A Small, Good Thing
A Small, Good Thing
Podcast Description
"A Small, Good Thing" is a podcast about short fiction. In every episode, I get to discuss the short story form with writers, academics, publishers, and anyone who shares a passion for short stories.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast explores themes around short fiction, including publishing challenges, writing techniques, and the cultural significance of short stories. Episodes feature discussions on specific works by authors such as John Cheever and Yiyun Li, as well as insights into initiatives like short story competitions. Additionally, it touches upon the evolution of narrative styles and engages with the academic perspectives on storytelling.
“A Small, Good Thing” is a podcast about short fiction. In every episode, I get to discuss the short story form with writers, academics, publishers, and anyone who shares a passion for short stories.
David Hartley is a short story writer, creative writing teacher, and the author of the collection of short stories Fauna (2021). In this episode we discuss the importance of voice in short story writing. What is voice? What does it mean for a writer to work on voice? How many voices can a short story writer have? How far can one trespass into alien territories when seeking for a character’s voice?
Works cited:
David Hartley, Fauna (Fly On The Wall Press, 2021).
David Hartley, ‘Voice of the Gods, Voice of the People: Authority and Authenticity in the Modern Short Story’, in The Subtle Art of Short Fiction, ed. by Isabelle Kenyon (Fly On The Wall Press, 2026), pp. 85-92.
George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Flannery O’Connor, ‘The Nature and Aim of Fiction’, in Mystery and Manners (Faber and Faber, 2014), pp. 63-86.
Flannery O’Connor, ‘Writing Short Stories’, in Mystery and Manners (Faber and Faber, 2014), pp. 87-106.
Sandra Cisneros, ‘Barbie-Q’, in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (Random House, 1991), pp. 14-16.
Kit de Waal, ‘The Art of Trespass’, keynote at the National Creative Writing Conference, 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_N10wSo4ZA
Shirley Jackson, ‘The Summer People’, in Dark Tales (Penguin Classics, 2016).
Podcast intro and outro credits: Shield, Leroy, Taylor Holmes, and Robert W Service. The shooting of Dan McGrew. 1923. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.
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