Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 107

(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...

They Hated My Orange Dress

by Morgan Baker

“Oh my god,” I said. “Look at this.” I handed my laptop to my daughter, Ellie. We were in our TV room.

After many unsuccessful submissions, the Boston Globe Magazine had just published my essay and I was ecstatic. For their Connections vertical, I’d written about how stores and restaurants in my neighborhood were closing and what that meant to my family. Not only were we regular customers, my daughters had worked in these establishments. We had become friends with the ...

Making Research Invisible, Or At Least Not Intrusive

By Helen Collins Sitler

Two summers ago chimney swifts nested in my chimney. I didn’t know a thing about swifts, except that they were there, and that I was intrigued enough to write about them.

As I sat surrounded by field guides to birds, I didn’t know what I needed to know so I took a lot of notes. Gradually, I noticed that field guides all use similar categories: description, voice, habitat, migration ….  Those categories provided ideas for organizing and for section headings when...

Falling in Love with Books

By Elizabeth Garber

It was the first day of summer vacation, about 1960, the end of third grade. I sat in the small rocking chair next to a bookcase in the dining room in our old Victorian house. I saw a faded blue bound book with a title that tempted me.  I Capture the Castle. The house was quiet. My brothers were napping. I must have begged off my nap, which was rare because my mother always told me “You, of all people, need so much sleep or you are not good for anything.” I usually rea...

The Long and the Short of It

Last night, in a webinar for Creative Nonfiction, we talked about sentences. What makes them soar lyrically across the page; what makes them stumble awkwardly into your editor’s inbox. Two great questions came in afterward (Thank you Maria-Veronica and Catherine!). First:

What are the most important or key elements that make a long sentence great? In what way can it have as great an impact as a short one?

I love long sentences. The bane of my MFA existence was classmates who “corrected...

How Writers Learn and Grow

By Aimee Christian

This spring, I attended my first writing conference, and it was almost embarrassingly life-changing.

For a long time, I wondered how people just sit down and write a book and send it off to an agent and then get it published. Where do they find the discipline? How do they know it’s any good? How do they know when it’s done? And then wait, when we study craft, are we saying these writers did these things intentionally? They didn’t just sit down and dash off sheer bril...

Tell Me How You Hurt Me

Hello? Ex-Husband? Why you were such a terrible person?

Interviewing people in your memoir can fill in details about settings you were too young (or emotionally unable) to remember, and explain personal logic behind choices that hurt you. But how the heck can you have a civil conversation with your abuser, your estranged parent or your ex?

Writing a good memoir means connecting deeply with your own feelings and experiences—then setting them aside and approaching potentially traumatic c...

I Didn’t Choose Writing: Writing Chose Me

By Robyn Fisher

When the question, “When did you know you wanted to be a writer?” comes up at author events and conferences, as it often does, I lean forward, hoping to hear something different from the usual “Oh, I knew as soon as I could hold a crayon that I wanted to write down my stories!” I have yet to hear a successful author say, “Gosh, I didn’t know I wanted to be a writer till I was well into my 50s.”

I am a writer now, well into my 50s, but I didn’t always know that’s what I ...

A Review of Marcia Meier’s Face: A Memoir

By Lisa Rizzo

At seven years old I fell out of bed, slicing open my chin. I woke up with blood pouring onto the rug. My mother scooped me up, pressing a towel to my face as my father sped through empty streets to the hospital. The towel, originally white with a bright polka-dots, slowly turned red.

I tried not to cry at the stinging shot of Novocain and a blue cloth placed over my face. Overhead lights shone through the material turning the shadow of the doctor’s hands into terrifying ...

Awakening Memories to Create Truth

By Linda Schifino

I’m two years old sitting in my highchair and my mom is feeding me pieces of donuts from a paper bag. I can see her face smiling at me; I can smell the sweet aroma of the donuts each time she opens the bag; I can taste the sugary bits.

Our earliest memories reveal how we tell stories to ourselves and then learn to tell them to others. By reconnecting with events from the past and then, like an archaeologist, excavating additional bits and pieces, we create our version...