Grant Faulkner in Conversation with Brian Benson

Broadway Books | 1714 NE Broadway St, Portland, OR 97232

Grant Faulkner, author of The Art of Brevity

Broadway Books in Portland, Oregon welcomes Grant Faulkner with his book, The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story. He will be joined in conversation with Portland author Brian Benson.

With increased compression, every word, every sentence matters more. A writer must learn how to form narratives around caesuras and crevices instead of strings of connections, to move a story through the symbolic weight of images, to master the power of suggestion.

With elegant prose, deep readings of other writers, and scaffolded writing exercises, The Art of Brevity takes the reader on a lyrical exploration of compact storytelling, guiding readers to heighten their awareness of not only what appears on the page but also what doesn’t.

Grant Faulkner is the executive director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the cofounder of 100 Word Story. His work has been widely anthologized in flash-fiction collections, and he is the author of several books, including All the Comfort Sin Can Provide, Fissures, and Nothing Short of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story.

Brian Benson is the author of Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America, and co-author, with Richard Brown, of This is Not for You. His essays have been published or are forthcoming in Tahoma Literary Review, X-R-A-Y, Pithead Chapel, Hippocampus, Bending Genres, and Sweet, among many other publications, and his work has been featured in several anthologies. Brian teaches creative nonfiction at the Attic Institute and volunteers with Write Around Portland. He is at work on his third book, an essay collection about modern masculinity.