Flash Fiction: Create a Moment, Create a World with Helen Phillips (Zoom)

How can I evoke a world/situation/character/emotion/idea swiftly and potently? This is a question that fiction writers are always asking, but flash fiction brings particular urgency to it. Participants will examine samples of flash fiction and then experiment with the form themselves. We will consider questions such as: How can a piece achieve arc and resonance in a brief space? How does one attain the precision of language essential to this form? What can this form offer the reader in lieu of the satisfaction of a longer narrative? How can the lessons learned by trying our hands at flash fiction be applied to longer works?

Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including, most recently, the novel Hum, a Slate Top 10 Book of 2024, an Economist Best Book of 2024, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction. Her novel The Need was longlisted for the National Book Award and named a New York Times Notable Book. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, a New York Times Notable Book, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the New York Times, and on Selected Shorts. A professor at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with artist/cartoonist Adam Douglas Thompson and their children.