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Paradise Pawn by Meg Richardson

By Meg Richardson | Fiction, Excerpt | February 28, 2020

We make a ton of money off Christmas in July, because customers have too much hope. It’s not their fault. Me and Rubina feed it to them. We decorate Paradise Pawn with tinsel and lights. We smile and hold…

CRAFT @ AWP20 in SAT (in spirit only)

By CRAFT | Roundups | February 26, 2020

Alongside The Masters Review & Frontier Poetry & Palette Poetry, we’ve made the decision not to attend AWP in San Antonio. We will keep this page updated when we learn of events featuring contributors & friends of CRAFT! Many…

Interview: Naomi Kim Eagleson

By CRAFT | Interviews | February 25, 2020

CRAFT: What was your motivation to open The Artful Editor in 2010? Did you specifically see a need to be filled, or were you pursuing your passion, or was it something in between or completely different? Naomi Kim Eagleson:…

Little Squirrel by Tim Hickey

By Tim Hickey | Fiction, Excerpt | February 21, 2020

But where exactly had it gone wrong this day? Probably when my brother-in-law-to-be, Ward DiBaptista, shouted at me to move the Tahoe so it wouldn’t rut the yard, or maybe just after that, when my fiancée’s entire family made…

Tarot Cards and Counting Cats: Writers as Magical Thinkers

By Guest Author | Craft, Critical Essays | February 18, 2020

By Emma Sloley • Seven is the optimal number of cats. Four is acceptable but dicey, and only three is worth getting nervous about. Any fewer than three is cause for great mental anguish and an absolute certainty that…

Empire of Dirt by Jonathan Bohr Heinen

By Jonathan Bohr Heinen | Fiction, Excerpt | February 14, 2020

That morning, when they set out to follow the fence line that surrounded their property, Sarah Billard didn’t expect her daddy to stop at the southern section. She could hardly recall the last time seed had taken root there—all…

Point of View Amplifies Theme in Zadie Smith’s “Crazy They Call Me”

By Guest Author | Craft, Classroom, Critical Essays | February 11, 2020

By Candace Walsh • In Zadie Smith’s short story “Crazy They Call Me,” the author makes the unconventional choice to present Billie Holiday as a second-person-singular narrator. This strikes me as a literary high-wire act, plausibly the result of…

Hello, My Name Is Marley by K.B. Carle

By K.B. Carle | Flash Fiction, Fiction | February 7, 2020

And I’m an ALCOHOLIC.

My parents, they had flaws. I was the kid left waiting at school, watching all the other kids’ parents pick them up on time while I got BLISTERS from squeezing the chain-link fence so hard, only to become someone else’s RESPONSIBILITY…

New Books: February 2020

By CRAFT | Book Launches | February 4, 2020

Here’s what we’re most looking forward to reading this February, with a special nod to several writers we’ve published in CRAFT! Clare Beams, The Illness Lesson “Beams (We Show What We Have Learned, 2016) takes risk after risk in this,…

The Study and Practice of Astral Projection by Lesley Bannatyne

By Lesley Bannatyne | Fiction, Short Stories | January 31, 2020

Cassie found the book at a bus stop next to a pair of abandoned men’s shoes: The Study and Practice of Astral Projection: The Definitive Survey on Out-of-the-Body Experiences, by Dr. Robert Crookall. On the cover was a drawing…

Author’s Note

The body grounds you; place gives you shape and history.

“Astral Projection” is so much about not being that the idea of physical substance became more important.

Initially, Cassie is assaulted by the world around her—by light, smell, her own weight—and longs to be gone from the body that has betrayed her. I tried to make the story’s physical elements as unsettling and foreign as the baby that occupies her body—the hard plastic chair at the clinic, the Caribbean accent, the white-soled shoes, high school—and situate Cassie in her own secret realm beyond the scope of adults, even most peers, in self-imposed isolation. She absents herself from, and sees herself as opposed to, the physical world. As Cassie drives from Pennsylvania to New York state I wrote the landscape as generic: suburbs, pine trees, soybean fields. She’s unwilling to dwell in it. Astral projection is not a stand in for suicide, but it is a leave-taking of an extreme sort.

As Cassie evolves, I wanted to bring place and physical presence into sharper focus so that the reader touches down when Cassie touches down. I used the actual ground, for one: Cassie’s Aunt Liz “talks” to her dead daughter outside at night lying, literally, in the grass. Cassie digs in the garden, Carl kicks overripe tomatoes lying in the dirt, his truck spits up stones, his footsteps sound in the hall. I opened up Cassie’s senses to create a gradual focus on the non-astral world. When she romanticizes about her new relationship with Carl, it’s through her perception of hayfield, light, the sound of thunder. Weather grows more immediate.

The reality of the physical world becomes unavoidable with Cassie’s birth experience. Cleaving in two was a painful, worldly experience, not an ethereal one, and her subsequent loss is real. It grounds her in her body and her situation.

Post-birth Cassie is not a romantic, wistful outsider, but someone with gravitas who has taken her place in the strata of mothers and children. She views the world more realistically, and I used specific physical details to evoke this: concrete street names, Bruce’s “Pink Cadillac,” the Susquehanna, and Proctor & Gamble trucks.

I see the story as optimistic. What Cassie’s been through is life-changing, possibly tragic, but when she and Gail are flying over the bridge in her mom’s car screaming out the windows, Cassie has in fact done what she wanted to do at the start: her spirit soars.

LESLEY BANNATYNE’s short stories won the Tucson Festival of Books first-place award in fiction and the 2018 Bosque Literary Journal literary fiction prize. Her stories and essays have been published in The Boston Globe, Smithsonian, Christian Science Monitor, and Zone 3; and in the journals Pangyrus, Shooter, and Bosque. As a freelance writer, she’s covered stories ranging from druids in Massachusetts to relief workers in Bolivia. Lesley writes extensively on popular culture, and her most recent creative nonfiction book, Halloween Nation, was short-listed for a Bram Stoker Award.