Katelyn Keating is the editor-in-chief of CRAFT and a freelance production manager for independent publishers. She is on staff at the Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop. Her essays appear in Tahoma Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, Flyway, and elsewhere.

Coming up is Rachel Thompson’s conversation with Katelyn Keating about the mechanics of story openings and the emotions in endings. They also talk about reckonings still to be had in the literary discussion of the canon related to what “qualifies” as a short story. Listen for behind-the-scenes details on how CRAFT editors read, accept, and work with writing submissions and for tips on how to polish and submit your own writing to CRAFT.

 

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Full Transcript

Rachel
I’d like to welcome you to the Write, Publish, and Shine podcast, Katelyn Keating.

Katelyn
Thank you for having me, Rachel.

Rachel
It is my pleasure. And I know, we’re speaking in this year of I’m not going to shy away from it, I mean, myself feeling a lot of burnout and overwhelmed. And you yourself wear many hats in the literary world. How’s that going for you? How’s it going with all the hats?

Katelyn
This year it’s feeling a little chaotic, perhaps a little bit too busy, but that’s OK. I think that’s maybe a good problem to have right now. And yeah—

Rachel
True enough, eh? So what is the best thing for you in terms of all the work that you do in the literary world about having all these roles? And how does one role maybe inform the other? Are there some specific ways that that happens?

Katelyn
There are. I mean, I would say the most obvious place, but also the most helpful is probably just an overlap of networks and contacts where I find someone that I published in a magazine maybe appearing as a speaker at like the publishing workshop where I work in the summers, or one of the things hopefully will be back alive in 2022. But one of the things I do for Los Angeles Review of Books is work on LITLIT, which is a book fair that we launched in 2019 and then had to sit out 2020 because it was a live event in downtown L.A. in the Arts District. And that was sort of a wonderful experience, bringing together a bunch of local, mostly Southern Californian, but a few in the Bay Area as well, local independent publishers to exhibit at that event.

And that was just a really nice overlap that tied in with a book that we had been publishing when I worked at Prospect Park Books as their production coordinator, which I was simultaneously working there at the time. They’ve since sold to an out-of-state publisher and are not in California anymore. But we were working on a book that year that had a lot of local Los Angeles book scene references, and that was just a lovely sort of kismet as those things lined up that year.

Rachel
Lovely. And then there’s also the sort of relationship that you also have with other literary magazines. You’ve published in a lot of outlets. Can you talk about some of the experiences that you’ve had with lit mag publication, I guess, favoring some of the better experiences, but really any experiences would be great to hear about.

Katelyn
It’s been a few years since I’ve had the attention from my own writing, but I would say one of my best publishing experiences was with Tahoma Literary Review print journal. They encourage audio recordings of each of their published pieces that they put up on their site. And I love the commitment to accessibility that that allows. So that was great. They’re wonderful editors there. And that was a particularly kind, of, I don’t know, important piece for me to get published. So I enjoyed that one a lot. And then I got to kind of have fun. My brother’s a composer, and so, of course, as one does with family, I made him fix all my sound in my audio recording. So I have like a very fancy de-essed audio recording of myself.

Rachel
Oh, nice. We try, we try a little bit of that with this podcast.

Katelyn
One of the most obsessive things that I hear after, it’s like something I wish I’d never learned about the, de-essing, because now you can’t unhear it. So I feel for you in this audio community because I’m sure it, it just stands out to you now. I would say that was maybe my best publishing experience.

Rachel
Yeah, they’re a wonderful lit mag, and I just realized I don’t think I’ve ever invited them to be on the show, so I’m going to reach out to them after that. So thank you. I always appreciate hearing good experiences so that we can celebrate them and talk more about them for our listeners. And is there anything that you learned from your publishing experiences maybe that you bring then in particular to the work that you do with CRAFT?

Katelyn
You know, I’ll share two small anecdotes without naming names. One was in a rejection and one was with a piece that was accepted. And just coincidentally, I think both of these markets were associated with university programs. And I’ve also worked in a lit mag when I was in my MFA and this sort of I don’t know, I guess it illuminated an issue for me around editorial. So I had the rejection first. I think if you as the editor of a magazine or the person responding in Submittable, can’t come up with something constructive to say about the piece, please don’t provide feedback. That’s not expected, nor is it welcome to get negative feedback in a decline. It’s completely unnecessary. So that’s something I’ve taken into my professional endeavors. You will never get any sort of negative commentary about your piece in the decline from us. And then I had a piece that was scheduled to come out in the journal and it did. And it was like the day before publication. And I went, you know, I never saw the proofs. So I reached out and I emailed. I said, You guys have copy edits? Like, are we still publish, are we still going live tomorrow? And thankfully, they responded right away and sent me a markup of my piece where they had made actually quite a few edits and like copy edits. Fine, of course. But they had deleted a paragraph. And as it turns out, that was the thesis of the piece. So it was turned into a little argument. It was sort of, it’s funny now, but I think that they would have run it that way. So that was another good lesson in staying organized and setting a clear timeline with authors when we require…

Rachel
Communication in talking to them.

