Little Landscapes: A Workshop in Very Short Fiction

Daily writing and weekly reading, to inform and inspire. We’ll practice and reflect on skills necessary to very short fiction, such as, but not limited to, compression, constraint, understatement, particulars over broad strokes. We’ll consider how a very short story can be a trickster: a whole meal dressed as a snack. Great focus will be placed on image, feeling, moments, titles, words, sentences, openings and endings, paragraphs, transitions, voice, style, rhythm, and breath, among other things. We’ll defamiliarize and decenter ourselves in relation to stories. We’ll test what a story can be, what it can hold. Experimentation, fun, and play will be foregrounded. Much of what we’ll practice and explore are necessary to all forms of writing. It’s all the same. It’s all paying attention.