Tell us about your fiction piece “The Saddest Song” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? The piece is based on a real grad school experience when I taught one of my first classes in a theater blackbox. I wanted to take a fictionalized version of this memory and...

From Gabrielle Civil: “My Black Boy Dead” (Vol. 22) emerged from a kind of haunting. Although the poem resonates with recent anti-black violence, it came from a state of emergency in my youth. I grew up in Detroit during “the crisis of the black boy” and as people...

Earlier this year, we began to mull over the idea of highlighting the creative process of our poetry and CNF book reviewers, Stan Sanvel Rubin and Barrie Jean Borich. We wanted to devote a space to allow these long time reviewers and contributors the opportunity to...

Tell us about your fiction piece “Where Strays Might Find Comfort” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? My wife and son and I live in South Carolina. Behind our house is a small duck pond, and beyond that a strip of swampland. A few years ago, an alligator moved into...

Tell us about your poem “Becoming American” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? I was lucky to grow up less than a mile away from both sets of my grandparents. I saw them all the time; they helped raise me. My sister and I spent most of our time with my paternal...

Tell us about your poem “Coldwater” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? I wrote the first draft of this poem in 2014 during my time in the Loft Mentor Series. We were having a workshop with one of the mentors and were given the prompt to “write a story in 15...

Tell us about your fiction piece “Reading Aloud” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? Just as the character in the story does, I read to my mother when she was in a nursing home for the better part of the last year of her life. She had read to me when I was a child,...

Tell us about your poem “The Weekend” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? It came, firstly, as a response to SZA’s song “The Weekend,” leaking like syrup into my ear, on repeat, for what felt like a full year. I wrote the poem last fall and still the song is playing...

It’s that time of year again when we all start to prep and plan out the most important thing about AWP—our conference clothes! I’m kidding of course, but it’s no secret that the stakes can feel high about what to wear at the biggest literary...

Tell us about your CNF piece “The Coward” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? This piece actually began 10 years ago, during the Hamline summer writing workshop. The visiting professor asked us to write about an article of clothing that was special to us, and the...