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.
Hybrid Interview: Peter Mountford
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…
Hybrid Interview: Marisa Silver
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…
Interview: David Haynes
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).…
Interview: Ashley Whitaker
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…
Hybrid Interview: Karen Babine
Essay by Abby Manzella • In Karen Babine’s latest memoir, The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo (Milkweed 2025), the author preps her Scamp camper and drives from her home in Minnesota to the Acadian coast of…
Point of View by Lina Herman
After Lucia Berlin In my story, the mother and daughter go out for dim sum on a Sunday, or a Saturday maybe, after basketball. My first draft was from the mom’s point of view, but then she got…
Interview: Jesse Lee Kercheval
Poet, translator, memoirist, fiction writer, and visual artist Jesse Lee Kercheval’s recently released graphic memoir French Girl portrays seventeen episodes from throughout Kercheval’s life, rendered in vibrant color by Kercheval herself. It showcases the powerful immediacy of Kercheval’s twenty…
Conversations Between Friends: Sienna Liu and Kit Lea Cheang
“In books you don’t usually get to know what the protagonists eat for each meal,” Sienna Liu’s narrator in Food Porn observes. “And because everything happens off-stage, whether those have been hot hearty meals or flimsy flippant meals is…
Flash Interview: Tara Isabel Zambrano
What does it mean to be “ruined a little when we are born”? Writer and engineer Tara Isabel Zambrano searches for the answer to that question in her newest collection of short stories, Ruined a Little When We Are…
Interview: T. J. Martinson
In T. J. Martinson’s forthcoming novel, Her New Eyes, an experimental eye transplant with unexpected side effects upends the life of a sixty-eight-year-old florist living in modern-day Indiana. Soon after the procedure, the protagonist, Susan, begins receiving sporadic visions…