To drum up interest in flash fiction among Avenues’ middle school student body, The Avenues Writing Center (in New York) has recently launched a series of flash fiction writing contests for their students. One of these contests will be writing micro-fiction to accompany postcard-sized artwork that the students have created recently.

…Postcard-sized? Microfiction? Sound familiar?

Well, HOOT will be judging this micro-fiction contest! And the winner will be posted right here on our blog, as well as on all of our social media.

Says a teacher at the school of the Avenues’ mission:

Above all, we want Avenues students to celebrate storytelling, as readers and writers, and to cultivate a community in which storytelling is prized.  We want Avenues students to recognize that many of the components that make for a successful story, whether it’s Homer’s The Iliad, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, or Alice Munro’s “The Bear Comes Over the Mountain,” can also be harnessed in shorter form: rendering a pressing conflict, attending to significant and sensory details, deftly selecting the story’s point of view, carefully crafting dialogue, showing and telling, and determining what to omit–when to let silence speak–to name but a few.

We at HOOT are glad and honored to be a part of helping these students towards that mission.