FICT 99 W — Flash Fiction Workshop: Five Stories in Five Weeks
Quarter: Fall
Instructor(s): Stephanie Reents
Date(s): Sep 28—Oct 26
Class Recording Available: Yes
Class Meeting Day: Mondays
Class Meeting Time: 12:00—1:00 pm (PT)
Tuition: $590
Refund Deadline: Sep 30
Unit(s): 1
Enrollment Limit: 18
Status: Registration opens Aug 17, 8:30 am (PT)
Quarter: Fall
Day: Mondays
Duration: 5 weeks
Time: 12:00—1:00 pm (PT)
Date(s): Sep 28—Oct 26
Unit(s): 1
Tuition: $590
Refund Deadline: Sep 30
Instructor(s): Stephanie Reents
Enrollment Limit: 18
Recording Available: Yes
Status: Registration opens Aug 17, 8:30 am (PT)
Flash fiction—very short stories that range from 500 to 1,000 words—invites playfulness and experimentation. And yet the fundamentals of fiction writing still hold. In this course, we will touch upon characterization, dialogue, point of view, momentum, and plot by studying a range of successful flash stories by Sandra Cisneros, Lydia Davis, Peter Orner, Venita Blackburn, and other contemporary writers. We’ll discuss how to hook readers from the first sentence, make judicious use of detail, and write toward zingy last lines. Weekly prompts and Zoom writing sessions will encourage you to try new things, take risks, and use the writing process to discover your story and subject matter. Pamela Painter, who taught one of the first graduate workshops on flash fiction, will give a guest lecture, offering yet another perspective. At the end of the five weeks, you will have written and received feedback on five brand-new stories.
STEPHANIE REENTS
Author
Stephanie Reents is the author of the novel We Loved to Run; The Kissing List, a collection of stories that was an Editors' Choice in The New York Times Book Review; and I Meant to Kill Ye, a bibliomemoir chronicling her journey into the strange void at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. She has twice received an O. Henry Prize for her short fiction. Reents received an MFA from the University of Arizona and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford.Textbooks for this course:
(Required) Robert Shapard (Ed.) & James Thomas(Ed.) , Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories, 1st edition (ISBN 978-0393328028)