A Conversation with Jude Higgins
I’ve followed the Bath Flash Fiction Festival online for years, and it soon became my writer’s fantasy trip. This past summer, I had the pleasure of attending for the first time and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Jude Higgins, one of the organizers, was especially welcoming and was fascinated as I learned more about her during this interview. —AA
1. I was delighted to discover your professional background as a Gestalt psychotherapist while preparing for this interview. I’d worked in the mental health field myself and believe there’s an intrinsic connection between writing and counseling. Both fields delve into the complexities and inconsistencies of human behavior. Do you find you draw from from your former career as part of your writing process?
It’s a long time ago now since I retired as a therapist. About 15 years. I think I must draw from my former career to some extent, although that part of my life feels quite background now. Often, in Gestalt psychotherapy sessions, therapists devise ‘creative experiments’ with clients to increase awareness. I love the experimental nature of writing short fiction and am always willing to try out new things. Writing for me, is about connecting with others, so if my experimental writing makes that connection and delves deep into relationship issues without being too on the nose, that’s a plus. I also ran dream groups as a therapist and have over the years run ‘Dreams into Fiction’ workshops drawing on the Gestalt approach to dreams. My fictional pamphlet, The Chemist’s House, was based on dreams about the house where I grew up. My newly published collection, Clearly Defined Clouds, also contains several stories sparked off by dreams. And there are certainly many stories about the complexities and inconsistencies of human behaviour!
2. In a recent interview with Christopher Allen in SmokeLong Quarterly, you’d mentioned that your “favourite thing about the festival is seeing how happy people are. I love that people have made lasting friendships.”
While attending the festival this year, I definitely felt that vibe and found the experience different from other writing festivals I’ve attended in the past. What do you believe it is about the BFFF that creates this sense of joy and engagement?
I am glad you felt the vibe! There’s a large cohort of worldwide flash fiction writers who keep contact with each other through social media and in various peer groups. The chance to meet face to face in a setting where no one asks what flash fiction is, is very compelling. I think that brings a lot to the joy and engagement during the weekend. People lead wonderful workshops too and I enjoy devising the packed programme. My team helps everything run smoothly and I am very grateful for that support. I do like organising large groups (part of my psychotherapy background too) and I spend quite a lot of time beforehand visualising in great details the event going really well and people having fun. The venue, which I have used since 2018 also helps. It is in such a beautiful setting with all the trees and greenery. We can’t have more than 150 there in total. This year there were 130 and that means it still feels relatively intimate and we can easily welcome newcomers and make them feel at home.
3. As a writer married to poet, John Wheway, what would a typical day look like in your household? Would you mind giving our readers a peek into your lives together?
Here’s a small peek into the writing side. We have spent years sending each other five words as a prompt to write a draft of a story or a poem first thing. Then we spend time writing that draft and share it over a (usually late) breakfast. There are times when we don’t do this but months and months when we do. I like the way the five random words can prompt odd combinations in stories. We give each other feedback. John is very good at giving me feedback. He was an English teacher once, is very widely read and is also a psychotherapist. Our house is stuffed with books of all sorts. We have many, many stories and poems in our archives and quite a lot have found their way into publication or have won contests.
4. Do you keep a wish list of dream journals, i.e., those you’d love to call home for your writing, yet elude you?
I would love to be published in SmokeLong. I nearly made publication when I had a story shortlisted in their micro contest in 2023. It would be nice to be published in Wigleaf too. I have had a few stories in the longlist of their yearly selections for the Wigleaf Top 50. However, in order to be nearer to achieving this goal, I do need to submit to them regularly! I’ve submitted hardly anything to either journal.
5. If I opened a closet in your home and pulled out your favorite coat, what would I find in your pocket that would surprise me?
I have a few favourite coats and was thinking of getting rid of some recently. One which was headed for the charity store is a short fake fur coat I wear when it is really cold. This coat is famous for the time I stood at a bus stop wearing it and a small dog growled and wouldn’t walk by me because I think it thought I was a fierce strange animal. I just found a post office receipt for a book in the pocket from 6th December 2022. Was that the last time is was really cold here in the Southwest of the UK? I also direct the small press Ad Hoc Fiction and am often down at the small rural office nearby posting books. They call me the book lady down there.
6. When did you first start writing and what do you wish you’d known then that you know now? Do you have any advice for writers just starting out?
I had written before but I began writing fiction with some energy in the1990s when I wrote short stories and won a few contests. Writing fiction was an evolving process. I wouldn’t have known then that my preference was for very short fiction, although I had read Sudden Fiction, the collection edited by James Thomas and Robert Shapard, which was published in 1983.
When I retired from the psychotherapy work, I did the MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University. For starting out writers, I’d say just keep writing. Get a friend to send you writing prompts. Banish your inner critic to a remote island. Come to the flash fiction festival!
