Volume 8 Number 1

FLASH FICTION: The Semester Goes By in a Flash

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…

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Flash Fiction Exercise: An Appropriated Form, the List

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…

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A Flash Fiction Model

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…

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Using Flash to Teach Reading Like a Writer

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…

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A Lydia Davis Story

This burrito and I have something in common: we are each almost keeping it together.

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Jellyfish of the Island of Palau

Once we were sea monsters, once we were sirens. We electrocuted whole boats, sucked the flesh off the still-living. We were a Force to be…

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How Not to Rescue Your Uncle from Accidental Drowning

It’s important to remember that a person jumping into water from a height will submerge immediately. Even if water doesn’t enter his lungs at first,…

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Crepuscule

You know, I still dream of them—riding Vespas, chipping golf balls, pluck- ing daisies, smoking pipes, rubbing the bow across a violin, chasing hoops with…

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The Pond

They separated, and it became necessary to open the closet that held all my childhood things. Boxes were splitting open, some sunken and faded from…

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Didn’t Waste Any Time in High School

Emma Curtis was so smart—thought the hole in the sheep heart was a cause of death, not a way for the butcher to rack a…

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