Sundress Publications announces the release of this year’s craft chaps by Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Mahreen Sohail, and Ching-In Chen. Craft Chaps offers substantive essays by contemporary writers on creative writing practice. Each chap focuses on one aspect of craft and also contains a writing exercise and bibliography for further reading. All of our Craft Chaps are available for free download on our website!
Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice is a craft text that interrogates privilege within the creative writing classroom, making space for disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence. Nerve shares Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s experience living and writing with disabilities to offer readers essential techniques to develop their own disabled writing practices. The text provides readers ways to unlearn ableist craft advice, strategies for developing disabled writing practices, methods to discover disabled forms for creative work, and practical tips for the business of being a writer.
Mahreen Sohail’s An Expansive Place is told through responses to various writing prompts. Navigating her identity surrounding her pregnancy, the speaker works through her ever-shifting identity as her body and relationships change. Her poetic, yet matter-of-fact prose builds layers when paired with included quotes from Ernaux. From Ernaux’s A Woman’s Story she pulls “Everything was definitely over,” marking Sohail’s thoughts on her own changes (9). “After birth I became a rage monster,” Sohail adds (7). A personal reflection on relational change caught between femininity and migration, An Expansive Place is a pensive, thought-provoking read.
In Breathing Space, Ching-In Chen offers their readers a new approach to poetry. Chen writes about epistemologies that shape their own relationship to poetry. In an anecdotal and charismatic approach, Chen provides the reader with step-by-step guides to changing their understanding of the layout of a page or a line or the words within. “My teacher, Juan Felipe Herrera, revealed to his students how poetry could encompass many worlds at once,” Chen says, before providing examples of their own poetry which does exactly that. Chen connects their own ideas to widely shared experiences, like the pandemic, striking each reader in a personal way. Breathing Space seeks to teach an innately human approach to both writing and understanding poetry.
Download them for free on the Sundress website: www.sundresspublications.com/craft-chaps.
Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir, which The Paris Review describes as “The wakeup call we need” and The Atlantic says, “Exemplifies a nuanced approach to life with mental illness.” She is also the author of Halfway from Home, winner of a Nautilus Book Award for lyric prose, as well as three poetry chapbooks. Abbreviate, a collection of flash nonfiction, is forthcoming. She is an Associate Professor at Bridgewater State University, where she teaches creative writing and disability studies.
Mahreen Sohail has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied as a Fulbright scholar. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Granta, Pushcart Prize Anthology (XLII), A Public Space, and elsewhere. She was previously a Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia in Norwich (UK), and is a recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and Hedgebrook. Her first collection of short stories is forthcoming from A Public Space.
Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer, and teacher. They are author of The Heart’s Traffic: a novel in poems; recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry), and the forthcoming Shiny City as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. They are a Massage Parlor Organizing Project core member, Kelsey Street Press collective member, Airlie Press editor, and Nonfiction Coordinator for Best of the Net. They serve on the Governing Council of Seattle’s Cultural Space Agency and on the board of Seattle City of Literature. They received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center, EmergeNYC, and Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They collaborate with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation, and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation and environmental justice. They currently teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell
