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CRAFT

Image is the book cover for "Martha's Daughter" by David Haynes. Title card for the new interview with David Haynes.

Interview: David Haynes

August 29, 2025

  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).…

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Image is the book cover for "It All Felt Impossible" by Tom McAllister. Title card for the new conversation between Aaron Burch and Tom McAllister.

Conversations Between Friends: Tom McAllister and Aaron Burch

August 27, 2025

  Tom McAllister’s It All Felt Impossible is exactly what its subtitle promises: “42 Years in 42 Essays.” Of course, what makes it literary; what makes it a hypnotic, engaging, magical read; what makes it one of my favorite books…

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Image is the book cover for "Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless" by Tamara Dean. Title card for the new interview with Tamara Dean.

Interview: Tamara Dean

August 22, 2025

  I’m not sure I’ve ever come across any other region named as evocatively as the Driftless region of Wisconsin. Driftless: the word itself refers to the area’s lack of glacial deposits (or “drift”), as the land was passed by…

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Image is a color photograph of two hands forming a pot out of wet clay; title card for the creative nonfiction essay "The Risk of Forgetting Why" by Michael Collard.

The Risk of Forgetting Why

August 20, 2025

  By Sean Collard • There’s a risk in learning how to write well: the danger of forgetting why you started. I worry that someday I’ll become so polished, so precise, that I’ll lose the very thing that made my…

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Image is the book cover for "Bitter Texas Honey" by Ashley Whitaker. Title card for the new interview with Ashley Whitaker.

Interview: Ashley Whitaker

August 1, 2025

  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…

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Image is the book cover for "The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo" by Karen Babine. Title card for the new interview with Karen Babine.

Hybrid Interview: Karen Babine

July 30, 2025

  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…

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Image is the book cover for the interview for "Leave: A Postpartum Account" by Shayne Terry. Title card for the new interview with Shayne Terry.

Interview: Shayne Terry

July 25, 2025

  On an early spring day in Flatbush, I sat down with my friend and neighbor, Shayne Terry. Our five-year-olds went out with their fathers while we talked about Terry’s debut book, Leave: A Postpartum Account, which came out this…

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Image is a color photograph of two wooden artists' figures, one reclining in the other's lap; title card for the craft essay "Are you Being Too Nice To Your Characters? Why Suffering Matters in Suspense" by Jennifer Craven.

Are You Being Too Nice to Your Characters? Why Suffering Matters in Suspense

July 23, 2025

  By Jen Craven • Here’s a truth many writers (myself included) sometimes resist: if your characters aren’t suffering, your story probably is. In the world of suspense fiction, suffering isn’t just dramatic flair—it’s fuel. It’s what cranks the tension,…

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Interview: Jesse Lee Kercheval

May 30, 2025

  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…

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Image is the book cover for FOOD PORN by Sienna Liu; title card for the new interview with Kit Lea Cheang.

Conversations Between Friends: Sienna Liu and Kit Lea Cheang

May 28, 2025

  “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…

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