A big thank you to Linda Simoni-Wastila who has honoured me with this award. Linda is a fantastic scribe herself so please check out her own fiction and flash at her wonderful blog.
Now I'd like to reciprocate with my nominees of people whose writing fundamentally needs to be
a) read by you all out there
b) acknowledged with this award so that hopefully
c) their amazing work will get to yet wider reading audiences
My first is Carrie Clevenger who just writes the most exquisitely worded, wonderfully evocative stories in a sort of James Joycean meets Texas Gothic way. Carrie tends to post early to #fridayflash which is good, cos she's always one of the first stories I unfailingly look to read.
My second is the wonderful Alison Wells who writes the most lyrical and delicious pieces of unapolgetically literary fiction. Her language is an absolute privilege to bask in and I often compare it to Beckett and Joyce (again) for which she always pulls me up short that she is only domiciled in Ireland, rather than a daughter of it!
My third is Penny Goring who interrogates language far more poetically and far more revolutionary than I do. Her work fundamentally needs to be exposed to a wider audience to demonstrate the possibilities of what writing CAN do, the places it can take a reader, the self re-examination it can bring you. Penny, I salute your genius and it's not a word I use lightly.
My fourth is Mazzz in Leeds who I only know by her first name Maria. Maria writes stories in genres I would normally run a mile from, being an effete literary type as I am, those of SciFi & horror, but such is her story-telling prowess, every time I click the link to her website and am confronted with that dirty great big black handgun in its header, my heart skips a beat and I know I'm in for a treat. Possibly the best thing ever to emerge from Leeds!
Special mentions to two brilliant people who between them make the #fridayflash community happen and provide the glue to hold us together:
Jon M Strother whose Mad Utopia blog provides the platform for everyone to participate and without whom we would not be here today. Undying thanks as ever Jon.
Anne Tyler Lord who hosts all the socials for the community (!) with her Coffee Klatches and also writes fabulously incisive posts on writing and psychology because she's enormously talented in both fields. Read her blog "Don't Fence Me in" all you could want to know about the psychology of writing is under "The Writer's Life" tag.
So thanks to every one mentioned here specifically and to the #fridayflash community as a whole where there is so much writing talent on display it's almost frightening. World look out!
