Former Creative Writing Student Publishes his Second Pamphlet of Poetry

 

Jake Campbell, former Creative Writing student at the University of Chester, has published a second pamphlet of poetry, The Coast Will Wait Behind You. It is available from Art Editions North.

 

 Poet Jean Sprackland comments: ‘The tempered lyricism of Jake Campbell's poems, and their forensic attention to detail, bring to life the visceral and psychological experience of coastal place, with all its edge-of-the-world urgency and exhilaration.’

 

Lecturer Dr Ian Seed says of the collection: ‘The poems in The Coast Will Wait Behind You convey such a strong sense of voice and of landscape. They are haunting, unafraid of the world of the dead, yet always feel firmly rooted in the world we live in.’ 

 

Read more about Jake Campbell’s The Coast Will Wait Behind You. 

 



 

 

New Collection of Flashes

Drs Peter Blair and Ashley Chantler are pleased to announce the publication of Meg Tuite’s Lined Up Like Scars: Flash Fictions. The chapbook is the second to be edited by Blair and Chantler, and published by Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press (Chester).

For more information and to order a copy, go to: http://www.chester.ac.uk/flash.fiction/press

New Pamphlet of Poetry Published by Lecturer Dr Ian Seed

 

 

Ian Seed's pamphlet of poetry, Fidelities, has been published in a limited edition by Red Ceilings Press. Click here to see a review by Steve Spence for Stride Magazine.

Winter WordFest 2015

Peter Blair, Senior Lecturer in English and co-editor of Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, will be a guest reader at Winter Wordfest 2015.

Flash, 8.1 (April 2015)

Issue 8.1 of Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine is now available.

It features new stories from Botswana, Britain, Egypt, France, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Japan, South Africa, Sweden, and the USA.

We are pleased to open with four pieces by David Swann, whose Stronger Faster Shorter: Flash Fictions launched our new venture, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press. For more information about the collection and the Press, please visit Flash’s website. This issue also includes the 2015 winner of the UK’s National Flash Fiction Youth Competition, ‘Hide and Seek’ by Helen Gurr, a talented A-level student at Wirral Grammar School for Girls. The competition was organized by Flash and the Department of English, University of Chester; it was judged by the editors and leading flash author Vanessa Gebbie.

‘Flash Presents’ contains four pieces – ‘The Interview’, ‘The Goat Tetherer Attempts to Make History’, ‘The Shortage at the Petting Zoo’, and ‘Storage’ – from Nick Parker’s acclaimed debut collection The Exploding Boy and Other Tiny Tales (2011).

In the ‘Flash Essay’ section, Charlotte Rich connects ‘Kate Chopin’s Very Short Stories’ to the late-nineteenth-century American author’s longer work. Alongside the essay, ‘A Very Fine Fiddle’ is reprinted; in Flash, 7.1, you can read ‘A Harbinger’, ‘Doctor Chevalier’s Lie’, ‘Old Aunt Peggy’, and ‘Ripe Figs’.

‘Flash Reviews’ assesses a rich diversity of texts: three chapbooks (Nuala Ní Chonchúir’s Of Dublin and Other Fictions, William Todd Seabrook’s The Imagination of Lewis Carroll, and Shellie Zacharia’s Not Everything Lovely and Strange Is a Dream); three longer collections (Stuart Dybek’s Ecstatic Cahoots, James Robertson’s 365, and Avital Gad-Cykman’s Life In, Life Out); and a compendium of five novellas-in-flash with accompanying craft essays (My Very End of the Universe, by Tiff Holland, Meg Pokrass, Aaron Teel, Margaret Patton Chapman, and Chris Bower).

To order a copy of the issue, or to subscribe to the magazine, go to: http://www.chester.ac.uk/flash.magazine

Peter Blair and Ashley Chantler (Editors), Department of English, University of Chester

Launch of Pandora's Box

On 12 May, with the summer evening light streaming in through the high windows, students and tutors gathered in the Vicarage for the launch of Pandora’s Box, an annual magazine which offers a selection of the best creative writing by students and tutors from the last academic year. The final choice of work for 2014-15 was made by the two student editors, Jessica Hilton and Laura Taylor.

As well as readings from the magazine, comic scripts were performed, writing competitions were run, and a wonderful time was had by all!

Out Now: Stronger Faster Shorter: Flash Fictions

David Swann’s Stronger Faster Shorter: Flash Fictions is the inaugural chapbook of Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press.

Imagine you have returned from a war to find the soldiers you killed wandering the streets of your home town and sleeping with all the girls you fancy.

The poor old pigeons are not having it much easier. They have flown back from overseas to discover their coop bolted shut. Word is, the champion fancier has gone down with an allergy to his flock. Word is, the birds’ homing has brought them somewhere strange.

In this collection of twenty-five short-short stories, the characters are searching for the things we all crave: a place to be, a use for their time, and that special creature who will share the hours with them…

But love is hard to find when there is so much fighting. Ask the Iranian with the Frank Sinatra fixation who you have just dug up from a flowerbed. Or the fundraisers knocking each other’s lights out at the Annual Party for the Association of Parents of Children with Hand and Arm Deficiencies.

They are in the wars, for sure. But these people go on dreaming of peace. Take the lonely fruit-picker, living in a caravan far from home. If she opens her hand now, a man will drop a flower from the sky and it will fall into her grasp… Then he will fire hot air into his balloon and rise again. And he will look down and agree that it is strange to see your home town like this, that distance makes him fond of its wrecked old streets.

But whenever he lands, he looks at the sky again. And he loves the fruit-picker most when he cannot quite reach her.

For more information and to purchase a copy, go to: http://www.chester.ac.uk/flash.magazine/press