“After the Rapture” excerpts published at Electric Lit/The Commuter (plus prizes)

“How do you convince the police that you’re not missing and never were? In these excerpts from “After the Rapture” by Nancy Stohlman, bad things pile on top of one another, food disappears from the shelves, and a person finds a missing person poster featuring their own face.”

READ AT ELECTRIC LIT HERE


And THANK YOU to everyone who has pre-ordered! xoxoxox

Pre-order AFTER THE RAPTURE

from Mason Jar Press!

Pre-sale price: $12

(regularly $14)

Pre-sale orders ship March 7, 2023

*************************

P.S. This month’s bonus prize drawing is happening

October 28

and the winner gets a free story critique!
(Max 1000 words)

TO ENTER:

  1. Pre order After the Rapture HERE
  2. THEN enter your name into the pre-order drawing HERE

And that’s it! If you entered last month then you are automatically entered for all the drawings–so the sooner you enter, the more chances you have to win!

(That’s me with the uncorrected galley proof) xoxo

“The Deep Woods: Writing Our Magical Stories” 1-hour Zoom workshop this Sunday, October 9th!

What can you write in 1 hour? A LOT!

Friends! I’m excited to be guest teaching this Sunday on the Four Queens Creative Writing and Divinatory Poetics Hour. It’s October: come make some magic on the page with us. Only $10!

THEME: The Deep Woods: Conjuring Our Magical Stories

In this hour we will allow ourselves to become wild/bewildered. We will divine and conjure, we will shapeshift and transfigure, and we will put our stories through the alchemy of playful potentiality to discover the strange magic hiding in our own deep woods.

Register at Four Queens

Divinatory Poetics: Where Creativity Meets Inspiration

From Four Queens: These one ZOOM hour gatherings are designed to celebrate the crossroads where the divinatory and oracular meet creativity. You don’t need to do anything to prepare. Just show up, receive the prompts, and write. All genres and levels welcome.

October 9, 2022
9-10 am MST

with guest Nancy Stohlman

$10

“After the Rapture” pre-sales now open!

My long-awaited flash novel, “After the Rapture”, is now available for pre-orders! I wrote this book between 2016 and early 2020, finishing it the same week the world went into quarantine. For the next year I watched as the line between truth and satire began to merge, and in the continuing aftermath it is now impossible to separate the two…

Pre-order from Mason Jar Press now!

Pre-sale price: $12 (regularly $14)

Pre-sale orders ship March 7, 2023

AFTER THE RAPTURE: In a world just slant from our own, the people are waiting for the Rapture. But what they get is not at all what they thought it would be. Whether they’re pilgrimaging to the Very First Kentucky Fried Chicken, living in life-sized Barbie houses, taking the Marriott staff hostage, trading Candy Corn on Wall Street or draining Loch Ness to “find out the goddamn truth once and for all,” there is a familiar sort of desperation in this post-Rapture existence. In moments you will laugh at the absurdity of their world, and in other moments the darkness will feel all too familiar…

BUT WAIT! Do you want prizes?

(I know you want prizes!)

Every month until the March 2023 publication date I will draw a “Waiting for the Rapture” winner of quirky fun prizes!


Prizes could include books, fab art, original music, or even a spot in an upcoming workshop!


First drawing September 30, 2022


CLICK HERE TO ENTER FOR PRE-SALE PRIZES!

And thank you!

“In this world of Walmarts, Barbies, Kens, orgies/time-shares, 7-11s, clones, a red Lake Michigan, and dreams, Nancy Stohlman’s humor and talent shines. The rapture becomes more than just a rapture: it’s a world turning on its head, acceptance, and then finding a new normal. Redeeming and heart-felt, this dystopian novel-in-flashes is one not to forget. After the Rapture is a rapture!” Kim Chinquee, three-time Pushcart Prize winner, author of seven collections and the novel, PIPETTE

“After The Rapture is a startling, rhapsodic, brilliant tome. Stohlman dares to venture into an intricate mosaic of layered, futuristic identities, individualities, and lives both wasted and yet fully explored. A dazzling oscillation of scintillating prose, on the threshold between the ephemeral and the eternal. After the Rapture is a book full of surprise and wonder, a compelling and majestic book.” Robert Vaughan, author of AskewFunhouse and Addicts & Basements

“Mesmerizing, challenging, funny, awesome, entertaining, bewildering, full of doom, wisdom, absurdity, and heart. I love how gigantic and scary Biblical personages and events are swallowed up by commercial / pop culture. It’s ridiculous, genius, and moving, all at the same time.” Robert Shapard, co-editor of the Norton Flash Fiction anthologies Sudden FictionFlash Fiction Forward, and Flash Fiction International

“Nancy Stohlman’s After the Rapture is the most raucous, innovative–and ultimately moving–disappearing act you’ll ever read. Brilliant!” SmokeLong Quarterly

Thank you so so much in advance! I can’t wait to share this book with you!

