This post is the sixth in a months-long series that explores the topic of craft: what it is, how it has evolved, who has historically had access to it, and the ways it is used in the classroom today, among other things. This week’s interview is with Amy Sayre Baptista and Meagan Class, Craft Chaps series editors. (Keep an eye out for a roundtable discussion with the first three Craft Chaps authors later in this series!)
Amy Sayre Baptista’s writing has appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2017, Ninth Letter, The Butter, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other journals. She is the author of the flash fiction chapbook Primitivity. She has received a SAFTA fellowship, a CantoMundo Poetry fellowship, and a scholarship to the Disquiet Literary Festival in Lisbon, Portugal. She is a cofounder of Plates&Poetry and teaches humanities at Western Governors University.
Meagan Cass is a fiction writer, editor, and teacher who lives in St.Louis, MO. Her first full-length collection, ActivAmerica, won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, judged by Claire Vaye Watkins. She is author of the chapbook Range of Motion (Magic Helicopter Press, 2014) and her flash fiction was selected for SmokeLong Quarterly’s The Best of the First Ten Years anthology.
Ruth Joffre: When and how did the idea for the Craft Chaps series originate? How did you become involved in the project?
Meagan Cass: About a year ago, Amy and I were hanging out in my kitchen one night and talking about teaching creative writing. We were both frustrated that most craft books, especially for fiction writers, are still written by cis white men and come with lengthy anthologies of stories that tend to privilege that perspective and also drive up the price. We wished there were concise mini-craft books from a broader range of perspectives that we could assign to our students. Thus, Craft Chaps was born!
After cracking many punny jokes about chapped craft and special chaps to improve one’s improve craft, we contacted Erin Elizabeth Smith over at Sundress Publications to see if her press would be interested in giving the project a home. Lucky for us, she was excited about the possibilities too.
RJ: How did you go about creating and editing the series—financially, intellectually, logistically? Did you solicit the authors? If so, how did you select the first three authors?
Amy Sayre Baptista: After the first meeting with Erin, the logistics were in place. Sundress also made financial compensation possible for the writers. Erin has such a magnificent team assembled that we could then start asking our dream list and see who had the time and desire to join the project. Neither Meagan nor I would have started a project like this without knowing we could finish it, and Sundress was that assurance. We each came up with three writers we loved and from those asks three were available. We were so thrilled that these amazing writers said yes, especially because we didn’t have anything to guide them but our general concept; and you can see the incredible results. Once the work came in, editing was very minimal. We each read the submissions and talked about them, but that was a pleasure. Then design was back to the Sundress team.
RJ: In the world of craft books and chapbooks, Craft Chaps is unique in that it’s free, downloadable, and invested in democratizing and contextualizing craft—a hard combination to find elsewhere. Why was it so important to you to make these chapbooks accessible?
MC: A traditional craft book costs somewhere between $15.00 and $45.00, which is prohibitively expensive for some students, especially combined with the full-length story collections I like to assign in my workshops. We knew if these were free teachers would be able to include a few over the course of the term, decentering the white male perspective without burdening students financially.
Also, the intersections of systemic sexism, racism, and classism, among other issues, prevent many writers from accessing both university classrooms and traditionally priced craft books. As Bayo Ojikutu notes in the introduction to his craft chap, the traditional academic workshop presents a “homogenized model for the perpetuation of the status quo notion of functional writing.” While online access is still a barrier for many, we hope Craft Chaps will chip away at this inequity and broaden access to aesthetic theories and practices outside academia.
RJ: How do you see the Craft Chaps series contributing to the larger discussion of craft within the literary community? What aspects of this larger discussion would you like to see get more attention?
ASB: Because the origin of Craft Chaps is basically asking diverse writers to talk about what they wish they had known as students or what someone might have said to them beyond traditional white narratives, the responses are coming from an utterly authentic place. I think many of us are hungry for these fresh perspectives. And, to quote Ángel García from Lessons on Erasure:
These reviews highlight how these poets of color are engaging in craft to make something new, something that might move us beyond the pain and trauma. This essay, I hope, serves as an offering—not a prescription—because I am as uncertain now as I was at the end of this essay about what it means to heal.
