Interview with Emily Rinkema, First Place Winner in the WOW! Spring 2025 Flash Fiction Contest

Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont. For her real job, she works as a district curriculum and instruction leader, supporting and facilitating professional learning for teachers and administrators. She has written about education for years, but has now shifted almost entirely to writing fiction, partly as a way to escape the world, and partly as a way to understand it. Her stories have recently appeared in Fictive Dream, Variant Lit, Flash Frog, Ghost Parachute, and Wigleaf, and she won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. When not writing or working, she enjoys spending time with Bill, her husband; Chet, her dog; and Jack Reacher the Cat. You can read her work at https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema).

--interview by Marcia Peterson

WOW: Congratulations on winning first place in our Spring 2025 Flash Fiction competition. What prompted you to enter the contest?

Emily: The timing was just right. I came across the reminder about the WOW deadline online, and I thought I had a story that would be a great fit. I have a spot in my heart for WOW as it was the first flash comp I ever entered, so I was excited to try again.

WOW: Can you tell us what encouraged the idea behind your story, “Huff and Puff?”

Emily: After a long day at work, a man I ran into decided to explain AI to me. It was sort of the last straw in a series of similar experiences and so I came home and rage-wrote the first draft (there was a lot more violence in that first draft…). I decided to incorporate the fairy tale components because there’s a common template and expectations in fairy tales that I thought played well with my main character’s situation. And honestly, it was really cathartic to write.

WOW: What advice would you give to someone wanting to try writing flash fiction for the first time?

Emily: This isn’t mind-blowing advice, but I’d tell them to read flash every day. One of the great things about flash is that there’s always time to read a complete story. I’d find a few flash journals or sites that you admire and go to them whenever you have a few minutes (instead of doom-scrolling, for example). One of my go-tos is Matt Kendrick’s site (https://www.mattkendrick.co.uk/resources), but I also recommend Bluesky, which has an amazingly prolific and supportive flash community. SmokeLong also has an incredible Fitness offering on their site; so many of the stories I publish were started in SmokeLong Fitness.

WOW: Are you working on any writing projects right now? What’s next for you?

Emily: I love writing (and reading) flash, so for the foreseeable future, that’s what I’ll continue to do. Maybe someday I will publish a collection!

WOW:  Yes, keep writing! Thanks so much for chatting with us today, Emily. Before you go, do you have a favorite writing tip or piece of advice you can share?

Emily: I guess I would say to find what you love to write and then just do a lot of it. I spent a few years trying to be a kind of writer that I’m not, beating myself up for not having discipline and for not writing a novel and for not doing all of the things that I thought a “writer” was supposed to do. But then I just gave into what I really love, which is flash fiction, and I’ve been so happy (okay…like it’s all relative, right? I mean the world is a complete $h*tshow, so my happiness is balanced by a good dose of existential dread, rage, and despair, but in terms of my writing life? Happy.).

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