Love,

Nancy

Workshops Now Open (almost full)

Flash Flood: Write a Flash Novel (and Launch Your Big Idea) (WORKSHOP FULL)

August 22-Sept 2 (10 days, online asynchronous)

Do you have a Big Story Idea brewing, but you don’t know where to begin? Is it a flash novel? Novella? Collection? A regular novel or memoir or a million other things? Sometimes not knowing can stop us from getting started. Sometimes the scope of it feels overwhelming.

Flash Flood: Write a Flash Novel is my signature course designed to help you launch your Big Idea. For 10 days we will envision, draft, collage and create the momentum for that large-scale idea you’ve been wanting to tackle. We’ll begin breaking it apart and making friends with the scope of it, and in that process of discovery you will find momentum, insight, excitement, and sometimes a total pivot–that’s okay! For 10 days we’ll get out of our own way–10 days and a flurry of words and ideas and encouragement and camaraderie–and when it’s over you will have the bones (at least) of a longer project and a much better idea of where to go next.

Whether your book is fiction or creative nonfiction, if you are drawing on the skills of flash forms–from collections to novellas in flash to flash novels–then this class will help you launch your idea into the world. Many, many flash novels and other books have been conceived, executed, and written from the seeds of this class. Maybe yours?

*Participants should have a basic understanding of flash fiction. Come with your big story idea and be prepared to shake up what you thought you knew. (This course may be taken multiple times. It is also the prerequisite/jumping off point for the Flash Novel Mastermind, a private, guided, 12-week community incubator to write yourself to the finish line of the first draft–see description below)

**This class is asynchronous, meaning I am actively participating but the daily lessons are not “live” at a set time though I am engaged and active for the duration of our time together. We have many people from different time zones, so it’s a “rolling” class with people working from their time zone in the hours that suit them best. Most people spend an average of 1-2 hours per day (can be more or less). You have unlimited access to the community forum for the duration of the class.

Full payment of $250 is required upon registration. This holds your spot, as workshops fill quickly. The cancellation policy requires a 2-week notice – you will receive a refund minus a $50 cancellation fee. You will not receive a refund without the required 2-week notice. Please email me if you need to request an alternate payment plan.

REGISTER NOW


Beautiful Flash Fiction II: Pop Lit and Flash Fusion (WORKSHOP FULL)

September 5-9, 2022 (5 days, online asynchronous)

The world is a constant and incredible source of inspiration–IF we are paying attention. In this brand new workshop we will engage with unexplored or under explored avenues of potential inspiration including pop culture, science, math, music, trends, politics, fashion and more to discover unusual angles and back doors into new ideas. We will continue previous conversations on what makes something beautiful, actively blur the distinctions between low brow and high brow art, and elevate the mundane to the miraculous. As always, come with an open mind and expect to play.

Taking a deeper dive into the concepts from Going Short, we will try a variety of approaches to the compressed narrative and you will generate your own original flash pieces. 

*This course is open to writers with all levels of experience in the form, whether you are brand new to flash fiction, a writer coming from other genres, or a veteran flasher looking for a dose of inspiration and some writing camaraderie.

You do NOT need to have taken Beautiful Flash Fiction I to participate.**This class is asynchronous, meaning I am actively participating but the daily lessons are not “live” at a set time though I am engaged and active for the duration of our time together. We have many people from different time zones, so it’s a “rolling” class with people working from their time zone in the hours that suit them best. Most people spend an average of 1-2 hours per day (can be more or less). You have unlimited access to the community forum for the duration of the class.

Full payment of $175 is required upon registration. This holds your spot, as workshops fill quickly. The cancellation policy requires a 2-week notice – you will receive a refund minus a $50 cancellation fee. You will not receive a refund without the required 2-week notice. Please email me if you need to request an alternate payment plan.


Flash Novel Mastermind: A 12-Week Guided Community Incubator

September 12-December 2

To embark on the journey of a book is to lose sight of the shore, to surrender to the story and the muse. Now imagine boarding that ship out to sea with like-minded others, colleagues on their own creative adventures but together, in community, with expert guidance and encouragement.

The Flash Novel Mastermind is a private, guided, 12-week community incubator for flash novelists and flash novels in process…a space of content, coaching, and camaraderie where we build on the momentum from Flash Flood while also finding a rhythm that will sustain us over the long haul of actually writing a book to completion.  

Whether your book is fiction or creative nonfiction, if you are drawing on the skills of flash forms–from collections to novellas in flash to flash novels–then this is the community and support you need to write yourself to the finish line of the all-important first draft–that solid and complete lump of clay that lets you discover, finally, what this story has been trying to say.

*The Flash Novel Mastermind is only open to those who have taken Flash Flood. Registration and full details available August 25

GET ON WAITING LIST

I can’t wait to work with you!

xo

Nancy