table of contents About CRAFT & The Short Fiction Prize 03 Guest Judge & Special Thanks 04 2020 Results 05 Note from the Editor 07 “Mule”—Third Place 08 by Elie Piha “Toward Inspiration as Craft” 25 by Mercedes Lucero “Yo Te Veo”—Second Place 28 by Rachel Pollon Hybrid Interview: Megan Cummins 44 by Laura Spence-Ash “Ariel” —First Place 47 by Jinwoo Chong “Revise Like a Scientist: A Method Approach to Finding 63 the Right Treatment for Your Story” by Lynne Griffin Excerpts from the Finalists 66 About the Finalists 77 about CRAFT Short Fiction Prize Established in 2017 as a literary magazine for Established in 2018, the CRAFT Short Fic- fiction, CRAFT has grown in 2020 to include tion Prize is our signature award. Open to creative nonfiction. We explore how writing unpublished short stories up to 5,000 words, works, reading pieces with a focus on the el- this contest was guest-judged in 2018 by Jim ements of craft, on the art of prose. We fea- Shepard, 2019 by Elizabeth McCracken, and ture previously unpublished creative work 2020 by Alexander Chee. The SFP is con- weekly, with occasional reprints, as well as ducted each March and April and judged in weekly critical pieces including essays on the summer, with the top three stories pub- narrative craft, interviews, book annotations lished each fall. and reviews, and more. Each published cre- ative piece includes an author’s note and an editorial introduction that each discuss craft and stylistics in the work. We do not charge fees for our fiction or cre- ative nonfiction submissions, or for our craft categories, and we are a paying market. Our general submissions are open year-round with no capacity limits. We value accessibil- ity—keeping CRAFT free to read and free to submit to is our priority. We work with all writers, established as well as emerging. 3 alexander chee ALEXANDER CHEE is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh, The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, Harpers, Vulture, and Best American Essays 2016 and 2019, among others. He is winner of a 2003 Whiting Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in prose, the AAWW Lit Award, the Publishing Triangle’s Randy Shilts Nonfiction Award, and a Lambda Literary Trustees Award. He is a contributing editor at The New Republic, an editor at large at VQR, and teaches as an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. author photo by M. Sharkey with thanks to JOURNAL OF THE MONTH, our prize partner: Get a new print literary magazine in your mailbox on a regular basis. Which one? What you receive changes month-to-month, but every participat- ing magazine is a highly regarded actor in the contemporary literary scene that publishes exciting fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry from new and established voices. Not only will you get to read the best writing being published today, but over time, you’ll get a ter- rific overview of the vibrant “little magazine” scene. 4 results First Place—Jinwoo Chong: “Ariel” winners Second Place—Rachel Pollon: “Yo Te Veo” Third Place—Elie Piha: “Mule” Jane Baskin: “Caprice” Andrea Eberly: “The Portrait of Venus” Temim Fruchter: “Viduy” Puloma Ghosh: “Natalya” Alejandro Heredia: “_____” finalists Jocelyn Nicole Johnson: “Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse” Michelle Go-un Lee: “jump!” K.C. Mead-Brewer: “The Angel Finger” Deborah Schupack: “Bird’s Eye View” (withdrawn; not excerpted) Flávia Stefani: “The Division of Bad News” Meg Todd: “My Father’s Wife” Tian Yi: “Body Language” 5 Bridget Apfeld: “Take This” Leslie Blanco: “My Wish for You in the Land of the Dead: A Cuban Sandwich” Madeleine D’Arcy: “To Be a Dearborne” Laura Herbst: “Child of the Mouth” Alejandro Heredia: “then, beauty” Tobey Hiller: “Blue, Wide, and Very Cold” the rest of Pete Hsu: “Game Five” Lucy Jones: “The Outing” the longlist Jill Koenigsdorf: “Tell the Bees” Virginia Marshall: “My Dearest” Hadley Moore: “JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Bobby” Mamie Pound: “Butterscotch Yellow” David Saltzman: “The Loneliest Whale” Caroline M. Schmidt: “Particular Luck” Wendla A. Schwartz: “Spaces” S. Kennedy Sobol: “The Haircut” Elizabeth Tran: “Twin” Chelsy Diaz Amaya: “The Bird Rattle” Robert Beasley: “The Missionary” Eileen Chong: “The Rice Chest” Sonali Fernando: “The Rose Garden” David Gerow: “Comedy Minus Distance” Stephanie Hamilton: “That Orchard Scene” honorable Marc Joan: “Swiss Watch” LE Keyes: “Letters to Senegal” mention Melissa Uyên-Thi Le: “Fuck You Texas” Jessi Lewis: “Whatever Was Left” Francisco McCurry: “Ecology” Daven McQueen: “Tahanan” Ry Molloy: “One Day, It Will All Make Sense” EJ Pettinger: “Fairy Godmother” Jesse Rasmussen: “Lone Star Park” Nina Siegal: “Gallantry in a Cardboard Box” Grace Yun: “The John from Jongmyo Park” Mario Alberto Zambrano: “Los Gallos” Annina Zheng-Hardy: “The Choice” 6 note from the editor On behalf of the readers and editors of CRAFT, I’d like to thank each writer who entered short stories for consideration in the 2020 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize. We are grateful you gave us the chance to read and consider your words. We’re delighted to share this digital compilation with you now, complete with the three winning stories, accompanied by author’s notes and Alexander Chee’s introductions; excerpts from a few of our favorite craft pieces, includ- ing essays and interviews; and excerpts from finalist pieces. Thank you for your support! —Katelyn Keating The 2020 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize Team Readers: Amy Barnes, L. Shapley Bassen, Cameron Baumgartner, Melissa Bowers, Winston Bribach, Alyse Burnside, Hannah Christopher, Jacqueline Doyle, Matt Dube, Alyson Mosquera Dutemple, Thomas Ferriello, Mike Goodwin, Rosemary Graham, Kristen Havens, Mike Keeper, Zachary Kocanda, Wilson Koewing, Albert Liau, Claire Lobenfeld, Claudia McCarron, Priyanka Moorjani, Jesse Motte, Hayley Neiling, Kathy Ngoc Nguyen, Elizabeth Ochsner, Vandana Sehrawat , David K. Slay, Cynthia Zhang Editors: Alex Berge, Suzanne Grove, Katelyn Keating 7 mule From the first line I felt I could hear this narrator in my ear, so vividly alive, the voice carrying each line with an urgent lyricism that felt effort- less, a story about how bragging hides, if not a broken heart, a broken man, and the broken man points out to the broken world. Our hero is trying to make himself right again and no one is interested in seeing that happen, not even the people who seem to be bringing him in on a deal, and so we begin the story’s electric hopscotch with a free car offered to a down on his luck veteran. As his plan to rescue his fortunes hatches, we understand that what he thinks is opportunity is most likely going to fall down around him, but we’re rooting for him—and this criminal enterprise—all the same. At the end, I wanted a whole novel like this. Elie Piha is a powerhouse, and I can’t wait for what he’ll write next.” —Alexander Chee 8 Nobody had ever given me anything before, so I didn’t care that the car was a piece of shit. I didn’t care that it was a two-timer, twice handed down, first from me and Davis’s old squad leader to Davis, and now from Davis to me. It was a fucking car, and it was free. To tell the truth, I actually liked that I knew its last two owners, had deployed with them. That made me feel like a legacy. I was four months out of the Army and growing a beard, but the years I’d put in were already looking like they stood for more, and I had the car to prove it. Davis had given me the worn, silver key and the faded green title while we were standing outside his Tacoma apartment in the rain. There was a vendor offering Mexican street corn and there was the scraping of forks and knives from people eating brunch under a glass awning. I hadn’t known how to thank Davis so I just laughed and said, “Seriously?” He asked me to take good care of it. I said it always did look like a drug dealer’s car, and he told me to be careful going to work for Ronnie. I said you too because Davis had just reenlisted and was on his way back to Afghanistan. I dropped Davis off at Fort Lewis outside our old barracks and he smacked the hood of the car goodbye, then I drove thirty minutes up to Seattle to say a quick hello to my grandma. I used to visit her on weekends back when I was still stationed at Lewis. I’d hold her under the arm as she shuffled across the street to Congregation Or VeShalom on Saturday mornings, and it’d take ten minutes for us to make the short trip, me holding my hand out to stop traffic, horns bleating, my little grandma’s breathy voice saying, “Oh shut it, shut it,” to the cars. While she prayed, I’d smoke and read on her back porch until the service was over and I had to walk back and hold up traffic again just to help her come home. 9 I’d ridden in the car plenty of times, not just since Davis owned it, but back when our old squad leader did, too. Once a month our squad would skip morning PT and we’d go to Denny’s and eat om- elets and potatoes and pancakes with whipped cream until we could barely walk. I was the one who had started calling the car The Atheist Mobile due to its original bumper stickers.