So, on one level, we see these essays as opportunities for a wide intersection of voices to be heard, but further that the writers we work with can have an expansive platform to teach from. We believe the generative nature of the prompts the writers offer could have a truly limitless effect. We cannot predict what someone’s words will do, but it feels stellar to be a small part of turning loose these ideas, and there is nothing stopping anyone from accessing them, as they are free. So many traditional craft books send the writer outward with instructions and how-tos, but the writers of Craft Chaps intuitively send the writer inward to where their ideas have been at rest, waiting, or forming.
RJ: In surveying craft books as a genre, it becomes clear that the authors and editors are predominantly white and male. One of the many reasons for this seems to be the publishing industry itself, which acts as a kind of gatekeeper, determining what will and will not sell. Would you agree with this assessment? What steps can the publishing industry and the professionals working in it take to address this issue?
MC: Agree absolutely! And, as Sequoia Nagamatsu noted on Twitter a couple months ago, we see this kind of gatekeeping in contemporary anthologies meant for the creative writing classroom too, especially in fiction.
As organizations like We Need Diverse Books and VIDA: Women in Literary Arts have pointed out, there needs to be systemic change within the industry. A recent Publisher’s Weekly survey reported that around 80% of people working in trade publishing are white. Houses and presses must take concrete steps to hire, mentor, and support people of color at all levels of leadership.
In addition to changing the power structure, editors and publishers need to work actively against the status quo in how they read, how they solicit work, and how they connect with that work. I thought KMA Sullivan of YesYes books put it really well in her interview over at the Minnesota Review:
There is so much incredible writing out there. A lack of diversity in a publication goes directly back to a lack of full engagement by editors in the literary landscape that is currently available to them.
I think we’ll see more diversity in craft books/anthologies if more independent presses like Sundress and YesYes include them in their catalogues. These presses are already taking active steps to publish diverse perspectives. I’m so excited that Sundress is planning to release anthologies specifically designed for classroom and community use in the coming years.
RJ: What was the first craft book you read, either in full or in part? What did you learn from it (about craft or about the genre of craft books)?
ASB: A very kind teacher in high school gave me John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction and Ray Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of Writing. I still have them. Both books taught me a great deal, and I still refer back to Bradbury in particular from time to time. Gardner felt snobbish in spots, but funny too. The older I got, though, some of what he said felt like the kind of pronouncements that only white men get to make.
In MFA, I had access to Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction and Imaginative Fiction, which are very well done, designed for a semester schedule, and again quite expensive for students. I am not sure that long craft books are meant to be read straight through, as you need to stop and write to really absorb the concepts. It’s like a good self-help book, where you read two chapters and your brain says, “There will be no more improvement for today, thank you.” Then you get up and go for a run or dance around and the concepts click. I can’t sit and read a long craft book cover to cover; it’s too talky. So the books that really taught me were reading and re-reading Toni Morrison or Sandra Cisneros, because you are getting technique and story all at once. Craft Chaps work on that same premise; for instance, Chen Chen has read his prompts as poems.
RJ: As writers and educators, what craft books have you found most useful (both in and outside the classroom)?
MC: I really love Lynda Barry’s “Two Questions,” which is actually a comic. It’s about drawing, but it deeply applies to writing. It deals with creativity, perfectionism, and the need to let go of control and allow for surprise to enter into the process. Barry tells the story of how her inner critic emerged in childhood as these two destructive questions: “Is this good? Does this suck?” At some point, making art became less about the imagination and more about seeking approval from teachers and peers. She represents the two questions with these really cool ghost monster creatures. I reread and teach this comic at least once a year. I have a panel from it taped above my desk. We talk about our ideas of “good” vs. “bad” writing, where these ideas come from, their effect on us. Then I make my students draw their inner critics. Octavia Butler’s essay “Positive Obsession” is also really useful to get us talking about the social and political contexts in which we each write and the different kinds of obstacles writers face from the broader culture as well as internally.
RJ: What’s next for Craft Chaps? Can you give us some teasers of the next chaps in the series?
ASB: Next we return to our ever-growing dream list of writers! We would like to release at least four in the next round, and maybe, just maybe, a fifth that would feature translation.