Writing Flash Fiction with Stephanie Reents

Name: Writing Flash Fiction with Stephanie Reents
Start: 2024-10-15T18:00:00-07:00
End: 2024-10-15T20:30:00-07:00
Location: 93 Pike St. #307, Seattle, WA, United States, Washington 98101

Schedule

Tue Oct 15 2024 at 06:00 pm to 08:30 pm

UTC-07:00

Location

93 Pike St. #307, Seattle, WA, United States, Washington 98101 | Seattle, WA

Join Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum and instructor Stephanie Reents for a new writing workshop on Flash Fiction – brief stories ranging from 500 to 1000 words. For this course, Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories will be required. The group will meet at Folio weekly on Tuesday nights for five weeks, starting October 15.
The beauty of flash fiction is that it invites playfulness and experimentation – unlike the long short story, a flash story can be drafted in a single sitting. Although you have only a few pages (or paragraphs) to write a flash story, the fundamentals of fiction writing still hold, and in this course, we will touch upon characterization, dialogue, and point of view, detail and setting, and forward movement and plot, by looking at a wide range of successful flash stories by authors such as Sandra Cisneros, Lydia Davis, Peter Orner, Steve Almond, and many other contemporary writers.
We’ll discuss how the form’s economy and brevity challenge writers to hook readers from the very first sentence, to make judicious use of detail to imply the story, and to write towards zingy last lines. The format will be a combination of workshop, lecture, in-class writing exercises, and discussion of craft. Workshops and instructor feedback will give you weekly feedback on your stories.
Stephanie Reents is the author of The Kissing List, a collection of stories that was an Editors' Choice in The New York Times Book Review, and I Meant to K*ll Ye, a bibliomemoir chronicling her journey into the strange voice at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. She has twice received an O. Henry Prize for her short fiction. Her novel We Loved to Run is coming out in 2025. Reents received a BA from Amherst, a BA from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and an MFA from the University of Arizona. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and was an Associate Professor of English and creative writing at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts until 2023.