7. Can you tell us more about your new flash fiction collection Clearly Defined Clouds and how you compiled it?
This collection contains many of the flash fictions I have had published in magazines and anthologies over the last 8-10 years plus some new ones.
I grouped them in various ways. For example, there are several stories from a child’s point of view arranged together. There are a few about women without children. I like writing re-visioned fairy tales and there are several of these in the book. The stories often show precarious or flawed relationships as well as the ways people come together again and many include climate change themes. Towards the end of the collection, they become more hopeful. But most are never really without hope or humour.
8. If you could change one thing about the flash fiction community, what would it be?
That all of the flash fiction writers I know on line lived in Bristol and Bath and I could visit them frequently.
9. I’d read in one of your biographical statements that you were “hooked on writing flash fiction after a workshop with Tania Hershman in 2012.” Tell us a bit more about that experience and what sold you on flash fiction.
As I mentioned earlier, I love the experimental form. Tania Hershmann writes wonderful experimental pieces and in the workshop, she showed her well-known story My Mother Was an Upright Piano published in 2009. Soon afterwards, I tried writing a piece that had odd juxtapositions in the writing and entered it in the Fish Flash Fiction Prize where I was thrilled to receive an honourable mention. This was a great encouragement. I abandoned longer forms and became addicted.
10. Do you believe flash fiction has the same staying power as a short story?
Yes. There are many pieces that have stayed with me for years. Some people have the ability to convey a novel’s worth of emotion and a strong sense of whole lives lived, in less than 500 words. It is worth paying close attention to how they actually do this. Often, it is the unusual subject matter. But also very strong images and metaphors, sensory details, pacing, sentence structure and finally the way they touch your heart. All the lasting stories have emotional impact.
Thank you for such an amazing interview! Our readers will love your answers which reveal so many aspects of who you are as a person and writer. We also appreciate you sharing a few of your stories from your collection below.
No Rhyme, Or Reason
Mary Bunting from next door has put her baby in the tree again. I tell my husband her man’s gone a-hunting for rabbits and someone needs to go around to get the baby down. In the end, it’s me. Mary pats me on the arm and says the cradle’s quite low down, there’s a proper framework in the tree and it rocks nicely in the breeze. Her baby loves it. I look at the tree and say the bough could break, but she tells me the tree’s sturdy and it will all be okay.
Mary’s done away with flowers in her garden. Silver bells hang from bushes and there are cockle shells all over the place, as if she just tips them out when they’ve finished their meals. While she’s seeing me off down the path, I mention that if she wants anything else to eat apart from seafood, to come around and I’ll make her a nice stew. She says it’s the wrong weather for stew, and she’s got plenty of food in, thank you.
Mary has always been contrary. She used to come around and sit with me for hours after my loss, but since her own baby came, she hardly visits at all. I stand in our garden and look over the fence at baby Bunting tucked up snugly in his cradle and cross my fingers that he won’t fall out. Then I go back inside.
My husband’s at the table, peeling onions for his pickles and his face is streaming with tears. It’s funny to see him crying. I could almost imagine they are real tears and he’s sad for baby Bunting, out in the cold, or that he’s sad for our own baby, but he’s full of Little Bo losing her sheep.
‘She doesn’t know where to find them,’ he says. ‘As if anyone could lose a sheep around here.’
I don’t tell him about the bleating I heard in his allotment yesterday because he’d have a fit if he knew the sheep had got in there and eaten his vegetables.
‘She’s had a thing with the fat guy you call Georgie Porgie,’ I say, ‘So I suppose she’s been distracted.’ I wonder why anyone in their right mind would let Georgie’s slobbery lips wander all over them. Last week, when I saw the way Bo had put on weight, I thought, soon enough, looking after sheep would be the least of her worries. The onions my husband’s peeling make me cry now. ‘Do you really think the Bunting baby’s going to be okay?’ I say.
He wipes his eyes and then mine with one of the posh paper napkins I bought for the street party I was going to organise to cheer everyone up. Such pretty ones, printed with little maids all in a row. I try not to mind that he uses them up like an ordinary kitchen roll. It would have been lovely to have a party for the local children but none of the neighbours seemed very keen.
‘Don’t worry, Goosey,’ he says and strokes my hair. I want to cry properly when he uses his favourite pet name for me. I pick up one of the pretty napkins and press it over my mouth so he won’t see my lips trembling. Soon after our baby died, he kept finding me sleep-walking. Once, I tried to grab his leg and throw him down the stairs. In my sleep, he said I told him it was because he wouldn’t say his prayers that we lost our little boy. He was very upset about that. He reminded me the doctor said it was no one’s fault.
‘We could have the Muffet girl and the Horner boy over today,’ I say. ‘I could make lemon curd sandwiches and something lovely with all our leftover plums.’
