The new year has just started, but Fremont Cultural Arts Council (FCAC) is already planning for this spring’s Flash Fiction Contest for Arts, Culture and Creativity Month in April. If you didn’t participate in the September 2025 contest, the theme was “The Friendly Ghost.” The contest used to be every fall, but due to increasing popularity it’s now held twice per year.
Al Minard, who’s been running the contest for many years, has chosen a theme for April. But FCAC is still looking for themes for this fall. If you have an idea that could be an inspiration for a 300-word short story—send them our way! Maybe later this year you’ll see 60 or 70 local writers explore what your theme meant to them.
I haven’t participated in the contest for all the years it’s been running. Some of the themes I remember are: “alternate history of Fremont,” “poems” (any topic, but all submissions had to be poetry), and “the day I fell in love.” My favorite was “fairy tales” because the topic could go in so many different ways. I felt like every submission had passion behind it. So many people seemed to hear that theme, and immediately inspiration struck—but never the same way twice.
An experience with a tsunami warning in Hawaii made me think of “the sea” as a topic. People could write about their own memories of the ocean. (We Bay Areans have a lot of beaches to choose from!) The sea has also been the setting or subject of famous works of literature: The Odyssey, Moby Dick, The Little Mermaid. The sea could also be metaphorical, representing a mental state, or a landscape like rolling hills or a prairie that resembles the ocean.
You can send Flash Fiction theme suggestions to tc*@**********ce.com. Whether inspiration strikes or not, I hope you’ll participate in some of the events this April.
