If you haven't done so already, check out Lydia's award-winning story "Salon Madonna" and then return here for a chat with the author.
WOW: Congratulations on placing third in the Spring 2026 Flash Fiction Contest! What excited you most about writing this story?
Lydia: Visual art is not something I usually write about or even think much about, so it was stimulating to explore something different while sticking to my greatly preferred medium of words! I didn't know that was the direction the piece was going to take; I was trying to pinpoint what felt so special about this seemingly ordinary mother and found myself thinking about paintings and frescoes. It was a good lesson in writing outside my comfort zone and not sticking to what I know.
WOW: Such amazing things can happen outside of our comfort zones. What did you learn about yourself or your writing while crafting this piece?
Lydia: Realising that inspiration really is in the everyday. You don't need to be having crazy life experiences to write interesting stories! Salon Madonna came from my daydreaming in the nail salon, surrounded by perfectly ordinary (at first glance...) fellow customers. It taught me to look again and dig deeper with my observations, which is a valuable skill for getting started on a piece, but it was also a great feeling to see something special come to life over many rounds of revisions – a lot like chipping away at a piece of rock to create a fresco!
WOW: What a great analogy! Please tell us more about your novel. What is it about? What has the writing process been like?
Lydia: The novel is very embryonic at the moment. I'm training to be a teacher and regularly take breaks to work on shorter fiction and my Substack so it's a deliberately slow process and I'm trying not to put too much pressure on it. Originally, I set out to write a short story but realised it was something bigger, so started mapping out how that might look. I'm moving between plotting and sporadic drafting and taking it as it comes. I'm really interested in how different generations perceive the world and interact with each other, so my main characters are a teenage girl and a woman in her sixties. I'm not either of those ages, so it's another example of not writing what I know! In a twist of circumstance, they need to come together to find a missing person, but more secrets are unveiled along the way.
WOW: It sounds like a fun process to explore all of those elements. What are you reading right now, and why did you choose to read it?
Lydia: I've been reading a lot of Graham Greene this summer, who is a new author to me (crazy, I know). I can't believe I waited this long... Brighton Rock has been my favourite so far. His examination of morality and Catholic guilt is about as heavy as subject matter gets, but he somehow manages to achieve the pace of a thriller with the scorching prose of a genius literary fiction writer. I've copied out lots of passages from his novels as I find this really useful for picking up skills for my own writing.
WOW: What a great method for learning and studying prose that you love. If you could give your younger self one piece of writing advice, what would it be and why?
Lydia: I'm young as it is but I still wish I'd started sooner. Something happens in the teenage years where so many of us reject the hobbies we loved as children only to pick them up in adulthood again and wonder why we ever left them; this happened to me with reading and making up stories. Building a writing habit is key and controversially I think quantity over quality has a greater pay off in the long term; if you show up, the rest will sort itself out.
WOW: Thank you for your thoughtful responses. Happy writing!
Interviewed by Anne Greenawalt, founder and editor-in-chief of Sport Stories Press, which publishes sports books by, for, and about sportswomen and amateur athletes. Connect @greenmachine459.
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