Flash Fiction
Luke Whisnant is the author of six books and chapbooks, including In the Debris Field, which won First Prize in the 2018 Bath Flash Fiction International Novella-in-Flash competition, and the novel Watching TV with the Red Chinese, made into an independent film in 2012. His most recent novel, The Connor Project, came out in 2022.
Luke’s stories, poems, and essays have been published in more than 50 different journals and anthologies, with three appearances in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, and three of his stories have made the Best American Short Stories Distinguished Stories list. He is Emeritus Professor of English at East Carolina University, where he was a three-time recipient of the department’s Excellence in Teaching Award and was twice nominated for the university’s Board of Governors Teaching Award. He has taught short story, novel, and flash fiction at Wildacres for 28 years, beginning in 1991. Visit his website at lukewhisnant.com.
Course Description
FLASH (SHORT-FORM PROSE)
Our approach in this class will combine three modes: writing from prompts, close reading of model texts, and peer-group workshops. We’ll spend some time getting a handle on the genre (what flash is, what flash isn’t), including a brief survey of the history of short-form prose (because it’s always good for writers to see where they stand within the tradition) and then study six or eight established flash forms—“templates” you can tuck into your toolkit for future flashes. The amount of on-site writing you do will be up to you, but in previous Wildacres flash classes I gave two prompts per day, so by week’s end most of us had written 10 new pieces, and workshopped several. This will be an excellent class for flash beginners and intermediate students alike.