Craig Morgan Teicher's Cradle Book is in the running for the Story Prize. The Story Prize is a distinguished annual award given to a short story collection. We hope Craig's book wins. He deserves it. While they're making their decision, the Story Prize people are running brief interviews with authors whose collections have been submitted. Craig's interview just came out and shines a little more light on his singular take on stories, fables, poems, and where Cradle Book lingers in the lands between... What is your writing process like? I write often. If I didn't, I think I'd be pretty hard to deal with. Most of the "creative" writing I do (I work as a kind of journalist) is poetry; Cradle Book was a project I got obsessed with for about a year. I love fiction, but started writing poems as a teenager because I realized quickly that I didn't have the attention span or patience to write fiction. The fables in Cradle Book are the closest I think I can get to fiction--they've got characters and little plots, but they also work a lot like poems, turning on phrases. Plus, they're short--the longest one is about 7 pages, which took a lot out of me! So, to write the pieces in Cradle Book, I sat down with a sketchbook--my favorite thing to start writing in--and tried to get from beginning to end of the fable in one sitting. Then there was lots of revising... Read the whole interview here [Craig Morgan Teicher's Short Attention Span]