Katelyn
Yes, and, you know, sort of, you know, please expect to see our copy edits and editorial suggestions around this date and then by this date, please send us your craft essay. And, one week before we publish, we will proof your piece and be in touch. Like so that, you know, we possibly over-communicate. But I’ll do a tiny shout-out to a recent tweet saying that our communication with specifically with running our contests is appreciated and top-notch. So I think just going the extra step, it’s not that hard. Submittable can be fussy. But, you know, we use it and it’s quite easy to send the same message to 500 people at a time if you need to.

Rachel
Yeah, that’s a really good point just so to have your systems in place and such a good point about how there’s really no sense in giving negative feedback

Katelyn
Yeah.

Rachel
More often the writers that I work with, they are going to take away negative feedback from neutral feedback. So, you know, negative feedback is going to just really hurt.

Katelyn
So we have one channel at CRAFT, one way that you can get some actionable feedback in our general submissions, but you do have to like tick a box that you want it, because not everybody does. That’s a personal choice. You know, if you’re getting a personal decline from CRAFT, first of all, that’s pretty rare. And second of all, we’re going to find something really positive to say about your work, what we loved about it. And that’s sort of where that ends and typically will be asking to see more work. Then you know what we love. We love the way you use, you know, lyrical language and imagery or whatever it is. And then you can choose a next piece that might be another showcase of that in your writing, but it’s never going to be a negative comment. And, you know, we we will offer some actual criticism on a few of our forms, by request. And that’s usually in the form of questions, things to consider about the writing, and always includes all the great things that are happening in the piece, too.

Rachel
That’s just wonderful. And I know that we’ve spoken before about your approach to the, your editorial work and that you really want to be an editor who collaborates as much as possible. And many markets, I know from my own experience who are not like that. Can you tell me about all the ways your large and growing team collaborate on selecting work for CRAFT?

Katelyn
Yes, and it’s always a work in progress as we try different ways. But I think something we’ve been doing for a few years that does seem to be fairly effective is to select, and it’s random selection if it’s first reading and sometimes it’s second reading on a piece that’s been upvoted. But we will assign as many as we can basically per week for team-reading. So the path of a, you know, just say a short story coming into the queue for our free short fiction, up to 6000 words, submission form on the day when we read an order on an assigning day, which is once a week, sort of figure out exactly how many pieces we need to try to get through to stay on our calendar, to be within the limits of what we said or what we’re currently saying, kind of response time, which I also think is important to try to be honest with, with our response time. It’s saying four to five months, then sometimes that will dictate exactly how many pieces we have to get through.

And so it may be a week where, you know, we really need to do a lot this week. So everybody’s just only getting individual assignments. That’s pretty rare. Usually it’s a mix. So, basically the whole reading team, everyone actually reading at the time will be like broken out into little pods for maybe a set of four or five weeks if it’s four or five people reading together. And so for four weeks in a row or maybe five weeks in a row, if we need to take one off in the middle, that group will consider a few pieces together every week. And then at the end of that time, we’ll shake it up and put people with different people. So readers on the team, you know, over the course of six months will hopefully interact with almost everyone else on the team, you know, at least everyone else on the team that’s reading in their genre. The goal is sort of twofold, to create a space to have high quality discussion about the work so that everyone is sort of learning from each other, in the sense of, OK, I hadn’t thought of it that way. Wow, that tool that you just brought in for the way that you describe that, that you know, you picked up at your summer workshop sounds sort of like this thing that I picked up at this residency. And we’re now finding a new dialog and a new way to talk about the work and increasing everybody’s sort of exposure to each other and how they see work. And, you know, it’s also just like helping us build community. You know, we have like writing groups that pop up among our readers, people, you know, workshopping together, being a reading for each other, becoming, you know, in-real-life friends. And, yeah, that’s not the experience on all magazines. So I’m really lucky that we are able to have a team large enough to be able to sort of balance that community aspect with trying to keep up with better response times.

