeded the word count requirements expected for a micro. I posted a portion of the story for workshop, ending with Lorraine (a mannequin and lover of my main character’s love interest) leaning in the doorframe of my main character’s bedroom, and saved the flash-length draft to my computer. This workshop took place during the summer of 2021 and I didn’t return to the story until the fall of that same year. I still wasn’t sure what was missing until Tara Campbell suggested separating the repetition of “We Survive On…” statements to heighten the sense of isolation. I also added several more line breaks to allow the story to breathe, to create even more white space on the page, and italicize any dialogue between my characters so the moments in which the last people on earth connect really stand out amongst the chaos and conflict provided by Lorraine.

Submitting: I had two places in mind for this story. One I’d been receiving personal rejections from and thought, surely, this story would be the one to convince them! The other, Lost Balloon, I’ve been a huge fan of since I first started writing. Lost Balloon had also published one of my first flashes, â€œWhite Ribbons,” and I believed this story coincided with the inspiration behind the magazine’s name: “…those small and sad but whimsical moments in life.” Lost Balloon accepted the story and later nominated the piece for Best Small Fictions!

Reflections: Out of all my stories so far, I have the most fun reading, “How We Survive.” To quote a member from Meg Pokrass’ microfiction masterclass workshop, “To be dumped for a mannequin in an apocalyptic world…oof, that’s rough!” Watching the “oof” of realization show on the audiences faces keeps me coming back to this story, to Lorraine, and finding more ways to distort our ideas of relationships, even at the end of the world.


Avitus B. Carle (she/her) lives and writes outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Formerly known as K.B. Carle, her flash has been published in a variety of places including the Fractured Lit, ASP Bulletin, Five South Lit., Lumiere Review, -ette review, and elsewhere. Avitus’s flash, “Black Bottom Swamp Bottle Woman,” was recently selected as one of Wigleaf’s 2023 Top 50 and nominated for the O. Henry Prize. Her story, “A Lethal Woman,” is included in the 2022 Best Small Fictions anthology. She can be found at avitusbcarle.com or online everywhere @avitusbcarle.

Literary Agent Interview: Eli Keren

Eli Keren at United Agents is the judge for the 2024 First Chapter competition and the winner gets feedback from him on their submission package and a 1-hour Zoom meeting to talk about their novel and upcoming career as a writer.

Eli started his publishing career at Curtis Brown before joining United Agents as an assistant in 2016. In 2021 he became an associate literary agent, representing a growing list of clients across fiction and non-fiction, actively seeking books that are going to make a positive impact in the world in some way, big or small. Before working in books, Eli was a research scientist designing and synthesising novel drugs (white coat and everything), and science books remain a particular passion of his. He is also very interested in LGBT-themed books in both fiction and non-fiction. In 2023 he was elected treasurer of the Association of Authors’ Agents.

Ahead of the January deadline, we grilled him on how you can impress him with your entries!

Eli, thanks for coming on the blog and for judging the contest. When reading the shortlisted first chapters, what’s going to make a novel stand out for you?

The first and most obvious thing is really simple – when I get to the end of it, do I want to keep going? Do I want more? Am I hooked, is there a mystery I need unravelled, a crime I’m emotionally invested in seeing solved, a dramatic situation I want resolved? By the end of the first chapter I want to know what it is that’s going to propel me to the end of the book, where the driving force is. This applies to all fiction, literary and commercial. If it’s commercial fiction then the driving force is going to be rooted in plot but if it’s literary I still do need a driving force of some kind to be there, it’s just more likely to be rooted in an emotional investment. Other than that, I want to see originality, I want to know what your book is doing that’s fresh and new and not like any other book on the shelf at Waterstones.

When you receive a three chapter submission what gets you excited enough to ask for the full MS?

I’ve got a big thing about audience control. I want you, as a writer, to demonstrate that you can put me in the emotional state you want me to be in for your work to have the effect you want it to have. I want you to manipulate me! I want you to cause me to feel something, and I want you to demonstrate that you can have me right where you want me for your work to have maximum impact. I want to feel your confidence, I don’t want to have to work to figure out what I’m meant to feel or what I’m meant to follow, I want you to make it easy for me, effortless, more than effortless, I want it to be impossiblenot to feel exactly what you want me to be feeling. There are other boxes to tick – I need to feel confident a book has a place in the market and all the rest of it – but that audience control is really vital for me.

