Flash Fiction Workshop
Sherrie Flick is the author of a novel, an essay collection, and four volumes of flash fiction: I Call This Flirting; Whiskey, Etc.; Thank Your Lucky Stars; and most recently I Have Not Considered Consequences. Her work has appeared in many journals and in the anthologies Flash Fiction Forward, New Sudden Fiction, and New Micro. She served as co-editor for the 2023 Norton anthology Flash Fiction America, was series editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018, and is a senior editor at SmokeLong Quarterly.
Sherrie’s debut essay collection Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist includes the essay “All in the Family: Waldo and His Ghosts,” which was listed as notable in The Best American Essays 2023. In 2025 she was the McGee Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing at Davidson College, and she recently joined the fiction faculty for West Virginia Wesleyan’s low-res MFA program. She lives in Pittsburgh, where she is an active member of Shiftworks + Public Art Creative Corps.
Course Description
Exploring Flash Fiction
Flash fiction stories can be elusive, under 1,000 words and yet they bubble and grow in a reader’s brain. During this week’s session we’ll work to get a handle on flash by exploring a different craft element each day, its connection to and purpose in these short-short stories. We’ll make our way through dialogue, setting, voice, point of view, and characterization, closely examining published stories to see how these elements tick in such compressed worlds. We’ll also dive into sentence structure, because word choice and rhythm are at the heart of this form. The week will consist of guided writing prompts, discussion, read-aloud peer workshops, and a group workshop of 1-2 stories each. You should have 5-6 stories drafted and a few workshopped by the end of it all. We’ll have fun while taking this experimental form for a ride. This class is great for writers both new to and familiar with flash fiction.