By Author's Name

Two of the writers selected for inclusion in the January issue of Flash Fiction Online, Beth Wodzinski and Rod M. Santos, hone their writing skills at Liberty Hall, a writers’ forum — and I’m not making this up — where you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard.

Whatever the nature of their interactions with floor coverings and felines, they seem to crank out a lot of good stories. We spoke with Liberty Hall’s founder and proprietor, Mike Munsil, to find out more. Read more: HTML 

In this article, Mark Freivald uses Bolesław Prus’s "Mold of the Earth" and other stories to discuss the difference between allegory and symbolism. Read more: HTML 

Eric Garcia is a novelist and screenwriter who writes insane things. Interestingly, he seems to be able to make a living selling them. Nobody’s quite sure how this works. Read more: HTML 

Dave Hoing, author of “Souls of the Harvest” from our February issue, sent me The Hand of the Dead with an odd explanation: “Although it’s short enough to qualify as flash, I’m not sure if it’s fictional enough to qualify as fiction.” Call it a speculative essay, if you like—it stems from his love of old books, and the legacy captured in the handwriting inside a 1792 bible. —Ed. Read more: HTML 

The latest installment of Bruce Holland Rogers’s “Short-Short Sighted” column discusses fixed forms found “in the wild,” in letters and travel guides and even fire extinguishers. His short-short story What to Expect is about pregnancy—and a little bit more. Read more: HTML 

The latest installment of Bruce Holland Rogers’s “Short-Short Sighted” column discusses fixed forms—using rigidity to inspire creativity. His 400-word story The House of Women serves as an example. Read more: HTML 

In the latest installment of his “Short-Short Sighted” column, Bruce Holland Rogers discusses a three-point structure for creating short-short stories: Momentum, Disruption, and Proof of Deflection. And he provides an extremely short story (238 words) called “Daddy” to show you how a master does it. Read more: HTML 

Bruce Holland Rogers’s “Short-Short Sighted” column this month is called The Fabulist’s Tale. In it, he discusses fables and gives us a story of his own as an example. Read more: HTML 

Flash Fiction Online is extremely proud to welcome Bruce Holland Rogers, award-winning author and educator, as he begins his new column, entitled “Short-Short Sighted: Writing the Short-Short Story.” His first column frames the question that will lead us through the rest of his columns: What exactly is this short-short story thing that we keep talking about? Read more: HTML 

Bruce Holland Rogers is an award-winning fiction writer and teacher, best known for his short — sometimes extremely short — fiction. Among many other places, his stories were included in both the original 1992 Flash Fiction anthology that coined the term and its 2006 follow-up, Flash Fiction Forward. The Keyhole Opera, a collection of his short stories, won the 2006 World Fantasy Award for best collection. He also wrote Word Work: Surviving and Thriving As a Writer, and is on the faculty of the Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA program. His “Reconstruction Work” appeared in Flash Fiction Online’s inaugural issue.

Though he bases himself in Eugene, Oregon, we caught up with him in London, where he’s living until July, 2008. Read more: HTML 

Suzanne Vincent gets practical on writing extremely short speculative fiction. Read more: HTML