Registration is rolling until Sunday, May 1st at 5pm, or until the class is full. No application is required. $250 w/financial aid available to residents of Greater Philadelphia (Bucks, Camden, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia Counties)

Thursdays 6-8 PM, May 5, 12, 19, 26

A flash essay is defined by its short length—typically somewhere between 500 and 1000 words—but what are its other characteristics? Dinty W. Moore writes that “the compression necessary to tell a story in a package this small means that every sentence should accomplish more than one task.” In generous and collaborative flash workshops, participants will tackle the big picture of how a flash essay can look and move and also gain tools to make their sentences pop with meaning and life. 

We will use existing models of the flash/short form essay to inform our own writing experiments in this exciting sub-genre of the essay. We will discuss and play with a variety of flash essay types, including visual and borrowed forms. Participants will leave the workshop with a minimum of three flash essay drafts and a host of generative prompts for future exploration.

Krys Malcolm Belc is the author of the memoir The Natural Mother of the Child (Counterpoint) and the flash nonfiction chapbook In Transit (The Cupboard Pamphlet). His flash stories and essays have been anthologized in Best of the Net 2018, Wigleaf Top 50, and in The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction (Rose Metal Press). Krys lives in Philadelphia with his partner and their three young children and works as an educator at a pediatric hospital.