In Between: Poem and Flash Fiction with Barbara Henning

Attention to style and structure is very important to the writer of tiny fictions, just as it is to poets. That’s why flash fiction and prose poetry are often described as borderline genres (between poetry and prose). In this class, you will write five poetic stories or narrative prose poems. Instead of working with the line, we will be working with the sentence and the paragraph. There will be assignments and examples from published writing and some theory. Assignments may include: auto-flash fiction, camera eye, long sentence, day dream story, sestina story, retelling and telling, story as list, etc. We will read tiny stories from writers such as: Lydia Davis, Fielding Dawson, Marcel Proust, Roberto Bolano, Gisèle Prassinos, Richard Brautigan, Laura Riding, Robert Walser, Julio Cortazar, Dale Herd, Clarice Lispector, and Jamaica Kincaid. We will enter into the writing through technique, constraints and forms typically used for writing poetry. In this way, perhaps the unexpected will occur: a story you didn’t know you were going to write. Most of the class will be spent as a workshop responding to your writing.

Barbara Henning is a poet and a fiction writer. She has published three novels and numerous books of poetry, including her most recent, A Day Like Today (Negative Capability Press 2015). A novel, Just Like That, is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil. Barbara has taught workshops for Poets House, The Poetry Project, The Poetry Center (Tucson), and many other organizations. She has been on the faculty at Naropa University and is currently teaching at Long Island University in Brooklyn, where she is Professor Emerita.

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