In honor of this year’s Big Jewish Community Read program, the St. Louis Rabbinical Association and the St. Louis Jewish Light are sponsoring a “Flash Fiction” writing contest, open to everyone.  

Flash Fiction is an increasingly popular form of creative writing. Sometimes also called “short short stories,” or sudden, post card, or micro fiction, the goal is to capture a character or story or setting in very short form. Definitions of the genre vary in how many words are allowed. For this local contest, the word limit is 300. 

Just as writing a short story can be as difficult as writing a novel, telling an interesting complete story in as few as words as possible can be quite demanding.

This year’s BIG READ book is “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” a collection of short stories by Nathan Englander, but the only “prompt” for the contest is relevance to a Jewish theme. 

The winning entry and two runner-up selections will be published in the Jewish Light. The judging panel will include Rabbi Brigitte Rosenberg of United Hebrew Congregation and President of the St. Louis Rabbinical Association; Rabbi James Stone Goodman of Congregation Neve Shalom; and Howard Schwartz, noted author and Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Entries are due by Dec. 15. Send them to: St. Louis Rabbinical Association, c/o Steve Sorkin, 36 Queensbrook Place, St. Louis, Mo. 63132; or by email to [email protected].