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.
It Happened Here: Setting in Natashia Deón’s GRACE
By Melissa Benton Barker • Natashia Deón’s novel, Grace, is a both a warcry against and a lament upon the violence inflicted on the Black female body under the conditions of slavery in the United States. The novel is narrated…
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Free Indirect Speech
By Laura Nicoara • So she would still find herself arguing in St. James’s Park, still making out that she had been right—and she had too—not to marry him. For in marriage a little licence [sic], a little independence there…
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The Art of Time in David Gates’s “Banishment”
By Amber Wheeler Bacon • David Gates doesn’t recommend flashbacks to new writers when he’s teaching fiction. When line editing a student’s piece, he cuts pretty much every flashback he sees. I know because he cut plenty of mine when…
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Daisy Johnson’s Cauldron: Realism & Fairy Tale Logic in “Albatross”
By Amelia Brown • Daisy Johnson is quite obviously inspired by folklore in her debut collection of stories, Fen—her pages are home to sentient objects, immortal monsters, and animal transformations galore. In fact, Johnson’s stories pledge their allegiance to two narrative…
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Reaching Out: Endings of Joy Williams
By Elizabeth Mayer • Death and loss and decay pervade the stories of Joy Williams’s collection Escapes. If a character is not facing the immediacy of their own death, often they are mourning the loss of someone close to them. Yet…
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The Art of Description in A.S. Byatt’s “The Chinese Lobster”
By Chaya Bhuvaneswar • The display is brightly lit, and arranged on a carpet of that fierce emerald-green artificial grass used by greengrocers and undertakers. Round the edges on open shells, is a border of raw scallops, the pearly flesh dulling,…
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Artifacts: On Revising Older Stories
By Laura Rock Gaughan Faced with the happy prospect of preparing Motherish, my short story collection and first book, for publication, I panicked. Not only did the task demand a decisiveness I lack, but I wanted to be moving on:…
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Mystery vs. Confusion
By Sarah Stone In writing fiction, we’re always looking for ways to manage the release and restraint of information, introducing our characters and situations while avoiding the dreaded exposition junk pile at the beginning (many of us do have a…
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Interview: D. Wystan Owen
CRAFT: Linked collections are so often the best of both worlds: the beauty of a short story combined with the scope of a novel. At what point as you were writing the stories for Other People’s Love Affairs did you…
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The Hook: More Than The Opening Line
By Tommy Dean Think about your favorite verbal storytellers, those people in your family who have passed down the history of the joys and tragedies, the small coincidences, and the shared DNA that results in a similar nose, an ornery…
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