THE CLASSROOM CORNER
We often hear from creative writing instructors that they find CRAFT to be very useful in the classroom. We listened, and we've made this corner as a quick resource, a curated list of some of our favorites. This list is NOT exhaustive—our pages are full of short fiction, flash fiction, creative nonfiction, critical essays, interviews, roundups of all things literary, and more. This is a handy place to start!
We will continually update this list, so check back when making those syllabi, and for quick inspiration anytime.
Persuasion, Camouflage, and Inoculation: Introducing Magical Elements in Fiction
By Duncan Whitmire • Nothing is more disruptive to a reader than the emergence of the cynical voice inside their head—and nowhere is this more true than with books that traffic in magic and speculation. Some readers call it…
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Conversations Between Friends: Nicole Haroutunian and Apryl Lee
When I signed the contract to publish my novel-in-stories, Choose This Now, with Noemi Press, I asked to include a clause that the press would make a “good faith effort” to publish it as an audiobook too. They’d never…
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Interview: Janis Hubschman
In her debut short story collection, Take Me With You Next Time, Janis Hubschman illuminates the inner lives of girls and women by guiding the reader through the intricate crevices of her characters’ psyches—the thoughts and feelings that we…
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Hybrid Interview: Afabwaje Kurian
Essay by Anna Polonyi • What does it mean to revise a novel? I’ve been doggedly asking this question ever since attending workshop beside Afabwaje Kurian, whose stunningly written debut novel, Before the Mango Ripens, was released on September…
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Interview: Sarah Seltzer
In her debut novel, The Singer Sisters, Sarah Seltzer chronicles the highs and lows of a family of musicians, focusing primarily on the matriarch, Judie, and her daughter, Emma. While Judie found her footing in the New York folk…
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Interview: Amy Stuber
There’s a tipping point in life when a possibility becomes a certainty, and a metaphorical crossroads becomes a permanent change of direction. Amy Stuber is adept at finding pivotal moments in her fiction, choices that simultaneously disrupt expectations and…
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The Speculative Aesthetic: How Language Communicates Genre
By Devon Halliday • When I worked as a literary agent assistant, one of my tasks was to read (or skim) the manuscripts that my boss had requested from promising, unagented authors to determine whether my boss should offer…
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Conversations Between Friends: Nora Shalaway Carpenter and Rob Costello
Nora Shalaway Carpenter and Rob Costello met during their MFA program over a decade ago. Now both creative writing educators, they have collaborated on a number of projects, including Shalaway Carpenter’s acclaimed anthology Rural Voices: 15 Authors Challenge Stereotypes…
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Flash Interview: Meg Pokrass
Award-winning author Meg Pokrass, who will serve as our guest judge for the CRAFT 2024 Flash Prose Prize, has published eight collections of flash fiction and two novellas. Meg was generous enough to conduct this flash interview through email…
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Interview: Penny Guisinger
Penny Guisinger and I met when we each served on the board of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance in the early 2010s, and I became a fan of her nonfiction soon after. Her work captured complex realities of…
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