Flash fiction expert to speak at SUNY Adirondack

QUEENSBURY, New York (Nov. 18, 2025) — SUNY Adirondack welcomes acclaimed flash fiction writer and educator Kathy Fish as the next featured speaker in the college’s Writers Project series at 12:40 p.m. Monday, Nov. 24, via Zoom in Miller Auditorium, Dearlove Hall.

Fish didn’t begin writing seriously until she was 40. “I was writing in grabbed moments, stolen moments,” she said, recalling the years when her four children were young. “At cricket practice with one child, in the back of a car with another, babies on my lap — just short little pieces, because short pieces were all I had time for.”

Those fragments turned into a career that helped shape the rise of what today is known as flash fiction — stories with usually fewer than 1,000 words that carry the resonance and emotional power of longer works.

Over time, Fish became part of the emerging literary movement sparked by online platforms and later recognized by Norton anthologies. What began as a compact form of the traditional short story has since evolved into a fluid and experimental art that sits somewhere between fiction and poetry.

“The best flash fiction should have emotional weight and movement — even in such limited space, it should leave the reader with an echo, something that reverberates,” Fish said.

That intensity, she believes, is why the genre has taken hold in the digital age. As reading moved onto screens, attention didn’t diminish — urgency did. “When you see a one-page story, it announces itself with a kind of urgency,” she explained. “Flash doesn’t have space for scene-setting or long character histories. You have to do everything — capture the reader, build tension and leave resonance — with very few words. It’s beautiful, powerful and distilled. You have to be a really good writer to do it well.”

Fish has been writing and teaching flash fiction for more than 20 years, and her work has been widely published in literary journals, including pieces featured in Ploughshares, Washington Square Review, Waxwing Magazine, Copper Nickel, the Norton Reader and Best Small Fictions. Her teaching style is known for igniting enthusiasm in writers at every stage.

“Some people take a flash class because 500 words feels manageable,” she said. “But then they read a piece that’s only two pages long and it knocks the breath out of them — that’s when they realize this isn’t a simpler form. It’s an intensified form.”

In her Writers Project session, Fish hopes to share the craft of the genre, and its creativity and playfulness. “It’s paradoxical — having a constraint can be incredibly freeing,” she said. “Writers can surprise themselves when they put a story inside a container: a letter, a list, even a crossword puzzle. It becomes almost like a magic trick — the whole emotional arc of a story in such a small space.”

A longtime resident of Colorado, Fish continues to publish and teach internationally. Her work is widely anthologized and she is recognized as one of the most influential voices in contemporary flash fiction.

Fish is a recipient of the Copper Nickel Editor’s Prize. Her highly sought-after flash fiction workshops, begun in 2015, have resulted in numerous publications and awards for the hundreds of writers who have taken part. Her work has been generously supported by the Ragdale Foundation and the Kerouac Project of Orlando. She publishes a best-selling newsletter, The Art of Flash Fiction, named one of the twenty best writing Substacks by Writers at Work.

The Writers Project event is free and open to the public. Fish will appear via Zoom at https://us06web.zoom.us/j/7977212478?pwd=ZXU5WlpJRXZ1YmZoNFNJak1yYVpSUT09.