Tiny Fictions

This workshop will focus on extremely short pieces
as a way in to writing narrative and non-narrative
prose. We'll read flash fiction, sudden fiction,
blast fiction, short-shorts, microfiction,
minimalist fiction, prose poems, microessays. We
might look at Anne Carson's short talks, Lydia
Davis's work, John Keene's Annotations, Ben
Marcus's fake instruction sets, etc. We'll
investigate all of these as way to think about the
limits of what prose can do in a condensed and
linguistically focused space. We'll think about
the sentence as a unit of meaning and as an
aesthetic gesture, discuss the acoustics of prose,
rhythm and sound in fiction, and so on. The heart
of the class will be workshopping your very short
pieces.