Karen Arnold

NFFR: What inspired “The Warmth of White China”?

Karen Arnold: This piece was written in response to weekly writing prompt from Writer’s HQ! (Tea vs Biscuits) and the image of the woman opening up a café just appeared in my mind’s eye. It developed from there, and the idea of this woman caring for her regulars and looking after a girl who appeared lost while she did not know where her own daughter was.

NFFR: How do you approach the editing process: love, hate, or something in between?

Arnold: I really have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the editing task! I am one of those writer’s whose eye is always taken to the next shiny new thing! However, I do know how valuable the editing process is, and I have found ways to approach it that suit me, I do tend to break the rule about not editing as I write, and also, I feel like a lot of the writing has been done in my head before anything goes on to paper.

NFFR: What are some stories or art that have moved you recently? A summer reading tip?

Arnold: A few months ago I read Prophet Song (Paul Lynch) which moved me profoundly as well as being absolutely chilling, I would absolutely recommend it, but as a slightly lighter summer read, I recently discovered Sylvia Townend Warner, and read Lolly Willows which was an absolute mischievous delight!

NFFR: Where and when do you write?

Arnold: I tend to write in my head all the time (which is probably why I’m always bumping into things!) but I actually put fingers to key board in my study at home, surrounded by books, pictures and objects that I love to look at or that fire my imagination in some way. I have a little ritual of lighting a particular scented candle when I sit down to write. I’m an early morning or late afternoon writer most of the time, but I also always have a notebook in my handbag just in case.

NFFR: What challenges are you grappling with in your writing right now?

Arnold: Making myself finish the three Works In Progress that I have on the anvil before I let myself start anything new!

NFFR: What’s a current writing project that you are excited about? Tell us a little about it.

Arnold: I have almost finished the first draft of a novella in flash set in a declining sea seaside town in the north of England. It follows the life of one young woman trying to make a life there. It centres around the pier and the people who work in the various shops and attractions, and it’s working title is “The End of The Pier Show.”

NFFR: What’s one of your favorite sentences…from your own writing? And why?

Arnold: Oh wow that’s a hard one! I had a story called “Birds Nest” accepted for the forthcoming edition of Banshee. I particularly love this sentence:

She invites crows to make their home there, claws and beaks poking out between the ribbons of old silk scarves and the magpie gifted glass beads she has knotted into her hair, making herself into a wishing tree with space for so many birds and their nests.

I love the way it sounds read out loud, and also the feeling of finding the words that exactly match the picture I had in my head while I was writing this piece.

Guy Biederman

NFFR: What inspired “Collections”?

Guy Biederman: We’re refurbishing an adobe home in El Paso that my uncle built in 1940. The walls had cracked and crumbled, and   the crawlspace below could be seen between the walls and floor —where skunks also dwelled. A craftsman repaired, replastered, and repainted the walls with their coved ceiling lines and made them beautiful again (the skunks were sent packing as well). But when the job was complete, we could not bring ourselves to make holes in the now gorgeous walls to re-hang our art.

NFFR: How do you approach the editing process: love, hate, or something in between?

Biederman: I love the rush and discovery of first drafts, written long hand in unlined moleskin journals using Precise V5 pens. When I type the story on my computer, the rewrite begins. I number every version and save them. It’s like turning all the lights on in your house, opening doors to explore every room, and then walking across the street to see how you live. Sometimes as it happens the first version, or very nearly, is the best, but the process of getting to know the story and hearing how others see it, is very satisfying. I love this process too, but in a different way because it’s a different kind of discovery.

NFFR: What are some stories or art that have moved you recently? A summer reading tip?

 Biederman: “Mime With A Gun” and “The Tiniest Fish” by Scotty Scottelaro are two amazing stories I’ve recently read and keep thinking about. This summer I would suggest checking out Aurora Baldealis by Meg Pokrass and Jeff Friedman, an astonishing collaboration of fabulist micro fiction.

NFFR: Where and when do you write?

Biederman: I write in the early morning in a big brown leather chair with my back to the canal where I live, coffee close at hand. Alone. No music. After tai chi on the roof. These are usually first drafts. Rewriting is often done in the afternoon.

NFFR: What challenges are you grappling with in your writing right now?

Biederman: I am somewhat nomadic these days. When I’m on the road, I can easily fall out of my writing rhythm and routine, which can affect my feel and flow. My challenge is to find that feel and flow when I’m not writing when and where I usually work. I’ll look for a chair in a cafe or in the hotel breakfast room, write a line or two and see where it goes. Often the coffee’s not great.

NFFR: What’s a current writing project that you are excited about? Tell us a little about it.