Rachel
I really love hearing about the way that you approach it, because it does seem like it’s so helpful for the submitters, but it’s also really helpful for the editors. It’s going to build more knowledge and relationships, like you say. I’m editing with Room magazine. We’re a collective and we do work in a really collaborative way, but I haven’t heard of that before on the first reading of pieces. Certainly, that’s what happened in our editorial teams, as more discussion but I love that that’s happening in the really early work, which can sometimes feel very whimsical about OK, is just does this one person like or not like this piece, is sort of the choice that ends up putting it to the next level. So I hope that the listeners who are thinking of submitting to CRAFT or maybe who have submitted to CRAFT before appreciate just what a wonderful opportunity that is, even if you don’t see how it’s happening. But the people are really discussing your work and thinking about it really carefully before it even gets selected for the magazine.

Katelyn
Yeah, it’s true. It’s something I think that has really been a positive for us for the past few years, and it tends to bring out just really wonderful discussions and deeper thinking about the work. It can’t be every piece, but it is a lot of them. And then, you know, if it’s not first reading, it’s often on second reading, too, where a group may consider something that an individual has upvoted. And then we also do collaborate at the editorial stage. We have section editors for creative nonfiction, for flash fiction, and for short fiction, basically our short stories. And then in each one of those departments, we also have editorial assistants. So when a piece is acquired or if we decide that we want to offer, like, a revise and resubmit on a piece that will also have a collaborative element, where usually like a top editor and section editor and editorial assistant are discussing the piece. And if not, occasionally, it’s every single one of those people even contributing to notes and ideas in the margin. And sometimes it’s more of a discussion and then somebody collates it all into one cohesive note. But there’s collaboration at most stages for us.

Rachel
And also lots of thoughtfulness around craft, like really understanding what’s working in a piece to the point where you then have to be able to describe it to your readers, as well as what is actually being done there, baring the device, as I’ve heard some editors call it.

Katelyn
Yeah, it’s I guess that’s another area where, you know, sometimes I think I’ve said before, I maybe even said to you that this is probably not a magazine I would have founded. It just it’s not like an idea I would have had. It’s a really interesting way where we actually, you know, you can take some of these concepts that you’ve learned in workshops or maybe if you took an MFA, any sort of formal training, it’s getting to, to sort of exercise the academic side just a little bit, too. Like, yes, of course, we want emotional resonance with everything we publish. We want to be able to connect to the piece. But it’s also exciting to see how, how dialog is functioning and what it’s bringing to the page. Or, you know, why the choice to use narrative time the way the writer did is super effective or how perspective is affecting the piece. So it’s I’m going to say it’s lovely to sort of have those devices to be able to frame a discussion. So there’s never a shortage of things to talk about, even if you just take, you know, your major elements of craft and start there. Let’s talk about this plot. Let’s talk about these characters. It’s a nice framework for us.

Rachel
I want to talk a little bit more about, I guess, the craft of openings maybe, or the craft of things that you believe, I guess, work in stories. Because I read in another interview that you did that you’re looking for a story that opens in scene and grounds us in time and place. By the time we turn the first page characters who stick with us long past the first read, dialogue that develops character and plot, as you just mentioned, and that emotional something that makes us want to go right back to the beginning and read the story again. I imagine this is still true, but is there anything you want to correct or anything you want to add to that list?

Katelyn
I think I still believe all of those things, but I will certainly add that, you know, and it wasn’t specifically mentioned there. So, you know, I guess it’s not a correction. It’s an addition that I think form comes in many shapes. And I would say among the reckonings still to be had in the literary discussion of the canon and what qualifies as the short stories, that I’m just going to do short stories as an example, that the must-reads, the best-ofs. And we are certainly in a place where we’re excited if forms are coming in that are not an arch or a pyramid. There’s many different ways to tell a story. So I think that would be my addition is that we’re not just looking for one direction of the piece. It doesn’t have to use linear time or linear form. But the rest of that still feels pretty true.

Rachel
Yeah, I find with a lot of those kinds of “mistakes,” I’m wrapping scare quotes around the term, but that there’s a difference between a writer who knows that they’re doing that, that it’s like serving the story. There’s a deliberate intention to disorient.

Katelyn
Yes.

Rachel
More often with newer writers, they just don’t realize maybe that’s what they’re doing and there’s something that they need to look at at the opening.

