CRAFT
Interview: Jeannie Vanasco
Memoirist Jeannie Vanasco’s third book, A Silent Treatment, will be released by Tin House on September 9. Jeannie’s mother starts using the silent treatment shortly after she moves into a renovated apartment in Jeannie’s home. Over the five years…
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Conversations Between Friends: Nina Michiko Tam and Vaishnavi Patel
Vaishnavi Patel and I met in our first year of law school—well before she’d published her New York Times-bestselling debut, Kaikeyi. By the time that book came out, we were fast friends, drawn together by our passion for civil…
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Interview: David Haynes
A year ago, we asked each other: what is direct address, really? We knew the craft definition, of course: a technique in which a narrator overtly addresses a secondary group or figure (such as a reader or another character).…
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Conversations Between Friends: Tom McAllister and Aaron Burch
Tom McAllister’s It All Felt Impossible is exactly what its subtitle promises: “42 Years in 42 Essays.” Of course, what makes it literary; what makes it a hypnotic, engaging, magical read; what makes it one of my favorite books…
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Interview: Tamara Dean
I’m not sure I’ve ever come across any other region named as evocatively as the Driftless region of Wisconsin. Driftless: the word itself refers to the area’s lack of glacial deposits (or “drift”), as the land was passed by…
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The Risk of Forgetting Why
By Sean Collard • There’s a risk in learning how to write well: the danger of forgetting why you started. I worry that someday I’ll become so polished, so precise, that I’ll lose the very thing that made my…
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Interview: Ashley Whitaker
In Ashley Whitaker’s hilarious, satirical, and at times devastating debut novel, Bitter Texas Honey, we follow Joan, a recent college graduate with an Adderall problem who wants nothing more than to be a writer. Her biggest obstacle? She’s plagued…
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Hybrid Interview: Karen Babine
Essay by Abby Manzella • In Karen Babine’s latest memoir, The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo (Milkweed 2025), the author preps her Scamp camper and drives from her home in Minnesota to the Acadian coast of…
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Interview: Shayne Terry
On an early spring day in Flatbush, I sat down with my friend and neighbor, Shayne Terry. Our five-year-olds went out with their fathers while we talked about Terry’s debut book, Leave: A Postpartum Account, which came out this…
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Are You Being Too Nice to Your Characters? Why Suffering Matters in Suspense
By Jen Craven • Here’s a truth many writers (myself included) sometimes resist: if your characters aren’t suffering, your story probably is. In the world of suspense fiction, suffering isn’t just dramatic flair—it’s fuel. It’s what cranks the tension,…
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