Essay by A. D. Carr • “Sometimes it just takes the right bird to awaken us.” —Priyanka Kumar I didn’t start to have an interest in birds until my midthirties. No doubt this shift coincides with the transition from…
By Daniel Abiva Hunt • When I first began writing seriously, I was obsessed with character histories. Nothing would make my character feel more real and fully formed than a detail-oriented past, I felt, and I would turn over…
In Sarah Blake’s sophomore novel, Clean Air, the cause of the climate apocalypse comes as a surprise. It’s not rising oceans or wildfires or air pollution. The trees release enough pollen to suffocate humankind: a drawn-out, mass-casualty event known…
All spaces are haunted. In a way, all spaces are about memory. In A Summoning, “a conceptual, psychological experiment focused on memory,” Nicole McCarthy invites readers to sit and feel and think and remember. Throughout this fragmented collection, McCarthy…
CRAFT is delighted to share a triptych of humorous microfictions by Grant Faulkner, previously included in Best Microfiction 2022. The following pieces take on the subject matter of craft and critical essays from the perspectives of three fictional individuals,…
I found Brittany Ackerman’s piece “Mia’s Birthday” in Forever Magazine in the summer of 2021, in the midst of an intolerably painful breakup for which I was wholly to blame. Asked to write an introduction for our conversation, I…
By Jennifer Murvin • There are two quotations I often turn to when thinking about ending a short story; the first comes from Flannery O’Connor, in her essay, “On Her Own Work,” which reads, “I often ask myself what makes…
Essay by Cavar Sarah • I have never understood the fear of birds. “Because they are so far from us,” I am told by well-meaning humans. “Because we lack ways to tell what they are feeling.” I try to…
The editors at CRAFT are thrilled to welcome Amelia Gray as the guest judge of our 2022 Amelia Gray 2K Contest, which is open to microfiction, flash fiction, and prose poetry pieces under two thousand words. Gray is a…
In the winter of 2014, Sadaf Ferdowsi took a creative nonfiction class taught by Dr. Sarah Fay. A longtime contributor at The Paris Review, Fay taught her the interview form while instilling a healthy suspicion on the limits of…
