CRAFT
Conversations Between Friends: C. H. Hooks and Kelsey Norris
Kelsey Norris and I spoke in December. She was in Washington, DC and I was in St. Augustine, Florida, two arguably very different spaces to prepare for the holidays. We were also preparing for her to join me at…
Hybrid Interview: Rebe Huntman
Essay by Shara Kronmal • My Mother in Havana by Rebe Huntman is a memoir about journeys and the lessons learned along the way. In the memoir, the journeys are threefold in nature: physical, a literal journey from Ohio…
Stepping Out of My Storytelling Box
By Tim Bascom • When I was twelve, I wrote my first short story, which was about a boy who, while hiking alone, falls off a mountain cliff and lands on a narrow outcrop, unable to get down or…
Interview: Deni Ellis Béchard
Deni Ellis Béchard’s speculative novel, We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine, is set in a future dystopian United States divided by a civil war. The machine, a powerful AI which was designed with the goal to protect humans…
Hybrid Interview: Chelsey Pippin Mizzi
When I began reading Chelsey Pippin Mizzi’s second book, Tarot for Creativity: A Guide for Igniting Your Creative Practice (Chronicle Books, October 2024), I wondered if she’d been in the divination panel at AWP in Seattle, which was so…
Interview: Heidi Czerwiec
I started writing lyric essays long before I knew the language for what I was doing. Working at the intersection of poetry and prose, I wrote about big emotions (love, grief) because I wasn’t sure how else to convey…
Comfort Animals
By Pascha Sotolongo • The cat on the proposed book cover—a white-whiskered piebald—shouldn’t have surprised me. My debut story collection is full of furry mammals, birds, insects, and at least two lizards. A handful of these (often fantastical) creatures…
Interview: Donald Quist
The editors at CRAFT are thrilled to welcome Donald Quist as our guest judge for this year’s Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest, which is open to memoir excerpts, personal essays, narrative nonfiction, lyric essays, and other forms of literary…
Hybrid Interview: Puloma Ghosh
Essay by Ruth Minah Buchwald • What keeps you up at night? For me, it’s genocide, climate change, another epidemic, hopeless politics, something embarrassing that I said in middle school, the finite nature of time, and so on, but…
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…