Biederman: My new book of micro fiction, Here’s Where We Get Off, was released last month by Blue Light Press and I’ve been doing readings, landing reviews, and learning about social media stuff that I haven’t really used much before. It’s another side of writing that I’ve rarely paid attention to, a different kind of follow through in a way, and it’s been great fun to learn about it and work with some folks and get my shoulder behind this slim book of micros, which I love.

Now that Here’s Where We Get Off is out in the world, I’m turning my attention to The Happy Houseboat, a children’s book about a little houseboat named Buttercup who thinks he’s a ship and longs for high sea adventure. One stormy day he gets his wish. The story has been illustrated by a wonderful mariner watercolor artist, and my friend, poet Florencia Milito, translated it into Spanish. So, it’s a bilingual casa flotante story. It feels time to launch Buttercup next.

NFFR: What’s one of your favorite sentences from your own work?

Biederman: “It’s all true, especially the fiction.”

Chris Cottom

NFFR: What inspired “When Dad Moves in with Auntie Carly It’s Time for Votive Offerings”?

Chris Cottom: When I was fourteen I spent lots of time at the higgledy-piggledy cottage of a friend, whose lovely mother was forever organising theatre trips, picnics, etc for her son and his chums. Before once such outing, she held a supper party on their lawn under a lichen-covered apple tree, with tablecloths and, yes, girls (all of whom, as a victim of single-sex education, I was too tongue-tied to chat with). After much heartache, the parents sold the cottage as part of a wider development and it was bulldozed away. I had tried to express this end-of-something feeling in a 100-word piece, but knew it needed more. A task in this year’s Smokelong’s March Micro Madness, of writing a first-person plural story, included the option of using a picker wheel of objects. I didn’t spin the wheel, just saw ‘a votive offering’, and I was off.

NFFR: Where and when do you write?

Cottom: Usually on my PC, sometimes on my laptop, much of the rest of the time in my head, occasionally when I’m asleep (but I’m working on that).

NFFR: How do you approach the editing process: love, hate, or something in between?

Cottom: Love it. Writing is rewriting. As a rookie writer, I thought I could call a story finished once it was published. Then I took a course with the redoubtable KM Elkes in which he said he’d never submitted anything without then immediately wanting to change something. Alice Munro famously tweaked published stories before republishing them in anthologies. I was delighted when the awesome editors of NFFR asked if I’d like to consider one repeated word in this piece (reader, I changed it).

NFFR: What are some stories or art that have moved you recently?

Cottom: Novel: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Short Story: Abject Naturalism by Sarah Braunstein published in The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories 2025

Flash: The Weight of a Hummingbird by Suraj Gupta published by Flash 500

Micro: Things My Brother Explains With Absolute Authority by J.M.C. Kane published by The Welkin Writing Prize

CNF: Grief Is a Quilt by Gillian Gurley published in Broad Ripple Review

Sculpture: The Tower of Babel by Colin Wilbourne at Kentwell Hall, Suffolk

AJ O’Toole

NFFR: What inspired “Least Said”?

A.J. O’Toole: My recent move to a small town, and seeing a decaying car outside a nearby house. It’s still there, getting worse, never going to be driven again.

Also I did used to travel a lot for work.  Maybe I should take up writing postcards as well as flash fiction.

NFFR: How do you approach the editing process: love, hate, or something in between?

O’Toole: I think I like editing more than the actual writing – I have a fear of the blank page, the first draft is torture, I prefer to chip away at something that’s already present.

NFFR: What are some stories or art that have moved you recently? A summer reading tip?

O’Toole: Leonard and Hungry Paul by Rónán Hession.  A lovely character-driven novel. I came to it through the equally charming TV adaptation.

NFFR: Where and when do you write?

O’Toole: I write a lot in the notes app of my phone – that’s how I get my ideas down in a form that I can build on later, and can be any time that inspiration strikes. Then it’s at my desk with Music For Airports on repeat while I try to make it all make sense.

NFFR: What challenges are you grappling with in your writing right now?

O’Toole: I have a finished novel that I’m trying to trim down to only the essential story. It’s hard as the book is quite tangential by nature, I need to keep some of the wandering, and make it still fit a structure. The structure is partly defined by the soundtrack album I’ve constructed for any future TV adaptation. I like self imposed difficulties in art.

 NFFR: What’s a current writing project that you are excited about? Tell us a little about it.

O’Toole: I’ve started writing a new novel, and my plan is to have each chapter around six thousand words, with the energy and arc of short stories. I’m getting as many jokes in as I can, and sending it to test readers chapter by chapter to keep the pressure on myself. It’s great to have a new cast of characters running around my head, and sometimes interacting in a way that surprises me as I go.

