Chauna Craig

Chauna Craig has published her stories and essays in numerous anthologies and literary journals, including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Fourth Genre, Sou’wester and Flash Fiction America (forthcoming 2023). She’s been awarded fellowships and scholarships to Vermont Studio Center, Hedgebrook, and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. A Montana native, she currently lives in western Pennsylvania. The Widow’s Guide to Edible Mushrooms was her debut story collection, and Wings & Other Things is her second, both with Press 53.

Advance praise for Wings & Other Things

A wistful melancholy permeates the sixteen short stories and flash fiction in Chauna Craig’s latest collection, Wings & Other Things, snapshots of women stuck at the crossroads, at the junction of stasis and action, hesitant, unable or unwilling to move forward, at least for now….Craig offers no resolutions, but like Dale the director at the rehab facility in “The Empty Set,” she reminds us with her achingly beautiful prose that “it’s all the same story with endless variations.” —The Attic, Lisa Slage Robinson

In Wings & Other Things, Chauna Craig examines the lives of women in courtship, marriage, adultery, and on their own, the decisions that brought them there, and the lives they never lived as a result. In small-town, rural, or city life, these women, in perfectly drawn revelatory moments, show us what we settle for and how we are haunted by what could’ve been. These stories and the characters in them disquiet and rivet, demanding our attention and inviting our reflection on how one reconciles the desire for escape with the need to stay put. Subtle and artful in its choreography of miscommunications and conflicting desires, this is an intelligent and absorbing collection. 

—Donna Miscolta, author of Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories

The stories in Chauna Craig's collection Wings & Other Things are about women in search of their past and future lives. As one character reminds us, "You can go anywhere. Depends what you're willing to pay." The women in these stories are certainly willing to pay to get where they need to go—whether it’s out of bad relationships or into new formed lives. These stories are full of hard-won wisdom, sharp insights, and generous compassion. Her characters suffer from and bear up under ordinary though devastating failures and disappointments, but through force of will, wit, and wonder they persevere and often prevail. While Craig's stories veer into the necessary dark territory of the heart, they never lose sight of the light in the distance. 

—Kerry Neville, author of Remember to Forget Me

Praise for The Widow’s Guide to Edible Mushrooms

The Widow’s Guide to Edible Mushrooms is a marvelous addition to the literature of the American West. Craig’s Montana roots are everywhere evident in how these characters speak and how they carve out their lives in hardscrabble places. If we’re serious when we say we want to understand the reasons why this country has become so divided, reading this collection might be a good place to start. These are wonderfully realized, fully rounded, authentic characters often living on the edge, far from the centers of wealth and power. If they’re sometimes selfish and ignorant, they’re also strong and thoughtful. And, like all of us, they love one another fiercely and imperfectly. When you least expect it, Craig reminds the reader that in every life there is grace and dignity.

—Ladette Randolph, author of Haven’s Wake and Leaving the Pink House

With the heart of a giant, and an eye sharp enough to cut, Chauna Craig takes her hometown of Great Falls, Montana, and makes it every town whose glory may lurk mostly in memory. And within these towns, within the hearts of the people hanging on, hidden as if by a magician, lie the complexities of all lives, awaiting, like our own hearts, discovery. The great gift of The Widow’s Guide to Edible Mushrooms is to allow you to be their discoverer. Chauna Craig is the real deal.

—Pete Fromm, author of If Not for This and The Names of the Stars: A Life in the Wilds