There can be the feeling of a magic trick to flash fiction: How does a whole narrative (and/or a whole sense of a life, or an environment, or a community) manage to compress down into such a small story-space? How can a thousand words map the entirety of a mind or even a cosmos? In this class, we'll read flash fiction that attempts to pull off this magic trick while also writing our own first drafts of several flash fiction pieces. We'll play with elements of magical realism, eco-fabulism, wildness, and weirdness in writing while also considering the way compression in prose might change the narrative physics of the stories we want to tell. Along the way, we'll discuss ways to sharpen and employ imagery, sensory details, and place details in our in-progress work.
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Lee Conell is the author of a novel, The Party Upstairs (Penguin Press), which received the Wallant Award. She’s also the author of the story collection Subcortical (John Hopkins Press), which received The Story Prize's Spotlight Award. She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Japan-US Creative Artist Fellowship, the Tennessee Arts Commission, Millay Arts, Willapa Bay AiR, and Yaddo. Her stories and essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Kenyon Review, Oxford American, Glimmer Train, Guernica, American Short Fiction online, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Paris Review Daily, and her work has won the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award and been shortlisted in Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize anthology.
Lee Conell is a returning teacher the Porch. Welcome back!
