Craft

“Celestial Bodies” by Katherine Van Dis is the winner of the CRAFT 2026 At Work Challenge. Through the CRAFT At Work Challenge, we called for stories that made work the focal point: setting, conflict, character, all filtered through the lens of the workplace and employment. “Celestial Bodies” by Katherine Van Dis certainly rose to the challenge. In “Celestial Bodies,” the workplace is a big box department store, more specifically the lingerie department.

Author’s Note This project started with a sound, low and guttural. Two years ago, I entered a summer memoir workshop with a trio of essays that touched the nerve of a secret. For years I had written about this secret from the lens of film or feminist theory or art criticism, hiding behind someone else’s words or objects. I was a journalist, after all, and I knew the importance of proof.

Author’s Note I started writing “Flood Days” as a work of fiction. I had always wanted to tell this story of leaving my home country, but had never quite figured out how to do so. Every time I recounted the events to friends and family, I shifted the details ever so slightly. I was afraid of exposing myself: my privilege, my opinions, my right to an opinion in the first place as someone with my privilege of leaving.

Author’s Note The language of flight is filled with poetry and metaphoric potential. I use my experiences in flight as a pilot to better understand nonflying subjects. “Holding” is one of a series of creative nonfiction essays borne from flight maneuvers—in this case, the “holding pattern.” I found inspiration from the technical aspects of holding and used them as a starting point to help me explore parallel themes in my nonflying life: relationships, risk, habitual patterns, and secret-keeping.

Author’s Note I find it very difficult to write about myself and avoid it whenever I can. This is exactly what I did for many years while writing the larger memoir from which “Palladium” is drawn: five Brooklyn brothers raised in the eighties, three infected with HIV and two lost to AIDS. My family, crowded, Catholic, and in large part queer, had been blindsided by an epidemic at once excruciatingly personal and explosively political.

Gabriella Graceffo’s “Split Reel” is one of two pieces selected as an editors’ choice for the 2025 Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest. This year our editors were drawn to work that demonstrates excellence in prose and innovative approaches to difficult subjects.

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 pillars of the writing community.

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 A Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Maas (Bloomsbury, 2015), and the lyric essay/memoir/philosophy/criticism Bluets by Maggie Nelson (Wave Books, 2009).

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 Story Hour at the local library, reading in the car, and my mother’s dinner table tales.

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 methods to reveal avoidant characters into the following strategies: the character explains, the narrator explains, and the story explains.