Grant Faulkner, who will serve as our guest judge for the CRAFT 2025 Flash Prose Prize, recently told me that he dislikes conventional bios and prefers to find something odd on the internet about writers he’s asked to introduce.…
Essay by Shehrazade Zafar-Arif • What do short stories have in common with jazz? Like the innately improvisational quality of jazz, the nature of the short story genre—constrained by the need for a high amount of drama in a…
Essay by Rose Smith • One of Marisa Silver’s goals as a fiction writer is to “change the angle of vision, both for the characters and the reader, just enough that some little aperture of awareness opens up to…
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…
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…
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).…
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…
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…
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…
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…
