The purpose of all written stories is simple; they must cull the core of humanity in ways other mediums cannot. Language is a living mirror that requires the musculature of imagination to sustain the image. Short-short stories aim to reach the emotional and thematic depths of our species under extreme conditions: compression. This course will explore classic and contemporary flash fiction and engage in the techniques through exercise and discussion.
Venita Blackburn
Piper Writers Studio Instructor 2017, 2021
About Venita Blackburn
Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in American Short Fiction, the Georgia Review, Pleiades, Madison Review, Bat City Review, Nashville Review, Smoke Long Quarterly, Café Irreal, Santa Monica Review, Faultline, Devil’s Lake Review, Nat.Brut., Bellevue Literary Review, audio download through Bound Off, and others. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2014 and three Pushcart prize nominations. In 2016 she received the Prairie Schooner book prize in fiction 2016, which will result in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. Her home town is Compton, California, but she now lives and teaches in Phoenix, Arizona. She earned her MFA from Arizona State University in 2008, and is finishing a new novel, Guts.
Find Classes with Venita Blackburn
Flash Fiction
Venita Blackburn
Date: Saturday, Oct. 21, 2017, 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Type: Presentation, Workshop
Genre: Fiction
Type: Presentation, Workshop
Genre: Fiction
Voice, Time and Otherness in Fiction
Venita Blackburn
Date: Saturday, April 10, 2021, 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Phoenix MST
Type: Craft Class
Genre: Fiction
Type: Craft Class
Genre: Fiction
The sacred yet rarely spoken covenant between author and audience states that prose should be both entertaining and educational. What happens when the lesson taught is woefully inaccurate? How do we judge accuracy in fiction when approaching characters with experiences wildly different than our own from nationality to sexuality to political alignment to gender to age to race? This will be a class on choices, audience, research, point of view, humility, compassion and empathy.