Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 106

Speculative Memoir Made Me Real

By Laraine Herring

The Velveteen Rabbit undid me. A stuffed Rabbit, a friendship with a living Boy, and the tale of how love and believing in what could not yet be seen turned fabric, stitches, and button eyes into fur, muscle, and whiskers.

Embracing my imagined worlds helped me become Real, too.

And as someone who is now Real, I am qualified to help define the terms of my arena. Here’s one:

Speculative memoir is an umbrella genre in which the questions of the memoirist’s book a...

My Home is My Muse

By Jeanne Bonner

My mother once visited a book-loving relative on the West Coast, and when I asked her what the house was like, she said, “He decorates like you do.”

I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant, but her tone of mild disapproval mixed with amusement (and delivered in her heavy Brooklyn accent) implied he had books strewn about, mementos from his travels, items tacked up casually on the wall and art of personal, rather than aesthetic, significance.

My parents’ house where I g...

It Can Happen: Rejection and Other Good News

By Jenny Klion

Another day, another essay rejection. I rarely respond to rejection e-mails, unless they read clever or uplifting, and this one was same-old, dry but polite. “Thanks but no thanks, send us more work if you think it’s a match. Good luck placing that essay we don’t want.”

Here is how I’d like to respond:

“Oh hi Lit Mag, 7 months later. A lot has transpired since we last communicated, when you moved my submission status to ‘in progress.’ Thanks for that and also your not...

A Picture’s Worth 75000 words

By Damhnait Monaghan

Shortly after she sold my debut novel New Girl in Little Cove, my agent sent me an email that made my giddy heart droop:

“You are going to need (and want) a professional author photo for your book jacket.”

Need? Maybe. But want? Nuh-uh.

Still, I went to my bookshelf and pulled down a few books to study the author photos, examining clothing, props and arm placement. Black-and-white or colour? Smiling or serious? Toothy smile or close-lipped? Who knew?

I goo...

A Review of Lee Martin’s Gone the Hard Road

By Debbie Hagan

On November 3, 1956, author Lee Martin was just a toddler when a farm accident changed his family forever. His father, Roy Martin, had been harvesting corn in the fields, near Sumner, Illinois, when the shucking box clogged. Instead of shutting off the machine, he reached in to loosen the obstruction. This split-second error took both of his hands, and he’d live the rest of his life with steel hooks.

A father with hooks cannot play games, cannot throw a baseball, ca...

Tomato Ready: Publishing, Patience and Pleasant Surprises

By Andrea A. Firth

My goal for this summer: to get published more. My husband’s summer goal: to grow heirloom tomatoes. In the writing world, we’d call that a metaphor.

We love heirloom tomatoes, the funny shapes, the rainbow of colors, the earthy smells, the taste—sweet and smoky, complex like wine. We buy them at our local farmers’ market, but my husband dreams of having his own tomato plants, ready to pick, and I’m game to help. After watching a YouTube how-to last fall, I harvested...

The Pleasures of the Personal Essay

By Dinty W. Moore

There is, perhaps, no current genre of writing as misunderstood as the personal essay. The personal (or literary) essay nowadays is often dismissed as some variation on a “Freshman English” paper, dull at best, and at worst a cliché-ridden five-paragraphs weighed down by unnecessary thesis sentences. Alternately, the personal essay is confused with archaic, meandering pontifications from old dead white guys, British and effete. Or at times the essay form just gets lost i...

Writing Down the Knowns

By Krista Varela Posell

Before the pandemic, I hadn’t published anything in three years. I don’t even think I even finished writing a single essay that entire time. I had not one but two book manuscripts that had stalled out. Major life events kept me from writing regularly: my mother’s dementia diagnosis, the death of my first dog, and a significant transition in my marriage. I kept telling myself, “you are just living the life you’ll write about later”—though that did little to assu...

Writing As Your Younger Self

Me six months before my first bad decision

When I’m not writing nonfiction and blogs for Brevity, I write Young Adult novels. I’m gonna put modesty aside and say I’m good at it. Specifically, what I’m good at is voice. Teachers and fellow writers have said so, and the people whose opinions I care about most—high school students—have said so, too. “I think that all the time,” one girl whispered to me. “But I didn’t know you could write about it.”

I’ve put a lot of practice into writing fict...

(R)Evolution Pantoum: An Unconventional Craft Chronicle, or, Playing With Your Food

By Heidi Czerwiec

            After Brenda Miller’s “Pantoum for 1979”—and, really, after Brenda in so many ways

At the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
            —T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets1

Narrative, even in creative nonfiction, leaps forward, circles back, success in circuit. But ‘90s Utah, desert no dessert—as at other creative writing programs, the choice an or: fiction or poetry, narrative o...