monday night, my first flash fiction class started at the phoenixville middle school through the chester county night school. fittingly enough, like with my spring semester class, the pull of poems, we were in the same room again, an english classroom.
flash fiction, while sounding rather fiction-y by its name, is actually a lot like poetry despite usually being in full sentences with no line breaks. it is often very richly saturated with poetic language, and it's also incredibly brief, or at least it can be. i describe it as usually being up to 1,000 words but more typically 500 or less. and in some cases, it might only be a few sentences long or up to 100 words. it all depends on the writer's intentions and experimentation with a particular piece. it is sometimes like a snapshot into a set of moments, gathered and wrapped together in prose.
since this served as a first class for us, we didn't dive into writing yet, but i shared some flash fiction pieces from out in the world, including "digging" by sherrie flick of pittsburgh from her chapbook titled i call this flirting.
and here is one of my own pieces which i shared with students, as i use my own work in lessons sometimes, too.
mooney
mooney joins her paws into the schuylkill river. an australian shepherd mix, she bolts through her own small crashes of soaked sound. we skip stones toward the other shore. mooney flies at their paths, jarred by their sudden far-off sinking, each slowly reaching smoothed-over rocks in the wet muck of underbeds. mooney expects more for the fetching. mooney knows i won’t be around for long, that this is her river.
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