Katelyn
Mm hmm. I’d say there’s maybe an overuse of the, like, false mystery of things being held back to later surprise the reader with. That isn’t necessary. And that seems like something that I think writers mature out of with experience.

Rachel
In your experience as both editor and a writer, is it just experience or what are other things that you think can help a writer get all of that list of things that you said you’re looking for into their stories?

Katelyn
I think read, read, read, read, and read is five musts, hopefully I said that five times. Everything from if you’re writing fiction or nonfiction at CRAFT, we publish a lot of craft articles and critical essays on our home page. There’s a link to our classroom section where we put things that we tend to think could be useful in teaching, you know, journals like Assay for nonfiction. So many places are putting out craft essay. Do the extra interactive steps there. So if you’re reading a piece about how openings work, and they cite several pieces, I think it’s really useful to take that extra step and go read the original piece, read the source piece, and look at it for yourself, I guess. See if you understand what the point is that the article is making. And we have a whole column on openings called Art of the Opening. I think we’ve had maybe six or seven entries into it. It’s occasional. We try to do it at least every other month. But I’d say over at CRAFT, we definitely spend a lot of time thinking about openings and strengthening them. I think there’s never-ending sources of ways to read more about that and learn, particularly now when we’re all fairly isolated. Learning it on your own time at home. A workshop of one can be useful, too.

Rachel
Yeah, for sure. And just like people, to think about, like writers, often I encourage them if they liked, the pieces that they like, to look at how it opened. Because often that’s invisible to us if we’re just enjoying the story. But reading like a writer like that is so useful. So glad to hear about the resource that you have around openings. I’m wondering because I find so often it’s like the opening is that literal first hurdle. And then as I approach the ending of a piece, I’m always a little trepidatious because I’m thinking, are they going to make it? How’s it going to end?

Katelyn
Right.

Rachel
And do you have any thoughts about endings, I guess, too?

Katelyn
Yeah, I mean, absolutely, when you maybe hit that three-quarters point and you’re like, tempted to look ahead. Oh, I really hope they stick this landing right. Just the joy when they do. You know, endings maybe don’t get as much attention as openings do, then. I guess in our consumption mentality and just the way that our industry sort of operates, we’re like, if you’re working on a book proposal, or your book’s out on submission, whatever is going on, it’s always this like your first five or your first 25 or so critical. But then it’s like, well, but the rest of the book needs to be good, too. And it’s the same with short pieces. Endings in my experience working with writers and as a writer, I guess, tend to be maybe a little more personal. I’ve got a lot of editorial experiences I’ve had with making a suggestion for an opening, even if it’s like, OK, this was some throat-clearing, here’s your real opening and writers going, wow, great, thanks. And then a similar thought or idea about an ending that’s just, not met well. I don’t know what that says about our, like, mass psychology as writers that the endings tend to be more personal. But I’ve learned enough about that, you know, if our editorial team really feels like an ending isn’t working in its current form, we typically will not rely on our ability to coax a different ending out in the acquisition, editorial time. So we will often leverage that into a request for revising and resubmitting a piece. That’s the dish on endings. There are so many different ways to end effectively. You know, I guess what I had to say about openings is fairly prescriptive, which I try not to be. But the opening is about hooking us and keeping us interested. And the ending is about leaving us heartbroken or, or amazed or excited or whatever it is. It’s the difference between perhaps just, on a really simple level, between mechanics at the beginning and emotion at the end. I guess maybe that makes sense and thinking about how can it be more personal, more challenging to approach editing and ending.

Rachel
Yeah, I’ve never heard that particular point of view before. So I’m really happy to hear it from you and think about that, about how there’s that emotional hook. Writers are hooked in emotionally, I guess, to their endings and I find with endings, there’s no one way to end the piece, too, it really is about, you know, what do you want to make the piece about then in hindsight as well? Like, so when someone gets to the end to give another layer of meaning to the story, where are you going to end it?

Katelyn
Yeah, I think maybe the only other sort of generalization, the thing that you see a lot and try to work with is trying to tie it up a little bit too neatly at the end. Either the telegraphed ending or the bow-on-top ending, that it may make more sense to leave us a little more surprised.

Rachel
And subtlety can be used there, whereas that’s the kiss of death often in the opening.

Katelyn
Yes that’s actually a good way of thinking about it. See, this has me thinking, I know we ran on openings versus endings piece in our Art in the Opening column in the winter. It might have been it might have been December that spoke to this a little bit. But this has me thinking of maybe going to write 500 words on this or something.

