The Truth About Post-Fact Fictions
By Ryan Habermeyer • My mom used to say I hated getting my hair cut. I would cringe, squirm, fidget, even cry out of an irrational fear the barber might cut my ears off. I was allergic to idleness,…
Author: Guest Author
Two Strategies for Working with Reticent Characters
By Evan Calbi • I’m drawn to characters who don’t easily express themselves. If they won’t share how they’re feeling, their emotions often manifest in behavior that can set a story in motion. But how do you reveal an…
Interview: Marty Ross-Dolen
I first met Marty Ross-Dolen in spring of 2020 at an online introductory event for Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA) MFA in Writing program. We’d each been accepted into VCFA’s Creative Nonfiction program, with goals of working on…
Hybrid Interview: Elyse Durham
Essay by Sonja Srinivasan • Russian writers never shy away from penetrating insight into all facets of the human psyche: we read Russian novels precisely because they “go there.” There is also a strong dramatic element to much of…
The Fiction Writer’s Free Will Problem
By Ayşe Papatya Bucak • I imagine many of us have heard the common textbook wisdom that story is dictated by a character’s desire, plot is generated by what characters do in the face of their desire, and endings occur…
Interview: Dustin M. Hoffman
Common descriptors from readers of working-class literature tend to devolve into one of two fields. The first, with words like “gruff,” “gritty,” and “crass,” tend to simply describe the economically depressed settings and the hardscrabble lives of the characters…
Interview: Tim Weed
Tim Weed’s third novel, The Afterlife Project, follows Dr. Q and her team of scientists as they travel through a world devastated by climate change and illness, looking for any sign of a woman still able to reproduce, after…
Interview: Kristina Ten
The internal logic of a speculative fiction story has a strange mathematics of its own. The rules of its world deviate from the rules we follow, but are usually consistent with our expectations about how rules operate. More than…
The Hybrid Essay: A Trial of the Metals
By Alexa Will • 1867–nonfiction, noun. Prose writing other than fiction, such as history, biography, and reference works, esp. that which is concerned with the narrative depiction of factual events; the genre comprising this. —From Oxford English Dictionary This…
Interview: Daniel Breyer
In Smokebirds, Daniel Breyer narrates a story which uniquely blends fiction with autobiography. We meet the Peterson family, the lucky few Northern Californians that, in the year 2028, are rich enough to flee the annual fire season for their…