What types of novels and writers would you love to have on your list?

I love a novel that is both commercial in terms of plot and pacing, but that also achieves something over and above that plot. Books with something to say that will get people talking about it. It could be an important message, or it could be a novel use of form and structure, or it could be a high-concept plot that changes what I thought you could do with your chosen genre. There are a lot of books on the market, I want to be working with writers who are producing the work that we’ll all still be talking about decades down the line.

When reading for pleasure, which authors do you enjoy and why?

I don’t represent fantasy or sci-fi, so when I’m reading for pleasure, I love fantasy and sci-fi. Reading the genres I don’t work with lets me really switch of my editor’s brain, I can relax into a narrative without thinking about how I’d have edited it or which editors I’d have sent it to if I was submitting it. I mostly read for pleasure in audiobook format so I can’t even be looking out for typos. It can be very hard to stop myself from working, but that’s the danger of turning your hobby into your job! I recently binged Neal Shusterman’s Arc of a Scythe trilogy, and am hugely enjoying John Gwynne’s Bloodsworn saga, as well as working my way through Sarah. J Maas’s and Leigh Bardugo’s fantasy worlds. I love the classics too, Arthur C Clarke and Tolkien. I’ve even read the Silmarillion in its entirety. I love books that can transport me somewhere, worlds built confidently with relatable human stories at their centres. Ultimately reading always comes down to the same things for me – I want to learn and I want to feel. The easier an author makes it for me to do both those things, the happier I am.


So there you have it! You now have a couple of months to get polishing those first chapters to submit and be in with a chance of winning the feedback and meeting with Eli. He’ll be reading the ten shortlisted chapters to choose the winner.

For an extra boost on creating a novel opening that readers can’t put down, you can buy the replay of Amanda Saint’s popular Fabulous First Chapters workshop.

*The link to watch the workshop is provided on the Stripe payment confirmation page.

Flash In Five October 2023 – Christine Collinson

This month our Flash In Five comes from writer Christine Collinson

A Climmer’s Chance, (click title to read) published by Janus Literary (online) and in A Pillow of White Roses (Ellipsis Zine).

Idea: My sources for generating ideas are quite broad: non-fiction books and articles, historic sites, podcasts, period dramas, and documentaries, are some of my typical starting points. I was listening to a BBC History Extra podcast about birds when I first came across ‘Climmers’ (or Climbers) [Pets, pests & portents: birds through time, April 2022]. This led me to some early film footage of Flamborough Head in Yorkshire [The Egg Harvest of Flamborough Head (1908), Cricks & Sharp]. Although black and white, and silent, it was so absorbing that a story idea emerged almost at once.

Development: A routine working day, perhaps, but what more could lie behind a perilous life at a cliffside? At the time, I was often writing stories around the theme of livelihoods (more on that later). The Climmers’ life clearly leant itself to an atmospheric setting, so I just needed to find that unique character arc. The footage of the workers was my starting point. I then considered what might drive my main character. It’s the same basic question for the past as now: what makes people get up every morning? So, my character’s motivation (aside from earning a living), would be partly romantic endeavour; something to keep his spirits up when the going was hard.

Editing: This story didn’t require too much editing, as occasionally happens, which gave me some confidence that the concept held together well. The film footage was in my mind as I wrote the first draft, so those images really helped to frame the main narrative. I often use first person from the outset and it seemed to lend the immediacy I hoped to convey here. Describing the coastal scene was a joy, but as usual in my work, I tried to avoid common phrases. The one I did use, “As sure as eggs is eggs,” was part of speech, which meant I could get away with it!

Submitting:  I think this piece went out to one or two journals and was declined, initially. Declines affect me less than they used to and I’m fully accepting that historical fiction is not always easy to place. I didn’t make any changes after the declines. With time (years!), I’ve learnt to trust my instincts a little more and I was happy with it. Then, I was approached by Janus Literary inviting me to submit to their Editor’s Showcase. I sent three quite varied flash pieces. A Climmer’s Chance was selected from those and featured in the August 2022 Showcase.