Rachel
Lovely. You have me thinking as well. I teach a course on revision and work on both openings and endings. And so this idea of the ending being emotional is stuck in my brain now, too.

Katelyn
Don’t forget, you know, pacing in the middle. Because that there’s so many…

Rachel
There’s the whole middle. Exactly, too. But I do find I mean, as we’re reading submissions, those are the key markers that we’re looking for. And then if you can trust someone to have put in the work on the opening and then actually stick the landing, as you put it, that there’s faith that we’re going to give the writer, and usually it’s warranted, that they’re going to know what to do in the middle as well.

Katelyn
Exactly, I think that that’s almost always been the case with us. Usually, you have a sense going into it about how the writer will engage with any ideas you might have for them. And a lot of it is based on how accomplished the opening and ending are.

Rachel
The volume of submissions that you’re getting this year, it’s up. And I’ve heard that from many magazines. And I told you my theory that maybe a lot of people who are not working right now or unable to work are trying out this writing thing. Because you also mentioned that some of the submissions are not as well developed. So thinking about this sort of openings ending and the craft of the pieces that you’re receiving, what editing and editorial suggestions are you giving to writers, especially for an accepted piece prior to publication?

Katelyn
An accepted piece, with something that we’ve acquired, we typically are comfortable with kind of all the major points. Like it feels like it’s in the right tense. It’s being told from the best point of view that the writer could have chosen. We have some characterization. We have an interesting story. We have some emotional resonance. It’s not like a rubric or a tick box, but it’s like, it’s functioning. And so there may be a line-level things here or there. In one go we’ll send a writer like our first round of copy edits, and that’s pretty straightforward. We use a style guide based on Chicago with a few little MLA portions and a few house rules. But mostly Chicago, and we use Merriam Webster, so, you know, these are pretty straightforward things. So there’s going to be maybe some spelling and, you know, a few copyediting things in the margins. And at the same time, we’ll also write some notes, usually in the margins, sometimes in the margins plus a little summary like a mini global letter about a couple of things to maybe focus on in general. And it could be, you know, anything from, are you sure you’re sold on not using speech tags? Like, something like that, something global. Have a look at this. It creates confusion on page three, seven, and nine when it’s pretty hard to tell if this is speaking or thinking. And if it’s speaking, who’s speaking. So here’s a solution. Good old speech tags. Or it might be something less specific that, you know, I guess could be a little harder when you’re receiving that note. But just the pacing isn’t consistent throughout the middle is, I think, a fairly common note. Because I think it’s a fairly common thing that we all do as writers and that we all see as readers where there may be a couple of pages, where not a lot’s going on. Is there anything you’d done to speed us up to get to page six faster, might be, would be maybe a common note for us or a little rearranging of this to keep us interested in what this plot point has. Incitement or whatever. I at least hope that, you know, I haven’t been at the other end of my own editorial, I guess. But we always try to have it be something to think about rather than something that’s mandated. This is not, you must change this. You must use speech tags. It’s just like, consider that if you did this, you might get a little more clarity here. The goal is to open a conversation and that’s going to be typically asynchronous, where they’re going to send it back with notes in the margin and we’re going to write back and forth until everyone’s happy.

Rachel
Can you talk a bit about your fast-response track, as well, that you have for underrepresented writers? How does that track work?

