Helen Hagemann's First Class for 2015 @ the FAC

Flash Fiction: Introducing Angela Meyer, Lydia Davis & Girija Tropp

Helen Hagemann's first class for 2015 at the FAC on Friday 6th February @ 1pm looks at Flash Fiction.  This workshop introduces three exponents of the form, Angela Meyer, Lydia Davis and Girija Tropp.

“For Sale: Baby shoes, Never worn” is a short-short story by Ernest Hemingway, and in its brilliance conveys more than it says in 6 words.

Nowadays we call this micro- or flash fiction. However, the general rule for flash fiction is a word count of a maximum of 250 to 500 words; although many might argue with this. Seizure publishes prose between 50 and 500 words. Cuttlefish (WA’s new journal from Roland Leach) requires up to 250 words. Spineless Wonders assembles prose poetry and micro-fiction together routinely – often without signalling a difference between the forms.

                                   -o-

Girija Tropp is a winner of the Boston Review Prize and the Josephine Ulrick Literature Award 2006. She has been published in AGNI, Best Australian Stories 2005 and 2006, Fiction International, Mississippi Review, Denver Quarterly, and other magazines. Her Twitter handle is @girijawrites. (updated 11/2013)

Angela Meyer, is a writer, editor, professional reader, Melburnian, whisky-drinker, Bowie nut, movie-lover, vintage fan, absurdist, aesthete, and blogs at Literary Minded. She is the author of a book of flash fiction, Captives (Inkerman & Blunt), and the editor of an anthology of spooky Australian stories, The Great Unknown (Spineless Wonders).

Lydia Davis, award-winning fiction writer and translator, was born  in Northampton (Massachusetts) in 1947. She is famous in literary circles for her extremely brief and brilliantly inventive short stories. In 2013, she was the winner of the Man Booker International prize. Her recent collection, “Varieties of Disturbance” (May 2007), was featured on the front cover of the “Los Angeles Times Book Review”. Her “Samuel Johnson Is Indignant” (2001) was praised by “Elle” magazine for its “Highly intelligent, wildly entertaining stories, bound by visionary, philosophical, comic prose—part Gertrude Stein, part Simone Weil, and pure Lydia Davis.”