Writing influenced
by Hempel.

Amy Hempel is the writer who makes other writers feel both inspired and completely inadequate.

Maximum compression · Dark humour as survival · The sentence as the unit

Amy Hempel may be the most technically accomplished short story writer in the American tradition — and she is the least famous for it, which says everything about the relationship between literary quality and cultural visibility. Her stories are sometimes a single page, sometimes a paragraph. They contain more per word than almost anything else written in English in the last fifty years. The Tumbleweed Words compression obsession comes directly from Hempel.

"Hempel's sentences do not build toward meaning. They arrive at it with the force of a door closing. Then the story ends. You sit with what happened."

David — Tumbleweed Words — on Hempel

The Hempel lesson is about the sentence as the unit of composition. Not the paragraph, not the scene — the sentence. Every sentence in a Hempel story is doing at least two things simultaneously. Read her work as a technical exercise: identify what each sentence is doing, and then identify what it is also doing underneath. This doubles your understanding of what a sentence can carry.

David — Tumbleweed Words Flash fiction and poetry in the minimalist tradition. Published in Litro, Adelaide Magazine, Cleaver Magazine. Pushcart-nominated. Read the newsletter.