Counter Craft was started in 2021 as a newsletter about “fiction craft, publishing stuff, weird books, and other literary sundries.” I’ve stuck to that remit and published on a (more or less) weekly basis since then. You can browse the archives and categories like “Craft Rants” and “Publishing Demystification” on the home page.
I called this newsletter “Counter Craft” because my focus has been on counterintuitive craft concepts. You don’t need me to say “show don’t tell” or “make your characters round,” but perhaps it’s useful to hear me say, “telling is just as important as showing!” or “you need flat characters too!” Of course, the newsletter has wandered to other topics like the porous boundary between genre fiction and literary fiction, writing in the age of AI, the writing processes of different authors, and my own publishing journey.
Sign up if you’d like! All articles are posted for free initially, but some older articles are paywalled for my lovely paying subscribers.
ABOUT ME
As an fiction writer, my short stories appear in journals such as The Paris Review, Granta, Lightspeed, McSweeney’s, Nightmare, The Baffler, and elsewhere. My criticism and reviews appear in journals such as The New York Times, Lit Hub, The Guardian, BOMB, and of course here on Counter Craft. I’m the former co-editor of Gigantic magazine, the former editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, and co-editor of the anthologies Tiny Crimes and Tiny Nightmares. I also teach. (Yes, writers seem to wear many hats these days.)
I’m the author of three books: the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts, the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout, and the satirical-autofiction-meets-space-adventure novel Metallic Realms.
