- This event has passed.
You've heard it called plenty of things: flash fiction, micro-fiction, the short-short story, prose poems. But what is this delicious, quirky art form, and how do you create it?
"Flash fiction is its own genre," says Jenny Pritchett. "It's not just a longer poem, or a shorter story. It has its own cadences, chimes, and resolutions, and you can learn to write it by putting aside your expectations of more familiar forms."
In this one-day workshop, you and a close group of students will write and share two stories: one finished story that you bring to class and one that you'll write during class in response to a prompt using models from a selection of published short fiction. The in-class assignment will help you explore the possibilities and parameters of a familiar or, perhaps, a brand-new genre for beginning as well as more experienced writers.
Jenny Pritchett has taught creative writing classes since 2006 and writes the popular blog Jenny True: An Excruciatingly Personal Mommy Blog. In 2021 she published You Look Tired: An Excruciatingly Honest Guide to New Parenthood (Hachette). Her debut story collection, At or Near the Surface (Fourteen Hills Press), won the 2008 Michael Rubin Book Award, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in Guernica, Salon, Southwest Review, Northwest Review, Boulevard, Best of the Web 2008 (Dzanc Books), and elsewhere. She holds a degree in magazine journalism from Northwestern University and an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. The former managing editor of Fourteen Hills, she has taught or lectured at SFSU, UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, Ex’pression College for Digital Arts, and the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
- Saturday, January 27, 10:00am-4:00pm
Jenny is a rare talent, capable of providing for the students’ wide range of needs, from giving positive feedback and support, remembering the tiniest details of her student’s writing, to elucidating some very abstract concepts.