1. I've been teaching a book of short short stories, sometimes called microfiction, sudden fiction, and other names. They are kind of a combination of prose poem and short story, but rarely over a page long. The stories I've been teaching are all from Latin America and were translated by one of my fellow teachers, Jose Chaves. Jose came to my class and talked about the background this genre emerged from and listened as my students shared their insights about the stories.
2. The stories often explore a dimension of reality known as magic realism. It's a way of writing stories that treat the realm of dreams and the absurd as if the incongruities and fragmented nature of dreams and the absurd live with us all the time. I want to strike the words "as if". Dreams and the absurd are always with us and these stories magnify that reality.
3. My WR 122 students have been reading the writing of Mike Rose and are doing a great job understanding Rose's thesis that we need to look at manual labor and recognize the multiple intelligences hard labor requires, even though it is common to regard blue-collar work as performed from the neck down.
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