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The University of Southampton
Winchester School of Art

Beyond the Edges of the Flash: an investigation of flash-fiction based collections and composite novellas Seminar

Dr Calum Kerr
Time:
16:00 - 17:30
Date:
15 February 2017
Venue:
Harvard Suite (Room Number 3032), WSA

For more information regarding this seminar, please email Professor John Armitage at J.Armitage@soton.ac.uk .

Event details

Very short, short stories have been around for as long as there has been literature. But flash-fiction was only codified as its own form in the early 1990s. Since then, it has been a site for constant experimentation by individual writers, but there is little in the way of deeper research. It is a form which implies much more than it says. This seminar examines an experiment I undertook throughout 2014 to write a series of books which, while they formed a type of narrative, were composed from individual flash-fictions, and used the implications of each story to expand the tale into the gaps between them. The books employed a range of different organising principles, and this seminar will explain those principles and try to unpick how, why and the ways in which they worked.

Speaker information

Dr Calum Kerr,Dr Calum Kerr achieved his PhD in Creative Writing and English Literature in 2005. Since then he has been drawn into the world of flash-fiction writing. He has undertaken two year-long experiments to write a flash-fiction every day. The first, Flash365, was published on a blog and then later picked up for the books Braking Distance (Salt, 2012) and Lost Property (Cinder House, 2013) as well as being featured on BBC Radio 4. In 2014 he self-published 12 ‘flash novellas’ and a ‘how to’ book entitled The World in a Flash. To date he has written more than 1,000,000 words of flash-fiction. He is Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing at WSA.

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