Timeline: FlashBack’s Fourteenth Season Somehow, it’s summer already! We have some absolutely amazing things waiting for you next season, with pieces scheduled right up until the end of the year, but for now, we’re taking our regularly-scheduled little summer pause. …
BackStory: Five Questions with Vanessa Couchman
BackStory: Five Questions with Vanessa Couchman Author of An Encounter Between the Poet and the Mantis What inspired you to write ‘An Encounter Between the Poet and the Mantis’? Two things. First, I had just finished Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror…
An Encounter Between the Poet and the Mantis
An Encounter Between the Poet and the Mantis by Vanessa Couchman He comes yet again with his busy retinue of clerks. They sneer at me and fawn on him, but he holds his papers away from their gaze. The cries…
BackStory: Four Questions with D.E. Hardy
BackStory: Four Questions with D.E. Hardy Author of What We Believed What inspired you to write ‘What We Believed’? This piece got its start in a phenomenal ekphrastic fiction workshop led by Meg Pokrass and Lorette Luzajic. In one exercise,…
What We Believed
What We Believed by D.E. Hardy Art class was the best hour of the week; Miss Cunningham’s poster of the color wheel told the truth—everything had an opposite—blue to yellow, green to red; our desks were magic shields; sharpened pencils…
BackStory: Five More Questions with Mandira Pattnaik
Five More Questions with Mandira Pattnaik Author of Kaala Paani What inspired you to write ‘Kaala Paani’? I visited Cellular Jail, Port Blair, India, some time back. Now a national memorial and museum, it was a colonial prison used by…
Kaala Paani
Kaala Paani by Mandira Pattnaik Bakru can’t sleep because his father can’t because his mother can’t, so he turns on the bed rags and watches the rain through the open window, rain so insistent it doubles up to cover for…
BackStory: Five Questions with Struan Gow
BackStory: Five Questions with Struan Gow Author of RRS Discovery What inspired you to write ‘RRS Discovery’? The RRS Discovery holds a special place in my heart, as I grew up in Dundee, where it is currently displayed. It is…
RRS Discovery
by Struan Gow RRS Discovery: She cannot glimpse the sea. She cannot feel it wrap around her hull—salt within the wood, burning hot to cold warping her skin. She cannot hear its rhythm like she cannot hear her heart. They…
BackStory: Five Questions with Joyce Bingham
BackStory: Five Questions with Joyce Bingham Author of The Inheritance What inspired you to write ‘The Inheritance’? I was given a prompt to write about entering a room at a ghost story workshop. I found I was writing about a…