CRAFT
Hybrid Interview: Elyse Durham
Essay by Sonja Srinivasan • Russian writers never shy away from penetrating insight into all facets of the human psyche: we read Russian novels precisely because they “go there.” There is also a strong dramatic element to much of…
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…
Interview: Dustin M. Hoffman
Common descriptors from readers of working-class literature tend to devolve into one of two fields. The first, with words like “gruff,” “gritty,” and “crass,” tend to simply describe the economically depressed settings and the hardscrabble lives of the characters…
Interview: Tim Weed
Tim Weed’s third novel, The Afterlife Project, follows Dr. Q and her team of scientists as they travel through a world devastated by climate change and illness, looking for any sign of a woman still able to reproduce, after…
Interview: Kristina Ten
The internal logic of a speculative fiction story has a strange mathematics of its own. The rules of its world deviate from the rules we follow, but are usually consistent with our expectations about how rules operate. More than…
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…
Interview: Daniel Breyer
In Smokebirds, Daniel Breyer narrates a story which uniquely blends fiction with autobiography. We meet the Peterson family, the lucky few Northern Californians that, in the year 2028, are rich enough to flee the annual fire season for their…
Conversations Between Friends: Laura Stanfill and Wendy Fox
Laura Stanfill is the founder of Forest Avenue Press, a small press based in Portland, Oregon. With her leadership, the press has acquired and published books recognized by major awards like the Nautilus Book Award, New American Voices, and…
Erasure: It’s For Nonfiction Writers Too!
By Kristine Langley Mahler • Some of the most fascinating creative nonfiction lives on the fringes of genre-play, borrowing from both fact and fiction, both poetry and prose. Essayists, memoirists, and nonfiction hybridists frequently use tools from fiction to create…
Interview: Robert Lopez
The Best People is Robert Lopez’s third and final installment of his novels-in-stories triptych continuing on from Good People and A Better Class of People. The form and point of view shift, chameleon-like, throughout the work, driving the reader…