Katelyn
So last summer we opened for I think it was in July, might have been late June. We were open through November. We had those categories just for Black writers. That felt like something that was like the least we could do as we also attempted to do other things and to stay engaged with, with the real equity issues in publishing. So that was exclusive for Black writers until November. And then we just expanded it so that basically any writer who identifies as underrepresented can use those forms. And we have it for flash fiction and short fiction, short stories. And the reason we did it so when we started we were at about a six month response time on short stories and flash fiction. I’ve said this to you before, that feels too long for an online magazine anyway. And very specifically for flash, it feels way too long. There are markets who are making decisions in a couple days. It’s hard to compete with that. You lose a lot of work through withdrawal. So less so with short stories where I think it’s maybe harder, maybe less opportunities and more understood that you’re going to wait. But it still felt like it was too long. So we initially open those categories with a three week response time. We ended up deciding that it needed to be four because of the way that we read. You know, pieces only get assigned Tuesday morning. So if something came in Tuesday afternoon, it wouldn’t get assigned until the next Tuesday, which means we would have lost a week. So we now have four week response times on those. If the first reader uploads in the first week, then in the second week, the section editors will read it and then in the third week it will go, you know, all the way sort of up for editors to have a discussion about acquiring. And for those we decided we wanted to not only have a fast response, but offer some actual feedback for writers who wanted it. So that’s where we have that option. I think I have it set right now where you can opt out like the automatic is like you would get some lines of actionable feedback and you can tick a box that’s required. So you have to look at it if you don’t want to get that feedback. And we’re very diverse in many ways. And one of them is sort of age and education. We have everything from undergrads to retirees in their 70s working on our team, which is wonderful. And then, you know, in the range of education, everything from undergrads to people with, you know, several doctorates and everything in between. So we have a lot of just well-qualified readers who work as editors professionally or teach creative writing or, you know, this is something they can do, they want to do. So that was another nice way to sort of bring communities together with being able to point out a few areas. And it’s the same approach. It’s like consider if you made a couple of these changes. It’s, we try to never be prescriptive and we make sure that everything that we’re doing, we always make sure to point out all the things that we think are working perfectly that we love, because that can get overlooked sometimes in edits. It’s important to make sure you’re saying, God I love this line, you know, every now and then. Let them know you love it..

Rachel
Well, thank you so much for sharing all this about craft. I have a quick lit round that I want to put you through. All that’s required is that you finished the following sentences. So the first sentence is being a writer is often:

Katelyn
Lonely.

Rachel
Literary magazines are:

Katelyn
Everything. Literary magazines are community and joy. That doesn’t even really complete a sentence. But that’s what I’m going to say about that.

Rachel
I feel that joy in community, too. Editing requires:

Katelyn
Compassion.

Rachel
Rejection for a writer means:

Katelyn
Nothing. Keep going.

Rachel
And finally, writing community is:

Katelyn
That’s everything. Writing community is everywhere. And I’ll just climb up on my soapbox for a second to hijack your quick lit round and say that you know, I wish that all of publishing was looking to the just massive explosion and success of literary magazines to understand that your team does not need to be in New York. Your team does not need to be physically anywhere. They can be everywhere. And it’s just such a shame that the lessons aren’t being sort of universally taken from our pandemic experience to open the doors for a lot more people into work in this industry. So writing community is everywhere.

Rachel
I love that. Thank you so much for sharing all your care and craft when it comes to writing and publishing, Katelyn.

Katelyn
Thank you, Rachel. It’s been lovely.

 

Rachel

That was my conversation with Katelyn Keating, Editor-n-Chief of CRAFT. I loved her five musts in writing: read, read, read, read, read. And I also won’t soon forget her take that endings are personal and emotional as opposed to the more mechanical things we look for in openings to stories.

Also to appreciate is her take on the reckonings still to be had in the literary discussion of what qualifies as a short story. “There are many different ways to tell the story.” And it’s wonderful to know they are not just looking for one direction in the pieces they get, that writing doesn’t have to use linear time or linear form.”

The Write, Publish, and Shine podcast is brought to you by me, Rachel Thompson. You can learn more about the work I do to help writers, write, publish, and shine at rachelthompson.co. When you’re there, sign up for my Writerly Love letters, sent every-other Thursday and filled with support for your writing practice.⁠

If this episode encouraged you to find a more personal, emotional ending to a piece of writing or to submit work to CRAFT or other lit mags, I would love to hear all about it. You can tag me on social media: rachelthompson Twitter or @rachelthompsonauthor IG.

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CRAFT’s guidelines:

CRAFT explores the art of prose, celebrating both emerging and established writers, with a focus on the craft of writing and how the elements of craft make a good story or essay shine. They feature new and republished fiction and creative nonfiction, as well as critical pieces on craft, interviews, book annotations, and more.

They are open to CNF and fiction, including flash for both of these categories, year-round. They pay authors $100 for original flash and $200 for original short fiction and creative nonfiction. And they do not charge submission fees.

Also, this is rare, they will consider previously published creative work, though do not pay to reprint writing.

Each published creative piece includes editor’s introduction as well as a craft essay (author’s note) by the writer.

You can find their FULL guidelines on https://www.craftliterary.com/submit/.

The final note on the interview is a production note on this episode. Early on in the conversation Katelyn Keating describes an experience recording her reading of Tahoma and Rachel says “we try to do those technical sound things with our audio here, too.” A HUGE shout out to Adam Linder of Bespoken Podcasting who recently started as our sound editor. You can hear his wonderful work on all the new episodes this year. Thank you, Adam!

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