Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 100

The Joy of Detail in Nonfiction

By Sonya Huber

“Detail” is a word I say so often that I maybe don’t even hear it anymore. But the benefits and the joy of chasing detail in the real world and putting it on the page never get old. Maybe it’s the way that, once you summon those details—not the eyeglasses in the dish, but the pink/mauve frames with your old prescription in the cobalt glass butter dish you found at a yard sale in Georgia—you’re summoned back to yourself. I am summoned back to myself and summoned back to the ...

A Review of Judy Bolton-Fasman’s Asylum

By Ellen Blum Barish

A curious girl who grows up around people who keep secrets is like a balloon filling with water. It’s only a matter of time until it bursts.

But secrets don’t stand a chance against a girl who can find the words. And Judy Bolton-Fasman is one of those girls.

With sophisticated sleuthing and tender prose, she investigates her secret-keeping parents in Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets, the book she wrote to “release the pull of a mystery that had taken up sprawl...

Writing Groups: How? Why?

By Aimee Christian

A few years ago, I took a ten-week class at the creative writing school in my city. As the sessions drew to a close, we talked about what we would do next: a break, another class, a writing group, work with an editor? I couldn’t decide. I was so fired up about my writing that I wanted to do everything but take a break. 

I went for coffee with a classmate who seemed to have all the answers. I downed my Americano and asked her if she wanted to be in a writing group wit...

So That’s Why I’m Writing These Pages: An Aspiring Memoirist’s Response to Joy Harjo’s Wisdom

By Margaret Moore

“What will we know when this page is done? Who will we be?”

I sat in my living room as U. S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo recited these words during the virtual 2021 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference keynote address. I was engaged in the event, drinking up the magnificent art of Harjo’s lines as they mixed with melodies played by her band in Tulsa, Oklahoma. With the long work week catching up to me, my mind faded in its attention to detail, though, li...

How to Find the Right Writing Coach for You

By Lisa Mae DeMasi

“Do what you love” may be the most overused advice in the career-improvement world.  Countless superstar entrepreneurs’ TEDx talks and thought leaders’ bestselling books have quoted Maya Angelou: “pursue the things you love doing and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off you.” But that’s not always possible in practice.

I know this firsthand. Once upon a time I turned my back on a half-finished MBA and a corporate job’s maddening pace and rigid h...

The Joys of a Bibliophile

By Shiv Dutta

If you walk into my house and look to the left or to the right or straight ahead, you’ll see piles of books. You’ll see them on the end tables, you’ll see them on the coffee table, you’ll see them even on the dining table. I have no room left for them on my bookshelves.

I’m a book hoarder but I prefer to be called a bibliophile or a bibliophilist or even a bibliomaniac. People get addicted to caffeine or alcohol or smoking. I’m addicted to books. I buy every single book I...

A Review Ninety-Nine Fire Hoops: A Memoir by Allison Hong Merrill

By Jennifer Lang

In her debut memoir, Ninety-Nine Fire Hoops, Allison Hong Merrill chronicles her life from early childhood in an abusive home in one country to marriage to the man of her naïve dreams in another. Night after night, I put my legs up my living room wall or crawled under my covers in bed desperate to know she will survive and overcome the obstacles and challenges along the way: a father who disowns her, a mother who cannot mother her, a cruel husband who uproots and deceives...

The Do’s and Don’ts of Applying for a Writing Residency

By M. Betsy Smith

In 2017 I applied for a writing residency held on an island. I had retired as an insurance professional the year before, and only then declared my second career would be as a writer—a long-held dream. I was a hot mess at the time, and my application was a train wreck.

My application didn’t focus on the writing; it was more about my personal struggles with a homeless alcoholic son and a depressed husband. I wanted to write creative nonfiction essays about my journey as...

Can Writing Memoir Trigger Old Emotions? Within The Hidden Landscape of Our Heart

By Mary J. Breen

In the many memoir classes I’ve taught, I’ve blithely told my students that since writing might stir up old and difficult feelings, it was good to pay attention as they can teach us a lot. By old feelings I meant flashes of anger or frustration, or the reawakened pain of old wounds. I assumed the arrival of these stirred-up feelings would be very obvious.

Then I started writing about my mother.

Some background: I was born in 1944, the only child of 41-year-old, ...

Gathering the Pieces

By Melanie Spencer

For most of my life, I’ve written from two different worlds—one technical and public, the other personal and private.

In science and business, my writing has a clear purpose and known audience. It is bounded by subject matter and structure. Evidence and facts must be produced and gathered. The writing must convey the right information in the right way—accurate, novel, interesting. It must be persuasive enough to convince its audience to make a decision or take an act...