Ian Walker-Sperber

NFFR: What inspired “A Minor Inconvenience”?

Ian Walker-Sperber: I first had the idea for this story several years ago, when I was briefly obsessed with graphic novels, especially from artists like Michael DeForge and Nick Drnaso. In my imagination, ‘A Minor Inconvenience’ was always meant to be an animated short. The story is a kind of social satire, which cartoons handle so well! Unfortunately, I’m neither an illustrator nor an animator, so when the story surfaced during a writing session, I had to accept it as is.

NFFR: Where and when do you write?

Walker-Sperber: I write a lot on trains! I had a long commute for several years, which in Switzerland thankfully means an opportunity to sit on a train, stare out the window and put down one’s thoughts. Though I’m not sure this works as well for longer fiction. I’d like to fix my bad habit of going outdoors, so that I can stay inside and write more on the weekends.

NFFR: What challenges are you grappling with in your writing right now?

Walker-Sperber: Like many writers, I am struggling to articulate this weird moment we’re in with the rise of artificial intelligence. I spend a lot of time thinking about the risks of superintelligence—a machine whose intelligence far exceeds our own. Much of my recent non-fiction writing has been an attempt to explain these risks to a general audience. This has recently become a motivating factor in my fiction writing as well… with the weird additional caveat that a sufficiently compelling story about artificial intelligence could become part of the training data determining how a future superintelligence might behave! I believe the potential role of fiction for determining safe outcomes with artificial intelligence has been underexplored.

NFFR: What’s a current writing project that you are excited about? Tell us a little about it.

Walker-Sperber:This summer I’ll begin work on a novel, more or less full time. I had originally intended to write a satire of corporate power struggles, but I am inclined now to write about our fatalistic pursuit of increasingly capable artificial intelligence. Of course, who knows what directions the story will take once I begin writing. Perhaps it’ll turn into a long exploration of soup?

Abigail Williams

NFFR: What inspired “Sometimes it’s the weight of a watermelon”?

Abigail Williams: In my recent writing I’ve started turning more to my northern roots. There’s something romantic and gritty about the redbrick terraces of northern towns – all that history, proximity and change. I wanted to write a piece that touched on crisis but brought the character back from the brink and finished on a hopeful note; in these strange times, I’m trying to weave more hope into my writing. Oh, and shoes. Even though they didn’t feature prominently in the final piece, it was the image of Jenny’s shoes which triggered this flash. I find objects to be critical in grounding historical pieces.

NFFR: How do you approach the editing process: love, hate, or something in between?

Williams: Hate! Writing is easy, delicious, sometimes even thrilling. And then there’s editing, where I pull on one string and end up reshaping the entire garment. Editing flash fiction is particularly hard because every word matters; the slightest alteration can change the nuance of the piece. Fundamentally, I think acknowledging the importance of editing flies in the face of my impatience. Like so many writers, I slide creativity in between the immovable pillars of work and family, and to edit well we need to let a piece lie fallow and be prepared to restructure it from the ground up. It can be slow. I’m ever grateful to my husband and Team Tuesday for their invaluable perspectives when I’ve taken a story as far as I can on my own. Irritatingly, a well-edited story is always sharper, brighter and more interesting than the original.

NFFR: What challenges are you grappling with in your writing right now?

Williams: Focus and time. I love writing flash, I relish the challenge of short stories, but I also have a draft of a novel which I need to restructure, the start of another novel underway and there’s an idea for a radio play… Flash is a beautiful siren, luring me in with brevity and technical intrigue, but at some point I’m going to have to sail past her and tackle those bigger projects. Then there’s the issue of switching between forms and the contrasting level of detail required…Sometimes pouring writing ideas into the time available feels like trying to stuff several superking duvets into a sock. I know I’m not alone. I know it’s important to enjoy the process and breathe out. But if anyone wants to lend me a time stretcher, I won’t say no.

NFFR: Do you have a favorite sentence from your own writing? What makes it pleasing?

Williams: I find it hard to reflect on my own writing – I read it between splayed fingers a bit like watching a horror film. In this piece I like the last line, because it pulls Jenny’s awful experience slightly back to a place of hope, even though it’s a hope mired in sadness. But I think my favourite sentence is ‘Sometimes, as she grew older, Jenny allowed herself to lick the sour pill of ‘what if’.’ I like it because it taps into the character’s yearning and, for me, knowing a character’s secret desire helps unlock them. And Jenny’s yearning is so sweet and gentle, and sometimes with grief we can get stuck between the desire to sit in our sorrow and having to box it up in order to carry on living. So I like that this line speaks to that struggle, if only a little bit.