Many years ago, I wrote a pop culture column for a subculture magazine and was told, “Rip ‘em to shreds,” because I had, at the time, a scathing voice that could cut people, places, and things to ribbons. I did that for a year and when I wrote reviews for my own music magazine, I often looked for what was wrong first. This, I think, is because I have a fixer’s mentality. I look for what’s broken and think about how to repair it. As an editor, it’s my job to be on-the-look-out for mistakes, typos, and errors. But I’m also good at spotting story and narrative errors, faux pas, and patterns. Am I then saying today’s piece is broken? No, because then editors from CRAFT will read this, I’ll get blacklisted, and I’ll be that mean girl who just shits on people. Ha. Those glorious salad-bar days of youth. I’m slightly more evolved now. Granted, it would be funnier if I just let loose on people, but I’m an adult grown up. I pay property taxes now. We property tax payers have a mature responsibility to look at craft, the way that CRAFT looks at craft.
Naomi Klouda uses phonetic spelling in today’s pick, Tungelquq Ellam Iinga: The Spirit at the End of Life at CRAFT. Words like “ting” and “tink,” while used sparingly, create a linguistic divide the author might not have intended. Or maybe she did. I truly don’t want to be mean, but I find phonetic spelling borderline crude, simplistic, and hard to read. Mark Twain frequently gets his ass handed to him for phonetic spelling in Huck Finn (Sumf'n, Nuther, Ridicklous) but I can see why people do it; because it’s how we authors hear it in our heads. But it also risks creating a caricature of the native-speaker as “less intelligent” and creates a comparison (implied but not addressed) that the narrator is educated, the townies are not.
The premise of the story is: a college student brings her girlfriend home to experience where she came from. This is like the time I drove my husband through the barrio I grew up in so he could see how shitty it was, have some empathy for my struggle, and get to know me a little better. I get this desire to share our pasts, but the story itself is preoccupied with culture dissemination, death, and queer identity. What I don’t want to do is wag my finger at CRAFT for making this choice, but we’re maybe coming to the “don’t say anything at all” part of the program. I don’t want to rip the author to shreds, I want to question why this piece was chosen—neutrally and objectively. I don’t know if I can.
Many times at Five South editorial meetings, I had to push back on the pieces brought to the table with, “Is it a good story?” and most of the time, the answer was no. Is Tungelquq Ellam Iinga: The Spirit at the End of Life a good story? At its heart, it’s about a lesbian bringing her girlfriend home; albeit a unique and interesting home with a rich culture and history. But the core is the love affair, the college-age concern someone will leave you when they figure out who you are. This message gets muddled in the cultural details of Apa’s death and the striking visual of his one arm. If we strip it further, it’s “Alaskan indigenous queers” which, let’s face it, is not something you read about everyday. So, is that the core reason it was chosen?
Good news is, CRAFT tells you exactly why it was chosen. In their preamble, they state the piece (I’m paraphrasing), successfully communicates something deeply personal and culturally rooted without flattening or over-explaining. Even so, the preamble states:
Although the story—which is centered around a trip home with her white girlfriend—is not complex, it’s nevertheless poignant:
They follow with:
The prose and dialogue in Klouda’s story are uncomplicated and yet still nuanced.
I’m definitely not going to say this sounds like they’re trying to be nice.
I bring this up because the preamble reads like a confession. Is CRAFT saying your story doesn’t have to be beautifully written, adept, or skillful… that all it needs is poignancy? And what is poignancy? Another subjective word we’re meant to interpret. To me, John Hughes is poignant. If you want to understand poignancy, their version, you have to read CRAFT. Klouda’s story gives us a glimpse. And I truly appreciate the preamble because CRAFT is the only journal that does this; they tell you what they liked about it. Not what I liked about it, nor my concerns it might be a simplistic story packaged in queer/indigenous wrapping paper. One could say that. I will not.
