Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 109

Teaching Brevity: Brian Doyle’s “Imagining Foxes”

By Amie Souza Reilly

Brian Doyle’s essay “Imagining Foxes” remembers the afternoon he and his siblings spent playing in a tiny patch of cedar forest. However, the importance of that day does not come from what they witness in the woods, but from what they don’t actually see at all. His is an essay about finding meaning in absence.

In the beginning, Doyle lists all they observed, and readers, like the Doyle children, forget that the “forest” is only twelve blocks long. This is the way h...

Review of Cassandra Lane’s We Are Bridges

by Melissa Greenwood

When a former writing mentor suggested I might enjoy Cassandra Lane’s book We Are Bridges—a memoir about ancestral trauma—I bristled. What could I possibly have in common with this story? Yet, (to borrow from the title), good writing acts as a bridge, connecting writer to reader, and Lane, who won a Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, is a master with her pen.

I was ashamed of my initial resistance when it turned out that Lane and I have a great deal in common: an ...

No Publishing Without Penalties

We’re all concerned about hurting others or getting hurt.

We all want to share our story as truthfully as possible.

What happens when these are diametrically opposed? When your ex threatens to take the kids, Aunt Mildred screams at you on the phone, and your mom says she’s “not mad…just disappointed”?

Your story matters, and you get to write it the way you remember. It’s called a memoir, not a “comprehensive review of all facts.” But you can take steps throughout your writing an...

Interviewing My Mother for My Memoir Helped Me Start to Forgive Her

By Lilly Dancyger

Most of the people I interviewed while doing research for my memoir, I spent a few hours with. Usually one long conversation, sometimes a few follow-up questions over the phone or email. But with my mother I just kept digging, and kept finding new depths. We spent dozens of hours, stretched over years, talking about her relationship with my father, their shared heroin addiction and the shadow it cast over my childhood, their breakup, and his death. Each conversation felt...

Teaching Brevity: Anna Vodicka’s “Girl/Thing”

By Suzanne Roberts

In 1857 Henry David Thoreau wrote in a letter to a friend: “Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” As a travel writer, I’m often asked to write about five ghost towns or six roadside attractions in 500 words. It feels impossible every time. I sit down and write 1,500 or 2,000 words. Then I kill 75% of my darlings.

Because I know this is what editors often ask for—challenging word counts—I assign the very short essay to my st...

Teaching Brevity: Christine Byl’s “Bear Fragments

By Suzanne Roberts

Choose a subject. It could be mineral, plant, or animal. Christine Byl’s “Bear Fragments,” takes on the subject of bears: actual bears (black bears and grizzly bears) and human interactions with them (both gentle and gruesome), bear folktales and legends, and the bear within.For Byl, bears are ideas and emotion, language and representation. Bears are art and story. But in the end, we understand that bears are bears—beings of wildness, separate from our human imaginings ...

Brevity’s Expanded Teaching Resources and Search Options

We’ve just expanded the Resources for Teaching Brevity section on our main website and each day this week we are featuring highlights. You can visit the menu page to see all of our new teaching resources or hop on over to check out these three new pages:

Searching Brevity Essays by Craft Element

Searching Brevity Essays by Mode

Searching Brevity Essays by Topic

We will be rolling out new features in the weeks and months to come, so be sure to check in regularly as your plan ...

Teaching Brevity: Torrey Peters’s “Transgender Day of Remembrance: A Found Essay”

By Emily Dillon

At 1,789 words, Torrey Peters’s “Transgender Day of Remembrance: A Found Essay” (Issue 49, 2015) is the only essay over 750 words that Brevity has ever published. Editor-in-chief Dinty W. Moore says, “We made an exception because of the power of the essay and the importance of the subject.” While Moore is of course correct that he made an exception, I would not be surprised if Peters intentionally exceeded the word count. After all, her essay, which compiles and arranges d...

Expanded Classroom Resources: Prompts for Teaching The Flash Essay

We’ve just launched an expanded Resources for Teaching Brevity section on our main website and each day this week we are featuring highlights here on the Blog. You can visit the menu page to see all of our new teaching resources or start your tour at Prompts for Teaching the Flash Essay.

Our Prompts for Flash Essays section offers:

– A prompt as simple as this: “Give directions or instructions to somebody you know, somebody you love, about something that’s important to you.” (Dinah L...

Teaching Brevity: Traci Brimhall’s “Post-Mortem”

Illustration from Wikipedia

By Amie Souza Reilly

There’s a toy called a Jacob’s ladder made from flat wooden blocks held together with ribbons. You hold the top block at its edges, letting the squares hang down and then, with a turn of the wrist, the blocks seem to flip, to tumble down the line.

Traci Brimhall’s essay “Post-mortem” opens with a paragraph about death in the arctic, the slowness of decay in the cold. Next, a paragraph explaining the death of a friend, missing then murdere...