Contributor Interview: Craig Bernardini
Craig Bernardini's "Lost Dogs" appears in the Fall 2026 issue of Broad Ripple Review.
What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have?
Oh, the semicolon. I love that the semicolon asserts a relationship between two independent clauses and (barring an adverbial conjunction) doesn’t tell you what that relationship is. Grammatically speaking, in such cases the semicolon could be replaced by a period, and thus it has been called gratuitous. But grammar can’t even begin to account for the aesthetic choices we make as writers. Beauty and ambiguity: what could be more literary?
As a young writer I abused the semicolon, and then I had to sort of purge them from my writing, and then cautiously invite them back in. There’s an exuberance about them, and yet they’re also formal, even staid—a combination that tonally suits the literary pretensions of youth.
My literary hot take: Neil Peart was a better lyricist than Bob Dylan. He should’ve gotten the Nobel instead.
What inspired you to write “Lost Dogs”?
A couple of things. The first was that the passing of my father in 2023 (my mother passed in 2019) prompted a lot of joint picture-sifting and memory-scouring with my sister. So many pictures we looked at and said, “Who is this? And who the hell is this?” This was as true for pets as for people. The other was the time I’ve logged working with dogs at a local animal shelter. I think and write a lot about the emotional lives of other animals and our relationships with them. These two strands came together about a particular dog I never had a chance to meet.
What is a change in the writing or publishing industry you hope to see in 2027?
I like the increased porousness between speculative and realist writing we’ve seen over the last twenty to thirty years. I hope the trend continues. In American letters, the boundary between them used to be all but impermeable, to the detriment of both. Let Trump and his Romper Room sycophants try (and fail) to build their walls. Writing has no need of them.
I noticed that you have published fiction as well. Do you prefer fiction to nonfiction, or vice versa? Why or why not?
I lean toward writing fiction, and have published more fiction than nonfiction. But maybe fifteen years ago I started writing about my parents, and as I have aged and my parents have passed away, exploring their lives, and through them my own, has proven to be incredibly enriching. Now, I tend to bounce back and forth between fiction and memoir, though I still give more time to fiction. Also, I often hybridize memoir with hypothetical or fictionalized episodes, so there’s a bit of crossover, too.
I also saw that you teach. Some writers may feel pressured to take a teaching career. Did you feel that way, and how has teaching influenced your own writing?
I should start by saying that I really enjoy teaching and sort of figured I would end up in academia. No arm-twisting necessary. Once a nerd …
I think my path has been somewhat different from many other academic creative writers. I teach at a community college, which means that composition, not creative writing, is my bread and butter. Also, when I started teaching full time, I wasn’t writing—I took a long hiatus—and I had zero interest in teaching creative writing. After I started writing again, my disinclination to teach creative writing remained. I won’t go into why, but I should say it has nothing to do with my own experience with workshops, which was overwhelmingly positive.
Anyway, my disinclination works well for where I teach; we run about one sophomore-level CW workshop a semester, and we have several excellent writers on staff who enjoy teaching it. For me, it means I’ve been able to keep my professional life as a teacher, which pays the bills, separate from my creative life as a writer; and I think this has allowed the latter to retain a certain sacredness it might not otherwise have. (I know: talk about romantic!)
The last point raises the question of how a person conceives of their writing (and by extension, their identity as a writer). Is it a “career”? Or something else? A hobby, an obsession? Whitman’s keelson? I sometimes think of myself as the character in Fargo who paints ducks. Frances McDormand’s husband. I love him. He painted one gorgeous duck.
I remember many years ago a colleague and mentor of mine saying to me that teaching “queers” writing—an interesting choice of word, no? I think she meant the vocational demands of teaching stymie one’s attempts to write creatively on the side. I confess that has not been my experience. Of course, one can think of teaching “queering” one’s writing in a strongly positive way, in which case I hope it has!
With that in mind: in several ways, my writing and teaching have connected, to their mutual benefit. I base some of my curricula for second-semester freshman comp, Literature and Composition, around early and antebellum American literature, periods which have been deeply inspirational for me as a writer. I also bring a “craft” perspective to that class, as I do to the Studies in Fiction, a sophomore elective I teach every couple of years. I always choose four or five short story writers. Finally, I co-designed a Writing About Music class, and all the reading and thinking about music-writing pedagogy definitely helped me write about music, which in turn helped me teach that class better … and who knows, maybe it’s also had a positive impact on my writing more generally.
Sorry, that’s a very long answer. But it’s a very big question.
Now that “Lost Dogs” has wrapped up, what’s next on the writing docket?
Well, there’s always a lag between finishing a piece of writing and finding a good home for it. I just finished writing a series of short stories and am diving back into memoir. I’m researching Argentine history, in particular the 1982 conflict around the Falklands/Malvinas Islands, for a piece I’ll be working on this fall.
Do you have any advice for upcoming writers looking to get their work published?
Persistence, patience. The former is a given; the latter is maybe underappreciated.
At the 2026 Big Other awards ceremony, John Madera read (and beautifully extrapolated on) a quote by Lance Olsen about the importance of building and sustaining literary community. Writing is a mostly solitary endeavor, and sending stuff out can be dispiriting. The relationships we establish with other writers—the folks we hobnob, commiserate, and kvetch with; the ones we excitedly share links and free journal copies that arrive with our occasional successes—are just so important. There is SO much great writing out there, and that can be at once exhilarating and daunting. If you read something that knocks your socks off, why not send the writer an email? That is, rather than imagining the literary ecosystem as a Darwinian struggle for limited journal space, a “village” approach means seeing all those writers as inspirations and allies, and ourselves as part of a broader flourishing of the literary arts. It’s never been more necessary than right now.
About the Author
Recent work by Craig Bernardini has appeared in Conjunctions Online, The Georgia Review, New Ohio Review, and Remains. His collection "12 Oxen Under the Sea" (2025) won the New American Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the Big Other Book Prize for fiction. He teaches English at Hostos Community College, a City University of New York school in the Bronx, and lives in the mid-Hudson region of New York with his partner, dogs, and chickens (cats RIP).
About the Interviewer
Ollie Sikes (they/them) is an evolving queer writer, editor, and creator based in Dallas, TX. They completed a double BA in Creative Writing and Theatre at Butler University. Besides volunteering with Broad Ripple Review, they also serve as Content Creator for the little things literary magazine. Their poetry has been published with Synchronized Chaos. You can follow them on Instagram @ollie.sikes.
