CRAFT ESSAYS, ELEMENTS, and TALKS
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…
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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…
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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…
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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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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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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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What I Want to Write
By Gemini Wahhaj • After publishing my first novel, I found myself unable to write. I had lost language. I had lived in the US for more than twenty years with some sort of relationship with the writing community.…
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A Contemporary Continuous Present: Revisiting the Work of Gertrude Stein
By Emilee Prado • The writing of Gertrude Stein, although idiosyncratic in genre and subject matter, might be best distinguished by its style. Both her poems and her longer works have been called literary cubism. They are impressionistic, introspective,…
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Hybrid Interview: Finnian Burnett
Essay by Michelle Sinclair • If one were asked to compare the experience of reading to that of eating a dessert, would it be so far-fetched to connect reading flash fiction and enjoying a cookie? Both are “bite-sized” and…
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Mother-Writers Are Writers
By Ann Guy • Wading through a sea of blond hair and blue eyes every day felt normal in the tiny, rural Western Michigan town where I grew up. So did biking to the public library and loading up…
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