Magical Realism & Flash Fiction Workshop with Tony Barnstone
Himalayan Literature Festival & Writers Workshop 2026
Malla Hotel, Kathmandu
31 May 2026
🕘 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
Magical Realism is a Latin American tradition of writing that blends the fantastic, the mythic, the uncanny or the speculative into the ordinary. A man dreams up another man like a God. People keep falling out of the skies. The goldfish in the tank suddenly can talk in cartoon bubbles. Everything an artist draws comes to life when the sun goes down. In this workshop, we will explore strategies for inventing fantastic premises and developing them into odd, visceral yet strangely real narratives. We will dive into the archetype and the metaphorical substrate, the uncanny and the philosophical, open Pandora’s box and let the strange things out. Then we will write it up in about a half page to a page. It is FLASH fiction, so it should go by in a flash—but an amazing flash.
About the Facilitator
Tony Barnstone, a poet, literary critic, and translator, has authored twenty-four books, including poetry collections, anthologies, textbooks, and multimedia work, including both a compact disc of music based on his poetry and a tarot deck, The Radiant Tarot: Pathway to Creativity, with artist Alexandra Eldridge, which draws upon the neuroscience of creativity to turn the tarot into a tool for creativity both in the arts and in reinventing one’s life. He is currently working on a libretto for an opera. His twenty-fifth book, The Cyborg Modernism of William Carlos Williams: Technoscience, the Arts, and the Biomechanical Muse, a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of Williams in the context of the history and philosophy of science, has appeared with Bloomsbury Academic.
Barnstone’s poetry collections include Apocryphal Poems (Nirala Press, 2024); Pulp Sonnets(Tupelo Press, 2015), illustrated by fellow poet and professor Amin Mansouri; Beast in the Apartment (Sheep Meadow Press, 2014); Tongue of War (BKMK Press, 2009); The Golem of Los Angeles (Red Hen Press, 2008); Sad Jazz: Sonnets (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005); and Impure: Poems (University Press of Florida, 1999). His selected poetry collection, Buda en Llamas: Antología Poética [Buddha in Flames: Poetry Anthology] (1999–2012) appeared in a bilingual Spanish-English edition published by Ediciones El Tucán de Virginia in 2014, with translations by Mariano Zaro.
Barnstone has edited and co-edited the following anthologies: Republic of Apples, Democracy of Oranges: New Eco-Poetry from China and the United States (University of Hawaii Press, 2019), co-edited with Frank Stewart and Ming Di; as well as Human and Inhuman Monster Poems (2015) and Poems Dead and Undead (2014), both co-edited with Michelle Mitchell-Foust and published by Everyman Pocket Library.
He has published seven works of translation, such as Faces Hidden in the Dust: Selected Ghazals of Ghalib (White Pine Press, 2021), co-translated with Bilal Shaw; Erotic Chinese Poems
Online Participation
A limited number of virtual seats are available for those who wish to join remotely.
To register or learn more:
hlfwwk2026@gmail.com
https://hlf.whitelotusbookshop.com/
