Our next three-week intensive workshop will be November 1 to November 21 with workshop leaders Michael Czyzniejewski, Sherrie Flick and Jasmine Sawers!
This modular workshop is appropriate for writers who want/need to hit the ground running and generate lots in a short time. Participants will work in small groups of five with the workshop leader, giving and receiving feedback on story drafts. Each weekday, the workshop leader will share a writing task with story examples. We encourage lively discussion, both in the large group and the small groups focused on peer review. At the end of each weeklong module, participants may send one draft to the workshop leader for specific feedback.
The course is asynchronous. All participation is in writing, although participants may choose to upload audio files of their work (encouraged).
Cost: $298 (Send an email to editors@smokelong.com for payment details.)
Number of Participants: Limited to 15, small groups limited to five.
Workshop Description:
Modules One (Nov 1-7) “En Medias Res” with Michael Czyzniejewski
In this module, we’ll experiment with different entry and exit points, exploring structure, pace, rate of reveal, and how all of these elements can alter your work. We’ll write flash pieces and rewrite them, discovering ideal beginning, ends, and middles.
Module Two (Nov 8-14) — “No Object Unturned” with Sherrie Flick
We will examine how objects are used to great effect in flash fiction. We’ll (virtually) sort through heaps of objects to see how their exacting placement helps with characterization, setting, plot, and point of view. A single, awesome object can focus your reader succinctly and place them precisely in a scene and in doing so make your compressed world come to life on the page.
Module Three (Nov 15-21): “Fairy Tale in Flash” with Jasmine Sawers
Folktales, myths, and fairy stories are often the blueprints through which we learn narrative as children—though their content is frequently dark and bloodthirsty. Let’s interrogate their rhetoric, musicality, and cultural insight (and impact) as we harness their sway over our imaginations with original fairy-tale flash of our own.
Workshop Leader bios:
Michael Czyzniejewski is the author of three collections of stories, Elephants in Our Bedroom (Dzanc Books, 2009), Chicago Stories: 40 Dramatic Fictions (Curbside Splendor, 2012), and I Will Love You For the Rest of My Life: Breakup Stories (Curbside Splendor, 2015). He is an assistant professor at Missouri State University, where he edits Moon City Review and serves as both Literary and Managing Editor for Moon City Press. In 2010, he received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Sherrie Flick is the author of the novel Reconsidering Happiness and two short story collections, Whiskey, Etc. and Thank Your Lucky Stars. Her stories have been performed for Selected Shorts and appear in Ploughshares, New World Writing, and wigleaf, as well as the anthologies Flash Fiction Forward, New Sudden Fiction, and New Micro. She served as series editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018 with guest editor Aimee Bender and is co-editor for Flash Fiction America, forthcoming from Norton in 2022.
Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fellow and graduate of the MFA program at Indiana University. Sawers’s fiction has won the Ploughshares Emerging Writers’ Contest and the NANO Prize and can be found in such journals as The Offing, AAWW’s The Margins, The Conium Review, Sycamore Review, Barren Magazine, and more. Sawers serves as Associate Fiction Editor for Fairy Tale Review and debuts a collection of fairy tale flash through Rose Metal Press in 2023. Originally from Buffalo, NY, Sawers now lives and pets dogs outside St. Louis. Find out more at jasminesawers.com.
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