CRAFT
Interview: Sarah Yahm
There are few subjects that demand more courage like illness does; not just to endure it, but to write about it with clarity and truth. To write on illnesses is therefore to not only capture the slow, intimate undoing…
Ambiguity in the Speculative Impossible
By JB Andre • Not all speculative fiction is equally speculative. While much engages with the unreal (vampires, superpowers, ghosts), or the possibly real (future technologies, alternative timelines), a very small sliver of speculative fiction will try to capture something…
Conversations Between Friends: Lara Ehrlich and Amy Shearn
What do a mermaid burlesque matriarch and a newly divorced mom coding her dream AI partner have in common? More than you’d think. Lara Ehrlich (Bind Me Tighter Still, Red Hen Press, September 2025) and Amy Shearn (Animal Instinct,…
Interview: Grant Faulkner
Grant Faulkner, who will serve as our guest judge for the CRAFT 2025 Flash Prose Prize, recently told me that he dislikes conventional bios and prefers to find something odd on the internet about writers he’s asked to introduce.…
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: Jeannie Vanasco
Memoirist Jeannie Vanasco’s third book, A Silent Treatment, will be released by Tin House on September 9. Jeannie’s mother starts using the silent treatment shortly after she moves into a renovated apartment in Jeannie’s home. Over the five years…
Conversations Between Friends: Nina Michiko Tam and Vaishnavi Patel
Vaishnavi Patel and I met in our first year of law school—well before she’d published her New York Times-bestselling debut, Kaikeyi. By the time that book came out, we were fast friends, drawn together by our passion for civil…
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).…
Conversations Between Friends: Tom McAllister and Aaron Burch
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…