Poet, translator, memoirist, fiction writer, and visual artist Jesse Lee Kercheval’s recently released graphic memoir French Girl portrays seventeen episodes from throughout Kercheval’s life, rendered in vibrant color by Kercheval herself. It showcases the powerful immediacy of Kercheval’s twenty…
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…
I. Rain gush-pummels our car. Whippet wipers slash frantically at the whitecaps. Off to Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, to watch our daughter, Lily’s, volleyball tournament. It’s the weekend before Thanksgiving, and our son, Hudson, is meeting us there from Pittsburgh. …
This used to be my go-to anecdote when warming up to strangers in bars: the one about my pageant for the repairman. It had been my parents’ first color television, a Zenith workhorse in a wooden case, complete with…
The editors at CRAFT are thrilled to welcome Donald Quist as our guest judge for this year’s Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest, which is open to memoir excerpts, personal essays, narrative nonfiction, lyric essays, and other forms of literary…
I was halfway through the show when I first saw the picture, hanging all alone on a wall. I knew I should hurry up, had other things to do. But something about the size and the color drew me…
Grace Loh Prasad is a literary sister of mine in many ways. She is a good friend, fellow memoirist, and neighbor. We are both members of The Writers Grotto and The Ruby communities in San Francisco, and alumnae of…
Essay by Yvonne Conza • In Splinters, Leslie Jamison exposes a live nerve that makes vivid connections between emotions of motherhood, marriage, artistry, and selfhood. Alive and strengthened within this endeavor is Jamison’s iconic, singular awareness, that like her…
“I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” —Alasdair MacIntyre No one would talk. It was as…
By Beth Kephart • The writer of the memoir in pieces is an assembly artist—a hunter, a gatherer, an arranger, a culler, a keeper. They are not at work on a collection of essays loosely bound by voice, style,…
