Hello, let’s take some time today to meet Mid-American Review’s non-fiction editor, Karen Craigo!
Karen Craigo is a poet whose first full-length collection, No More Milk, is forthcoming in 2016 from Sundress Publications. She is also an essayist and maintains the blog Better View of the Moon. She is a founder of Paper Crane Writing Services and teaches in Springfield, Missouri.
A submission is giving you major thrills: Why? What qualities does it have?
I get so mad at the contemporary essay. It’s a genre that is ripe with possibility, but its practitioners too often fall into formulae, the most obvious being a bookend structure that essays—even compelling and interesting ones—too frequently default to. What thrills me in an essay submission is originality, especially in form. Because they tend to be fresher in terms of structure, I gravitate toward lyrical essays. I’m open to anything I haven’t seen before, though. That’s what gives me a charge.
What is the best piece of advice another writer has ever given you?
Writers write. I know too many people who talk about writing but don’t produce. I have been that writer, in fact. But get a daily habit and challenge yourself—all of the best writers do that. Quit jawing about it and sit yourself down to work.
Tell us one strange thing about yourself that involves writing and/or editing.
For the longest time, I carried a river stone around my neck and wrote about it every day. It was the most exciting time of my life, artistically. My first chapbook, Stone for an Eye, is made up of stone poems. I did everything with that rock. I ate with it, slept with it, bathed with it. I held it in my hand and my mouth. I balanced it on my head. Want inspiration? Pick up a rock. Step inside.
What is your favorite piece that MAR has published recently (in your genre or otherwise)?
Just flip to the finalists and winning pieces of any year’s Fineline Competition. I live for those. They’re always the most innovative and exciting work we get—hands down.
Thanks, Karen!