Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 103

Bricolage, the Writing of Words/the Pasting of Pieces

From the French verb, “bricoler,” to tinker with things you already have

Collage, also from the French, “coller,” to glue

By Nina Gaby

Pile and slash, cut and paste. Start with one element. Maybe the scroll or the shard. The thing you found in the road. Kind of like that first glimmer you have for writing.

I’ve amassed ephemera, handmade papers, antique Japanese ledger books, milagros, wire of varying gauge, Italian calling cards, vintage cloth and wrapping papers. I have fired trans...

My 92-Year-Old Mom Reads Proust and Other Instagram Flash Stories

By Elizabeth Garber

I posted: My mom has seven pages left in Vol 2 of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Each day I visit, she starts off with an update: “Proust is mad at his mother because she misplaced his hat.” Then she’s puzzled and kind of pissed off. “I just don’t get it, why is he so famous?”

My most popular Instagram/Facebook posts are about my mom. There’s a photo and story of her crossing a meadow with her cane to pick fiddleheads in the spring or picking blueberries in the su...

What to Leave Out

By Laurie Easter

I had the pleasure of being interviewed about my forthcoming essay collection, All the Leavings, by author Sonja Livingston (The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions into Devotion) for her YouTube interview series “The Memoir Café.” Being live interviewed was challenging because, like many people, I always think of a better answer after the fact.

The question Sonja asked that I later obsessed over was “How did you decide what to write about and what not to write about?...

The Seven Powers of Laurie Lynn Drummond’s ‘Alive’

By Samuel Autman

I don’t know if my obsession with Laurie Lynn Drummond’s flash essay “Alive,” reflects a fascination with serial killers, or if I feel attached to it because it was published in 2003, the year I began teaching college, shortly after leaving daily journalism. No matter the reason, I can’t go for a semester without teaching this creative writing catnip.

With unforgettable grit, vulnerability and powerful detail, Drummond’s piece never fails to dazzle the students in ...

Getting Together Again

I’m going to a writers’ conference! With workshops and panels and book sales and a lot of strangers and oh dear god what if none of them like me? What if all the workshops are too advanced, or too basic, and I have no idea what the Liminal Space Outside the Academy: A Feminist Perspective Through The Work of Dickinson and Gay As Realized In Graphic Novels panel is talking about? Am I too old? Am I too young? What if I haven’t had anything published yet?

Good news: we’re all welcome. Confe...

A Review of John Domini’s The Archeology of a Good Ragù

By Kass Fleisher

John Domini can write a sentence.

Prose is the great pleasure to be found in this book, The Archeology of a Good Ragù: Discovering Naples, My Father and Myself, a book that, contrary to its title, is not really about archeology per se. Nor is it about ragù, or self-discovery, or discovery of the hard-won revelations of a reticent father — and which book departs from autobiographical norms, despite the designated insistence of the Library of Congress.

Beyond a nod he...

What Makes for Good Creative Nonfiction Writing?

By Suzanne Farrell Smith

One of the many measures my sons’ elementary school has in place for pandemic-time in-person learning is file boxes: an open box under each chair to hold all personal materials, so no one shares crayons or germs. Smart—in theory. In practice, the boxes are a bit of a mess. In and out go folders, books, pencils, markers, stickers, rulers, paper clips, paper masks, notes from home, notes for home, open hand sanitizer bottles, used tissues, animal crackers, empty jui...

Writing a Legacy

By Morgan Baker

When I was young, my neighbor, Caroline, in New York City and I created our own private library, before my parents’ separation when I was nine and I moved. We made pockets in which to put library cards in the back of our books and shared them between ourselves.

In the summers after the divorce, I spent hours lying on the scratchy rug at the local library with my cousin Betsy. There, I picked out all the stories about happy families like The Saturdays, The Four-Story Mis...

We’re Not Going to Talk About It

By Victoria Lynn Smith

Shame is visceral.

An essay about a pivotal moment from my childhood had been declined. In the rejection letter, the editor wrote:

Thanks for sending us more of your writing. Regretfully, we won’t be able to publish your work this time. As you know, only a fraction of what we receive is selected for publication, so even very good writing must sometimes be left out.

We’re grateful you chose to share your creativity with ________ again. Effective simile: ...

Finding Seshat in the Summer Dawn

By Sue Repko

Just give me that first line. That’s what I’d said to myself for weeks, hoping for entrée into a new piece of writing. My creative nonfiction group was meeting in 14… 10… 9… 8 days, and I needed to drop something in the Google drive folder ASAP. But even when I did have some free time, I couldn’t focus enough to jot down a single paragraph. For the past month I had voluntarily disrupted my early morning writing routine to re-connect with family and friends 400 miles away from...