Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 101

A Review of Margaret Renkl’s Graceland, At Last

By Sarah White

As a memoirist who most often chooses the brief essay form, I’ve wondered how my personal essays might hang together as a collection. For that reason, I was drawn to Margaret Renkl’s Graceland, At Last. Having discovered, earlier this year, her 2019 book Late Migrations, I welcomed the chance to spend more time with her closely observed, intensely humane, and always brief writing.

Renkl was offered a monthly New York Times op-ed column about “the flora, fauna, politi...

Lessons in Memoir from Self-Portraiture

Our new issue includes a fascinating Craft Essay from author Kim Pittaway exploring the need to convey depth and shadow when writing the self, how “a slimly pen-stroked ‘I’ isn’t a portrait,” and what we can learn from visual artists and self-portraiture.

Her essay includes links and examples, and a series of excellent, unusual prompts such as:

What catches your eye? Throughout a day or a weekend, snap images of where your gaze settles: the irritating scuff on the white-painted stair ...

Writing the Animal Other

In a new Brevity Craft Essay, Heather Durham examines how authors like Sy Montgomery, Lyanda Lynn Haupt, and Brian Doyle have redefined the ways in which we depict animals in our nonfiction.

She writes:

It seems simple enough. In creative nonfiction we don’t lie. We may write other humans, even strangers, as long as we do our best to learn what we can on multiple levels and from various sources, cognizant of power dynamics and wary of stereotypes. But if non-human animals are involved,...

Fifteen Fabulous Flash Essays

Brevity’s 68th issue launches this morning, with brilliant new essays from Kimiko Hahn, Sven Birkerts, Ryan Van Meter, Richard Robbins, Suzanne Roberts, Kathleen Rooney, Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn, Sarah Cedeño, Laurie Easter, Gary Fincke, Charles Jensen, Kathryn Nuernberger, Mary Ann O’Gorman, Katerina Ivanov Prado, and Alyssa Sorresso.

In our Craft Section, Abigail Thomas reminds us that vulnerability is a memoirist’s strength, Kim Pittaway examines what we can learn from visual artists abo...

Rudderless

By Kirsten Voris

Portrait of Kirsten Voris ©Bill Hatcher 2019

When I first started kayaking, I made sure to reach the departure point early so I could snag the kayak with the working rudder. A kayak rudder, for those who don’t know, is that little piece of plastic hanging off the end that you angle one way or another with your feet, to steer.

More often than not, rental kayaks have broken rudders. Some are rudder-free by design. I like a rudder. They help you stay perpendicular to the w...

Diversion, Delight and Pleasance: Rebirth Your Book in Tuscany

In 1348, Boccaccio writes in the Decameron, Florence was gripped by plague. Seven young women and three young men (about the ratio of most writing events) meet on a Tuesday morning in the church of Santa Maria Novella. Living in the city right now sucks, they agree, and so they’ll  

betake ourselves quietly to our places in the country…and there take such diversion, such delight and such pleasance as we may, without anywise overpassing the bounds of reason. There may we hear the small bir...

Writing 9-11: The Costs and Benefits of Saying Yes

By Jessica DuLong

“What about another book?” The editor’s email subject line announced her overture. Who would turn down such an offer? Still, I hesitated.

She was encouraging me to expand the piece I had published about the spontaneous boat evacuation of nearly half a million people from Manhattan on September 11, 2001. I knew turning that into a book would require immersing myself for many months in the suffering and fear of a dark day in American history.

It would mean putting my...

A Review of Sebastian Matthews’ Beyond Repair

By Stephen Corey

At a writers’ gathering several years ago I had picked up a few basic details of the horrific, head-on, near-fatal automobile crash endured by Sebastian Matthews, his wife, and their young son. Because Sebastian and I are acquaintances from shared attendance at such gatherings and from my having published his work several times when I was editing The Georgia Review, I looked forward to learning more from his Beyond Repair: Living in a Fractured State. And I did learn,...

Flash Diagnosis: Illness as Craft

By Sarah Fawn Montgomery

When my father became ill, time stopped, and with it, the words.

It was not that I was unfamiliar with writing with and through and perhaps because of pain—much of my writing centers on disability, my most recent book, Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir, scrawled during anxiety attacks, OCD compulsions, and PTSD flashbacks.

I am well familiar with writing with pain, hunched over the keyboard with a muscle spasm, trying to finish a page before fatigue sets ...

But What About Mom?

By Helena de Bres

Every memoirist worries, at least a little and often a lot, about wronging their family, friends and lovers by writing about them. It’s probably impossible to create a good memoir without including people other than yourself in it. But as soon as you do that, you risk hurting, exposing, exploiting and betraying your subjects, some of whom you may deeply love.

We memoirists could just abandon the whole genre in light of these distressing facts. When encouraged by h...