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Fiction is Trouble
By Jim Roberts The late Chuck Kinder1—creative writing teacher to Michael Chabon and close friend to Raymond Carver—once told me that “fiction is trouble.” This was sometime around 1990 when I was just starting to write seriously, having fantasized about it for over twenty years, imagining myself vaulting the wall of my gray corporate cubicle…
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Country Craft: Parking Your Writing
By Stuart Phillips My friend, Susan Muaddi Darraj, is a proselytizing member of the five a.m. writers’ club. Frankly, not a club I’ve ever had any interest in joining. Instead, I have contented myself by building my “writing life” on the fringes of my “real” life. And there’s the rub. I tell myself I will…
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Artful Academics: What Are The Odds?
By BrandY Renee McCann I have a math lesson. Wait—bear with me, please! In an introductory statistics class in graduate school (also taught in 4th grade math in the state of Virginia), one of the first principles we learned is that two unrelated things can be correlated, or seem to have a relationship with one…
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The Pie Was a Final Draft: Lilacs
By Michaella Thornton Because I’m a plant-obsessed dork, five years ago I wrote an Instagram ode to a Miss Kim lilac bush in my backyard: [In 2016] this lilac bush was felled by a neighbor’s dead tree, which fell on our back porch, too. The tree ruined our fence, and, I thought, my beloved lilac…
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The Off-Season: How To Survive The Writing Winters
By Wendy Newbury Every February, March, and April, I step into the role of general manager for my NFL team, a coveted position that passionate fans like myself eagerly embrace. Dubbed ‘armchair GMs,’ we immerse ourselves in every pivotal off-season event, hoping each move inches our team one step closer to the Lombardi Trophy. But…
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Strike a Minor Chord
By C.W. Blackwell I was thirteen when I strummed my first guitar chord—a G major—on my father’s 12-string Epiphone acoustic. He’d started over with a new family in Santa Rosa just a few hours north of where I grew up, and I was visiting for summer break when he suggested I learn a few chords.…
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The Craft of Listening: The Story’s Unique Scale
By Koss A few years ago, while in deep grief, I became aware that stories and poems reside in my body, not just in my head. A poem might wake me up in the form of a low thrum in the night. Sometimes every beat of the poem would come before the words arrived–as a…
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Story Crafting Below the Surface
By Jolene McIlwain Once upon a time, I could literally see inside people. Before I tried and failed at my dream of becoming a published poet, before I wrote a novel, and a group of short stories (the former sits unpublished in a drawer and the latter was published last year as the story collection,…
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Yarns: On Making Perfectionism Work for You
By Meagan Lucas I hate it when editors publish themselves—especially in anthologies, but that’s another column—and I vowed when I started this mag that I wasn’t going to do that. But then I had an idea for this essay, and I thought a craft column isn’t as self-indulgent as publishing my own fiction, right? Plus,…