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Flash fiction reminds me of my childhood fascination with paleontology and archeology. I loved how, from just a chip of stone or a few improbable…
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperback, 208 pages Stuart Dybek’s Ecstatic Cahoots is a two-hundred page collection of fifty stories. They’re “bite-sized,” according to the market-…
In The Secret Life of Objects, Dawn Raffel treats readers to dozens of flash nonfictions revolving around household bric-a-brac. Each object, which titles a chapter,…
There are twelve students in each flash fiction workshop I teach at Emerson College in Boston. What is very different about this class in contrast…
Through exercise, through activity, direct the writer’s eye and mind: the entire world as structure. Not Freytag, not three act, not two realist characters, enter…
When I teach flash fiction I like to guide my students by using great stories already written as models. I do this through a series…
On Top Chef, Wolfgang Puck had the contestants cook an omelet. A plain one, just egg and butter and cream. Salt and pepper. There isn’t…
Liliane’s Balcony by Kelcey Parker 208 pages, Rose Metal Press In Kelcey Parker’s cleverly woven novella-in-flash, a group of tourists arrives separately at Frank Lloyd…
50 pages, BlazeVOX Books Urging the poet to be concrete and specific, William Carlos Williams says, “No ideas, but in things.” This became my mantra…
Graywolf’s 2009 reissue of J. Robert Lennon’s collection of literary anecdotes, Pieces for the Left Hand, seems to have found its niche as one of…