Crafting Stories

Portable, accessible, affordable, and packed with engaging examples, Crafting Stories is a friendly introduction to writing short fiction. It encourages students to read fiction actively, with a writer’s eye, and to approach their own work in a spirit of adventure without sacrificing rigor. It makes the elements of story-craft more engaging to student readers, so that beginning writers can see greater progress reflected in their short stories over the course of a single semester.

Ethel Rackin Professor of Language and Literature at Bucks County Community College, has been teaching creative writing for over twenty years. She is the author of the poetry collections The Forever Notes (Parlor Press, 2013), Go On (Parlor Press, 2016), Evening (Furniture Press, 2017), and In Time (Word Works Books, 2025). Her writing has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry East, Verse Daily, and many other journals.