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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.

Nonstop Oracle: Everlastingness in Rachel Cusk’s OUTLINE

March 17, 2020

  By Mark Gozonsky • 1 My favorite books explore the contours of the narrator’s brain, and I’ve never read anything that does this so well as Rachel Cusk’s Outline. I first encountered the striking cover image on the windowsill…

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Interview: Sarah Rose Etter

March 10, 2020

  In her debut novel, The Book of X (Two Dollar Radio, July 2019), Sarah Rose Etter explores fear and femininity through the character of Cassie, a girl who was born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a…

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Point of View Amplifies Theme in Zadie Smith’s “Crazy They Call Me”

February 11, 2020

  By Candace Walsh • In Zadie Smith’s short story “Crazy They Call Me,” the author makes the unconventional choice to present Billie Holiday as a second-person-singular narrator. This strikes me as a literary high-wire act, plausibly the result of…

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Hybrid Interview: Garth Greenwell

January 28, 2020

  By Nicole Barney • Garth Greenwell’s second novel, Cleanness, revisits the territory of his debut, fleshing out the experiences of the narrator beyond those of his encounters with Mitko, a young man he meets in a public bathroom and…

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Ugly Love: Character as Plot in Mary Gaitskill’s DON’T CRY

January 21, 2020

  By Melissa Benton Barker • The stories in Mary Gaitskill’s collection Don’t Cry are like tiny mirrors held close, all the pores and blemishes of her characters offered up for the readers’ inspection. Published in 2009, the collection scrupulously…

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Dialogue as Character (and Narrative) Complexity in Monica McFawn’s “Out of the Mouths of Babes”

January 14, 2020

  By Gwendolyn Edward • I’ve often battled with how to better develop secondary characters in short stories that use a limited, third-person point of view. While I’ve learned how to use my main character’s memories and current thoughts to…

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Hybrid Interview: Dustin M. Hoffman

December 17, 2019

  By Jesse Motte • When I read Dustin M. Hoffman’s first collection, One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist, during undergrad, it felt like I’d been suddenly gut-shot by some invisible, benevolent entity. The shock excited me. I prefer my writing like that: unforgiving…

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Repetition and Evolution: Structure in Robert Boswell’s CROOKED HEARTS

December 10, 2019

  By Amber Wheeler Bacon • In the third draft of my novel, I’m still messing with structure. It feels like I’ll always be messing with structure. To experiment, I’ve tried copying the frameworks of different novels I love: Purity…

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Interview: Benjamin Percy

November 26, 2019

Benjamin Percy’s new book, Suicide Woods, released in October with Graywolf Press, is a collection of eerie and visceral short stories that walks an electric tightrope of genre and literary fiction to the pulsing phantoms of boogeyman and creatures that…

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Hybrid Interview: Cathy Ulrich

November 19, 2019

  By Kate Finegan • The Pieces Left Behind In Cathy Ulrich’s debut flash fiction collection, Ghosts of You (Okay Donkey Press, 2019), the murdered lady sets the plot in motion. These forty stories are all named in the same…

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