February 2020 
Dreaming the Real: An Interview with Marianne Boruch
Helena Feder
The troubling and wonderful thing about poems is that we’re reinventing the wheel as we write them. And having written, one’s experience with that doesn’t much help a new effort, I’ve discovered.
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A Quantitative Approach to Crafting Tension
Dustin M. Hoffman
Far too often, we fiction writers and teachers allow elements of craft to be too nebulous, too magical and ethereal, when there may be concrete variables we can control.
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An Interview with Matthew Lippman
Tina Cane
Humor, if done right, is the world because it is a response to the world in color, or Technicolor. It makes things uncomfortable and weird. I like uncomfortable and weird in poems.
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Writing Pain with Metaphor
Sonya Huber
The idea of using language to navigate pain has been resisted from many corners. The philosopher and critic Elaine Scarry wrote in her 1985 book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World that pain sabotages words, expression, and comprehension.
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A Suggested Teaching Guide for “Foundational Narrative Design” by Andy Graff
Karen Salyer McElmurray
Masterful stories establish a contract with their readers, promising that the elements of craft presented will evoke a “fictional dream” that we can trust.
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Give Up Your Ghosts: Character Obsessioins as Conduits to the Uncanny
Theodora Ziolkowski
...ghosts need not be present in stories to offer a sense of the uncanny. A story grounded in the natural world, with a realistic cast of characters, can move into the uncanny by using other narrative strategies.
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Hecht’s Vital Artifice in “The Book of Yolek”
Alexander Long
The sestina’s powers—part subtle seduction, part exasperating charm—to induce ruminative thought and feeling reveal themselves in a clandestine manner.
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Who’s Colluding? The Case For Collaborative Writing
Sally Ashton
...intentional contemporary collaborations disrupt the very core of Western literary practice: the belief, protected by courts and contracts and sustained by publishers and pedagogies, in the primacy of the artist’s unique voice and vision.
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