CRAFT
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…
Creative Nonfiction Techniques: Perhapsing and the Truth of Gaps in Memory or Knowing
By Lexi Lilly • Growing up, I was scared to swim in Kentucky Lake, a reservoir created after the construction of Kentucky Dam, just outside my hometown of Murray. One day, my fiancé wanted to go cliff jumping, having…
Hybrid Interview: Salma Ibrahim
Essay by Paul Chuks • As far as immigration stories go, Salutation Road is about as political as can be in the way that it anchors readers into the realities of immigrants in Britain and applicably the Western world.…
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…