Writing Short Short Stories
Instructor: Javeria Hasnain
How do we craft narratives that fragment across time and space? Stories that are interrupted, cut short, or deliberately non-linear? In this workshop, we’ll explore the world of very short short stories—flash fictions, prose poems, and fragmented essays that challenge conventional storytelling while creating their own integrity and architecture.
Together, we’ll examine works by masters of brevity like Lydia Davis, Mark Strand, Ben Lerner, Kimiko Hahn, and Sawako Nakayasu, who skillfully employ hybrid forms including prose poems, flash fiction, and Zuihitsu to create concise yet powerful narratives.
We’ll investigate both the technical and intuitive tools these writers use—vivid imagery, resonant metaphors, surprising associative leaps, and memory fragments—to simultaneously disrupt and develop their stories. Through guided exercises, you’ll learn to employ these same techniques in your own work.
This workshop is designed for writers who feel constrained by traditional fiction forms and seek new ways to capture their messy, nonlinear narratives. Come prepared with a spirit of playfulness and embracing messiness!
About Javeria
Javeria Hasnain is a poet, translator, and educator from Karachi, and the author of SIN (Chestnut Review, 2024). Her poems and prose have appeared widely, most recently, in Pleiades, Poet Lore, The Brazenhead Review, and Foglifter. She received her MFA in Poetry from The New School in New York as a Fulbright scholar, and was selected as a 2023-24 Educational Associate at Teachers & Writers Collaborative. She has received fellowships and support for her writing from Sewanee Writers Conference, International Writing Program (IWP), and Tamaas. Hasnain has taught creative writing workshops with Brooklyn Poets, Writing Workshops, Writopia Lab Inc, Kitab Ghar, and Writing Colab, among others. She has previously also worked with Cave Canem Foundation, Alice James Press, and Tupelo Press. She is currently teaching at Habib University and reads for The Rumpus.
