In this workshop, you will read some very brief stories (ranging from several sentences to several pages long) to explore how writers accomplish as much as they do in the brief form of flash fiction. How can you create characters, plot, and setting in just 50 words or 500? Some people say the last line is everything in flash. Why is this case? We’ll end our discussion by writing a few tiny fictions of our own.
Stephanie Reents grew up in Boise, Idaho. She is the author of The Kissing List, which was an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times Book Review, and I Meant to Kill Ye, an account of her attempt to come to terms with the strange void at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Her awards include a Rhodes Scholarship, a Stegner Fellowship, and the Robert and Margaret MacColl Johnson Fellowship for Writing from the Rhode Island Foundation. Her short fiction has recently appeared in Epoch, Witness, and The Bennington Review, among other journals. She teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and lives in Cambridge with her husband and four-year-old son.
