CRAFT ESSAYS, ELEMENTS, and TALKS
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…
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Are You Being Too Nice to Your Characters? Why Suffering Matters in Suspense
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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Hybrid Interview: Deborah Jackson Taffa
Essay by Gabriel Moseley • I had the great pleasure of meeting Deborah Jackson Taffa at the Vermont Studio Center in October 2023, where she was the Visiting Writer. It was stick season—the dismal threshold between the time of…
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Show, Don’t Tell: What AI Can’t Do
By Laura Hartenberger • Teaching writing at university sometimes makes me feel like an academic imposter. Compared to my students’ other college courses, with their weighty textbooks, weekly quizzes, and the expectation of all-nighters, my writing classes, I fear,…
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Hybrid Interview: Rebe Huntman
Essay by Shara Kronmal • My Mother in Havana by Rebe Huntman is a memoir about journeys and the lessons learned along the way. In the memoir, the journeys are threefold in nature: physical, a literal journey from Ohio…
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Stepping Out of My Storytelling Box
By Tim Bascom • When I was twelve, I wrote my first short story, which was about a boy who, while hiking alone, falls off a mountain cliff and lands on a narrow outcrop, unable to get down or…
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Hybrid Interview: Chelsey Pippin Mizzi
When I began reading Chelsey Pippin Mizzi’s second book, Tarot for Creativity: A Guide for Igniting Your Creative Practice (Chronicle Books, October 2024), I wondered if she’d been in the divination panel at AWP in Seattle, which was so…
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Comfort Animals
By Pascha Sotolongo • The cat on the proposed book cover—a white-whiskered piebald—shouldn’t have surprised me. My debut story collection is full of furry mammals, birds, insects, and at least two lizards. A handful of these (often fantastical) creatures…
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Hybrid Interview: Puloma Ghosh
Essay by Ruth Minah Buchwald • What keeps you up at night? For me, it’s genocide, climate change, another epidemic, hopeless politics, something embarrassing that I said in middle school, the finite nature of time, and so on, but…
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Persuasion, Camouflage, and Inoculation: Introducing Magical Elements in Fiction
By Duncan Whitmire • Nothing is more disruptive to a reader than the emergence of the cynical voice inside their head—and nowhere is this more true than with books that traffic in magic and speculation. Some readers call it…
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