THE CLASSROOM CORNER
We often hear from creative writing instructors that they find CRAFT to be very useful in the classroom. We listened, and we've made this corner as a quick resource, a curated list of some of our favorites. This list is NOT exhaustive—our pages are full of short fiction, flash fiction, creative nonfiction, critical essays, interviews, roundups of all things literary, and more. This is a handy place to start!
We will continually update this list, so check back when making those syllabi, and for quick inspiration anytime.
Framing Catastrophe in the First Two Paragraphs
By Darryl J. Benjamin • Many contemporary short stories begin with what I’ve been calling “the mountaintop move”: an omniscient, panoramic first paragraph that orients us in time, space, and tone, followed by a second paragraph that drops us…
Interview: Heidi Czerwiec and Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh
Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney founded Rose Metal Press in 2006 “to support innovative hybrid writing and provide a publishing home for transgressive, unusual, and hard-to-categorize literary projects.” In addition to exciting hybrid work, the press has published an…
Unraveling False Literary Binaries: Character Versus Plot and Other Mysteries
By M. Beth Zimmer • “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” Henry James, The Art of Fiction During the first month of my first semester as an MFA student,…
Interview: Beth Ann Fennelly
A few years ago, when I was developing a graduate course on flash writing, I knew that I wanted to include Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (2017) because it showed how brevity helps language to draw…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
I Am a Dragon Joss Stick: An Essay by Yee Heng Yeh
Starting-starting I better tell the readers that this won’t be their typical primary school karangan, isn’t it? I know one, just because they see the title, sure they thinking they so clever, already know the whole story from Paragraph…
Parts by Allison Field Bell
I. He tells me my body is deteriorating. Just like that. He says, “Your body is deteriorating.” Part 1 of me says Fuck you. Part 2 of me weeps. II. We’re fighting about sunflowers again. Or maybe the…