CRAFT
Self-Salvation, Structure, and Sex Part I: Intertextuality in Jess Walter’s “Famous Actor”
By Candace Walsh • In Jess Walter’s “Famous Actor” and Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch,” the authors use intertextuality as a structural element: a rhythmic, outside-of-time interruption of the chronological main story. Simultaneously, each of the female narrators…
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Naming Makes Visible: Building a Craft Vocabulary
By Caitlin Horrocks • I was well into my MFA in creative writing before I encountered anything that might be called a craft essay. The previous writing-on-writing I’d encountered consisted of inspirational texts, collections of writing exercises, or literature…
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Hybrid Interview: Molly Gloss
Essay by Nicole Barney • “Your opening line is a throwaway,” Molly Gloss said during workshop, not unkindly, just matter-of-factly. “An editor wouldn’t read past it.” Granted, my first sentence was no Dickensian gem. It presented no intriguing riddle…
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What We Talk About When We Read Submissions
by David K. Slay • Since the beginning of this year, I have been on a team of first readers for CRAFT, a literary journal with a mission to “explore the art of fiction with a focus on the…
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If You Can Name It, You Can Fix It: A Craft Glossary
By Jody Hobbs Hesler • “It seems like you don’t really care about your main character,” someone once told me in a workshop. Maybe they sensed an underlying issue with the character’s authenticity? A nebulous not-rightness about the prose?…
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Hybrid Interview: Ariel Gore
Essay by Melissa Benton Barker • In this cultural moment when bodies and embodied experiences that resist conforming to the cisgender, heterosexual male norm are increasingly marginalized and criminalized, Ariel Gore’s We Were Witches, feminist novel and anti-shame manifesto,…
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Telling Time: Fiction As Clockmaking
By Alix Ohlin • A few years back, in New York, I sat through four hours of Christian Marclay’s 2010 video art work “The Clock.” This was actually the third time I’d seen it, but I still went in…
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The Diarist: Kathryn Scanlan’s AUG 9—FOG
By J.A. Tyler • Other people’s diaries. Strangers. Their words inked across aged paper. Where did it come from? How did it get here? Who owned it, who read it? Hunt on eBay and one could be headed your…
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Interview: Wendy J. Fox
Wendy J. Fox’s recent novel, If the Ice Had Held, out now from Santa Fe Writers Project, explores the secrets of a Colorado family and how far its members have gone to keep them. Told in alternating perspectives, the…
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Interview: Nancy Stohlman
Nancy Stohlman’s new book, Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities, is a dizzying array of flash and vignette stories that put the reader behind the scenes of vaudeville and freak show acts from the era of traveling circuses. If you’ve ever…
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