CRAFT

1A

I slip into a crowded theater to feel close to people without being seen. My elbow just barely on the armrest, I watch the film color the room yellow then blue, each face in my peripheral blurred by light. I am twenty. I don’t understand the language the characters in the film use, the language the people around me know—instead I look at their mouths, each gestu...

For as long as I’ve been around the indie lit world, Aaron Burch has been a steady source of positive energy and endless creativity. Over the past fifteen(ish) years, he’s been responsible for so much inventive writing—his own, of course, but also the work he’s published at Hobart, HAD, and Short Story, Long—and for building some of the fundamental pill...

Genre-bending is a not a new concept, yet it seems to have recently made its way into the mainstream (at least, as far as TikTok goes) with works such as the memoir/fantasy/gothic/horror In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (Graywolf Press, 2019), the epic romantasy...

By Ryan Habermeyer •

My mom used to say I hated getting my hair cut. I would cringe, squirm, fidget, even cry out of an irrational fear the barber might cut my ears off. I was allergic to idleness, always drawing, cooking, playing basketball, building LEGOs, and cosplaying He-Man. About the only thing I would really sit still for was a good story. I loved Stor...

By Evan Calbi •

I’m drawn to characters who don’t easily express themselves. If they won’t share how they’re feeling, their emotions often manifest in behavior that can set a story in motion. But how do you reveal an avoidant character? You need to tease out the underlying emotional truth and find ways to say what’s unsaid. 

I’ve divided the method...