Reflections: When I was compiling my flash collection themed around livelihoods for the 2023 Ellipsis Zine Novella/Collection Competition, A Climmer’s Chance was a natural fit. I’m so pleased that as a result of first prize in that competition, it found a second home in A Pillow of White Roses.


Christine Collinson writes historical short fiction. Her debut collection, A Pillow of White Roses, was published in 2023 by Ellipsis Zine (also available from Amazon UK). Over the past five years, her work has been widely published in online journals and print anthologies. Find her on Bluesky and X @collinson26.

Flash In Five – September 2023 Emily Devane

This month our Flash In Five comes from writer Emily Devane

The Word Swallower (2018) Ellipsis Zine (click title to read)

Idea: This story came about by accident. I wanted to write a piece of flash for the National Flash Fiction Day anthology, on that year’s theme of ‘food’. I still have my notebook, filled with abandoned notes. I wanted to write something that would stand out. It was in thinking around the theme that an idea came to me: what if I told a story about people who eat things that aren’t food? I was familiar with stories about pregnant women craving coal, earth or chalk. I have hypo-sensory tendencies, so this was something I could relate to, albeit in a small way. I went down a lengthy research rabbit hole, exploring the phenomenon of people eating non-food substances. Pica, as it’s known, is classed as an eating disorder. The story started life as a paragraph with the holding title ‘The Paper Eater’.

Development: At the back of my mind was the expression: you are what you eat. I became interested in the concept of a person eating paper, and somehow becoming the words on the page. The story set out in a playful direction. Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this but the tale about the eaten lunch ticket actually happened to me, and it provided a humorous jumping off point. Then I thought of other things that might be eaten – and what might be rejected by the discerning paper eater (I had fun with that part!). But at this stage, the story was a series of anecdotes. As I worked on the story, it became clear that this character was eating paper due to a lack of something. By the final draft, this girl has become so shaped by the words she has consumed, she is now unrecognisable to her own mother. Everything slotted into place with that last line – another literalised metaphor. Sometimes that happens, and it feels like magic – a ‘ta-da’ moment.

Editing: During the editing stage, I switched perspectives. In the first draft, the story was told from the mother’s perspective but that made it harder to convey the final message. Third person allowed me to shift tones as the story progressed. I decided the title, ‘The Paper Eater’, wasn’t doing enough work. This girl wasn’t just eating paper, she was consuming words – and swallower seemed to have more resonance as a word. We talk of people swallowing a story whole or being swallowed up by something. That word seemed to better reflect the transformation at the heart of the story, and I felt it would prime the reader for something a little deeper. I still have the first draft of this story and it was one that grew and evolved rather than being honed and polished. I know I’m unusual in this, but I resist over-editing. First drafts have an energy and rhythm to them that’s hard to replicate.

Submitting:  I ended up not sending this to the NFFD anthology – ironically, in my attempt to think outside the box, my story had become too removed from the theme of ‘food’. I submitted the story to Ellipsis Three (the print edition), along with another story, ‘Night Music’. Steve told me he’d like to publish both stories – ‘Night Music’ ended up in the print zine, and ‘The Word Swallower’ was published online. I was thrilled when it was later nominated for Best of the Net and went on to be a finalist.

Reflections: I’m still fond of this piece because it reminds me to play. Too often, I forget that bit!


Emily Devane is a writer, editor and teacher based in Ilkley West Yorkshire. She has taught workshops and courses for Comma Press, Dahlia Press, London Writers’ Cafe and Northern Writers’ Studio. She has won the Bath Flash Fiction Award, a Northern Writers’ Award and a Word Factory Apprenticeship. Emily’s work has been published in Smokelong Quarterly, Best Microfictions Anthology, Lost Balloon, Ambit and others. She is a founding member at FlashBack Fiction. Emily co-hosts Word Factory’s Strike! Short Story Club and runs a monthly social writing group at The Grove Bookshop, Ilkley. Find her on twitter @DevaneEmily and @WordsMoor