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Notes on Craft

Sara Freeman

Sara Freeman, author of Tides, on writing while seeing the wood for the trees.

Notes on Craft

Alex Hyde

‘The scrubbing of floors or rugs. People down on their knees, “tamping” the stain.’ Alex Hyde on the everyday gestures that make a life.

Notes on Craft

Scholastique Mukasonga

‘It was the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis that made me a writer.’

Notes on Craft

Lauren Elkin

On journal keepers, from Sei Shōnagon to Susan Sontag.

Notes on Craft

Juliet Jacques

Juliet Jacques on writing her trans and non-binary characters into being.

Notes on Craft

Oli Hazzard

Poet Oli Hazzard on writing his debut novel Lorem Ipsum, which is made up of one single 50,000-word sentence.

Notes on Craft

Kjersti A. Skomsvold

Kjersti A. Skomsvold on writing The Child, a book on motherhood and grief.

Notes on Craft

Ho Sok Fong

‘While writing we recover memories, recover moods, and we start to interpret them.’

Notes on Craft

Rebecca Watson

I was possessed, for a year, by a woman whose name I do not know.

Notes on Craft

Amina Cain

‘I would rather work in front of, or behind, a story. I want to leave a chain of images that remain in the reader’s mind.’

Notes on Craft

Caoilinn Hughes

‘I like to feel contradicted and conflicted by characters.’

Notes on Craft

Naoise Dolan

‘If something is usually done in novels, but I can’t actively justify doing it, then I don’t do it.’

Notes on Craft

Alan Rossi

‘The whole universe emerges and lives through this little consciousness that we call our self.’

Carrot Bread

Annabel Banks

‘A short story is a loose-knit sweater, a trawler’s net, where the spaces and holes are inseparable from the whole.’