Category: On Craft
Craft Musings on Beginnings and More, from Our Editors
Three of our editors on the craft of beginnings and more
Read More
Hawks and Walkaways: How Nature Can Aid Revision
“Not everyone will walk away from a computer into the vast outdoors and find help from a hawk. But over time, these ‘focused walkaways,’ which were first unexpected distractions, have become a scheduled part of my practice, my discipline.”
Read More
Getting Away with It: Epistolary Fiction
The epistolary toolkit is a rich and varied one—it insists on the reader’s interpretive participation, and offers powerful methods for developing character and setting and for playing with the progression of time. So: what, supposedly, is wrong with it?
Read More
Poetry in Fiction Workshop: Everything Is the Same, Everything Is Not the Same
Summer Assistant Editor Rome Hernández Morgan explores the ways poets can learn from the craft of fiction.
Read More
Are You Gonna Go My Way? The Inclusiveness of Second Person
What makes second-person narration so compelling? What makes it so polarizing? In this essay, Jen Michalski reflects on the magnetic pull of “you.”
Read More
Elliston Poet-in-Residence Spotlight: Brian Teare
We reflect on Elliston Poet-in-Residence Brian Teare’s vivid call for “poetry as fieldwork.”
Read More
In Defense of Wish Fulfillment & Romantic Fantasy
What can romance teach us about the space between “improbable” and “impossible”?
Read More
Trapdoors & Lit Fuses: How We End Our Poems
How do we choose a poem’s final, resounding lines?
Read More
On Writing in a Secondary Genre
Working across genres can be intimidating for those who write and publish in mostly one genre. Cindy Juyoung Ok, SJ Sindu, Philip Metres, and Kathryn Nuernberger share insights.
Read More
Poetry at the Museum
What draws us, as writers, to museums, exhibits, and galleries? What is it about these spaces—real or imagined—that makes us curators in our own work?
Read More
On Titling Poems
Titling is sometimes the easiest, sometimes the hardest part of crafting a poem—a process that seems shrouded in both mystery and luck. Five poets share their perspectives.
Read More
On Craft: Notes on a Failure Poetics
“I’m not going to talk about ways to succeed in poetry—not how to craft a perfect line or please your reader or even excite the staff at a literary journal. Instead, I’m going to briefly talk about a poetics of failure.”
Read More