But my husband says their parents don’t like them coming over here, they need to be in their own homes. He sits me down and makes me label the pickle jars. Yesterday he made me polish the silverware. The doctor said repetitive tasks would be helpful and would stop everything being mixed up in my head. And it is soothing for a while, sitting down with my husband, us doing things together. But our cupboards are full of what he’s preserved and I wonder why he wants to store everything away.
Outside, the wind is getting up. I hope Mary takes the baby in.
Note: No Rhyme or Reason was originally published in Fictive Dream and nominated for Best Small Fictions includes several nursery rhymes.
It Comes To Something When You Want To See Roadkill
They’d been talking about hedgehogs, the way they hadn’t seen any for years. And, she said, not even squashed on the road — it comes to something when you want to see roadkill. There were badgers dead on the verges, sometimes a deer, but no hedgehogs. She said she missed the nest of wasps in the wall outside the front door, the way they chased the postman down the path and bothered them at breakfast outside, dug into the apples and ruined them. He said there were fewer woodlice in the wood pile. He used to brush them off the logs so as not to watch them curl up and sizzle in the stove. She said, not too far in the future, people would long to be stung by anything, even a mosquito. They’d deliberately go to Scotland in the insect season to have clouds of midges hanging over their heads. There’d be coach trips to witness the last of this phenomenon. Tourists would show off their bites. At home, instead of Tupperware, there’d be infestation parties. Women would turn up wearing their moth-eaten cashmere like a badge of pride. They’d admire the holes and say, what, you still have moths? Where do you live? They’d long for the tickle of a moth on their necks in bed at night, to see them clustered around a naked lightbulb, long to scrape squashed moth bodies off the car windscreen. Because if they did, at least the air would be alive. They’ll even like bluebottles, he said. Want to hear the drone around the kitchen. Want to see them walking over left-out food, want to see the bluebottle maggots on the rotting animals in the fields. And what about the bees, she said, and they were silent for a while. Once last spring, she said, she rose at dawn to hear the chorus. Still loud, still that blackbird lording it over every other bird. The bumblebees were motionless on the lavender, as if they were dead. But when she put a finger on the furry back of the biggest one, it grumbled like he did if she woke him up too early. Technically, he said, bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly. Physics says their bodies are too big. She remembered the slow buzz of the bees on the comfrey last year, the lazy way they dipped in and out of the blooms. Their wings flex, he said. That’s how they do it. They don’t flap them up and down. Perhaps being flexible might save them and us in the end, she said. Maybe, he said. But they were silent again. And outside even the sparrows had stopped their chatter.
Note: It Comes to Something When You Want to See Roadkill, a climate change type story, was originally published in Ellipsis Zine.
The Great Conjunction
The mother went out with her spade on the night of the winter solstice, 2020, just after sunset when Jupiter and Saturn were the closest they’d been in the night sky for four hundred years. You might think she had something to bury, but it was nothing like that. She wanted to dig a hole for a new tree. And then in the daytime she would plant an oak in a place where in four hundred more years one of her descendants would stand under its branches and gaze towards the sky to see the two planets in conjunction again.
It was safe in her country garden at night. And she hoped she’d live another year to check the new growth of the tree and that next winter her estranged only son would return from New York and they’d gaze into the sky together, although the planets would not be aligned like this.
The son went out with his smartphone on the night of the winter solstice, 2020, just after sunset, and walked to the middle of Central Park. You might think he was making his usual secret call or that he was waiting for someone to contact him but, today, it was nothing like that. He looked up. Even with his naked eye in midst of the city, Saturn and Jupiter looked bright. He took a picture, which clearly showed Jupiter’s four brightest moons and the faint rings around Saturn. In the daytime, he might send the picture to his mother. And he’d save the photo to show the child he might never have, the child he would tell about Galileo, who, four hundred years previously, used a telescope to look at these planets and kept notes that people could still read now.
It wasn’t safe in the park on dark winter nights and he hoped he’d live another year. Perhaps he’d feel able to visit his mother, even though the planets would not be aligned like this.
For now, the mother and son silently radiate their love across the ocean. Tonight they feel as close as Jupiter and Saturn, which, in the sky, look as if there is only a pinky finger’s distance between them, although they are 600 million kilometres apart.
Note: The Great Conjunction was originally published in Twin Pies magazine.
Jude Higgins is a writer, writing tutor, book publisher and event organiser. She has been published widely in magazines and anthologies since 2013. Her collection, Clearly Defined Clouds, was published in July 2024 and is available from Ad Hoc Fiction and Amazon. Jude directs Flash Fiction Festivals UK, and hosts a yearly in-person weekend event in July and three online festival days, which take place in the autumn/winter. She has been running the thrice yearly bathflashfictionaward.com since 2015. You could say she is addicted to flash fiction.
