CRAFT ESSAYS, ELEMENTS, and TALKS
Conversations Between Friends: Gale Massey and Louise Marburg
Gale Massey and Louise Marburg met in 2016 at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference over a tarot card consultation. Discovering a shared interest in exploring the dark side of human nature, they immediately clicked and have been friends and writing…
Never Rush a Rabbit: Prey Animals & Choices in Fiction
By Lee Upton • Probably like many writers I’m protective toward my characters—even though I put them in impossible situations or give them unfulfillable longings. I pretty much pickle them in vulnerability. Sometimes I let them avoid any action…
Hybrid Interview: Rebecca Kuder
Essay by Jahzerah Brooks • The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival is, at its core, a story about tearing down and building up. In this debut novel set against the backdrop of a working carnival and a wartime munitions factory,…
Hauntings of the Past, Hauntings of the Future: Crafting Dreams in Fiction
By Audrey T. Carroll • Dreams have woven their way into fiction from The Iliad to The Lord of the Rings and beyond. They can, of course, serve all kinds of purposes—deepening understanding of a character’s fears, desires, or…
Gurov’s Watermelon: Prop Work as Character Work in Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Pet Dog”
By Patrick Thomas Henry • Wherever I write, I stow props: photographs and notebooks, found objects, mementoes of life away from the page. Despite my effort to shake off the strictures of my own workshop experiences, I still believe…
Hybrid Interview: Ira Sukrungruang
Essay by Sam Risak • Author of a combined six books of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College, and president of the literary nonprofit Sweet: A Literary Confection, Ira Sukrungruang…
The Semantics of Belonging: Asian American Identity and Cost of the American Dream in Ling Ma’s SEVERANCE
By Khushi Daryani • “Only in America do you have the luxury of being depressed,” claims Ruifang from Ling Ma’s Severance (Ma, 226). A recently resurfaced novel due to its uncanny similarity to the global pandemic, it contains several…
Shaping, Containing, and Dissecting Emotion in Kristen Radtke’s SEEK YOU
By Stephanie Trott • I learned to love long-form graphic narratives during a time often associated with loneliness: college. Neither wunderkind nor department darling, I often felt an imposter in my undergraduate English classes and struggled to determine one…
Hybrid Interview: Alexandra Kleeman
Essay by Claire Lobenfeld • Alexandra Kleeman’s latest novel Something New Under the Sun is a book about plague. Not necessarily about sickness—although there is an age-agnostic form of dementia in its pages—but the Biblical kind. A novelist moves…
Classics in the Maze: Michael Ende’s THE MIRROR IN THE MIRROR: A LABYRINTH
utque ope virginea nullis iterata priorum ianua difficilis filo est inuenta relecto —Ovid, Metamorphoses Das stammt alles aus anderen Zeiten. —Michael Ende, Der Spiegel im Spiegel. Ein Labyrinth Essay by Tamara Beneyto • Writer Michael Ende is mainly…