One could also say that Klouda’s talent as a writer is truly evident in this piece. “No trees, no mountains, only flat, cold Earth extending miles in every direction except where the river braids into many icy strands,“ is wonderful world-building and Klouda’s gift for observation is clear. The questions for me then become: Does the messaging cloud the story? Are editor’s choosing pieces because they cater to a societal demand? Or are editors and screeners truly choosing pieces they love? CRAFT employs a former Five South reader. Editor-in-chief, Cole Meyer, has submitted to us before, so I think we’re kind of in the same sphere. Cole, sorry we didn’t get the chance to accept “Camelot” and we’re stoked Baltimore Review got it first. But these are the things I think about, even though there’s truly no way of knowing why CRAFT chose this piece over another—whether because this is what they think good writing looks like or are subconsciously performing for the crowd. Are we seeing patterns yet?
And finally, I want to ask: Would The Paris Review or New Yorker publish this? They would not. This is because the quality of writing, although adept and very pretty, is not top-tier writing. The topic, although current, important, and poignant, is coming into a saturated market. There is a distinction between “top tier” journals and indie journals. CRAFT falls under the indie category and thus the quality of the writing reflects this. There is a fork in the road, my friends. I won’t pretend I know exactly why The Paris Review and The New Yorker select fiction, but I will say that after a while of reading, you can clearly see the line in the sand. In Tungelquq Ellam Iinga: The Spirit at the End of Life, there’s almost no tension, it signals importance (good fiction doesn’t have to tell you it’s important), leans heavily on poetic phrasing, tells more than it shows. Top tier journals favor implication over explanation. Read for yourself and tell me what you think in the comments. I really want to know. I might be jaded.⬥
CRAFT Rank #97 · Tier 4 (Respectable Mid-Tier)
Tungelquq Ellam Iinga: The Spirit at the End of Life by Naomi Klouda
https://www.craftliterary.com/2026/05/08/tungelquq-ellam-iinga-spirit-end-life-naomi-klouda/
3,067 words · 13 min read
PDF download
Summary
A young Yup’ik woman returns home with her girlfriend and tries to make her understand the spiritual and emotional landscape of her grandfather’s death, her village, and her own divided identity. As illness, a suicide, and winter isolation press in, she moves from grief and defensiveness toward a fuller acceptance of love, loss, and continuity.
Themes: grief, ancestry, queer identity, cultural belonging, death and continuity, love under pressure
POV: first person
Submitting to CRAFT
✅ Open — Submissions · Fiction: year-round
Reading fee: $0
Simultaneous submissions: yes
https://craft.submittable.com/submit
About the Author
NAOMI KLOUDA was raised in Alaska and earned a BA in Journalism from Gonzaga University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska Anchorage. Her writings often invoke the language and culture of Yup’ik and Alutiiq cultures, after living with those cultures through marriage and giving birth to her children. She is the mother of three children and the grandmother of five. She studied the Yup’ik language under Yup’ik speaker John Active, and the Alutiiq language under Philomena Knecht. Her various writings have been accepted by fifteen publications during 2025-2026. She is the author of Anna’s Whale, The Alaska Glacier Dictionary, and The Octopus Murders. She lives in Homer, Alaska.
The editors sound defensive in explaining why they chose it. I see the writer has over 15 acceptances in the past year so assuming Craft is a big step up for her. I like the description of the environment early on but it doesn’t seem to evolve or stay aligned or influence the plot. Characters are kind of skin deep and generic, the white GF especially. Some of the dialogue at the end is pretty awkward and unsubtle IMO. I don’t know why the MC has these bad dreams and the transition to that part is very abrupt because up to that point I don’t know much about her past, apart from Apa’s death and she likes running. Not clear why she is abruptly tormented in the middle of the night. Is it implicity caused by a suicide that connects people in a sparsely-populated village that share a culture? Cultural difference makes people hard to know even to their intimate partners is the “message” I guess?
"The prose and dialogue in Klouda’s story are uncomplicated and yet still nuanced." That sounds like a spoof of wine talk, you know: "This wine is pert but not presumptuous."