CRAFT ESSAYS, ELEMENTS, and TALKS
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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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The Risk of Forgetting Why
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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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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