Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 110

Teaching Brevity: Brian Arundel’s “The Things I’ve Lost”

By Shuly Xóchitl Cawood

I open up each session of my five-week memoir and personal essay workshop with a writing prompt. The first session is probably the most challenging and also the most important because this is the start of the students’ journey and they may be nervous about meeting a class of eleven strangers and about what will be taught, especially if they are beginning memoir/essay writers. I often use Brian Arundel’s “The Things I’ve Lost” for that first opening lesson and promp...

Teaching Brevity: Deesha Philyaw’s “Milk for Free”

By Emily Dillon

When The Best of Brevity launched on the East Coast in November 2020, Deesha Philyaw was one of three authors to participate in its inaugural reading, alongside Lori Jakiela and Julie Hakim Azzam. I was not familiar with Philyaw’s writing, but during her reading I was impressed with her intellect and precision of language. In particular, her essay “Milk for Free”—originally published in Brevity’s “Experiences of Gender” issue in 2015—stuck out as raw and unflinching, a com...

Expanded Classroom Resources: Teaching With The Best of Brevity

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 Teaching With The Best of Brevity. 

Our Teaching With The Best of Brevity section offers an array of pedagogical resources, including:

– Zoë Bossiere’s discussion of using Brevity’s flash anthology in her first year writing classes (along...

Brevity’s New Issue & Expanded Teaching Resources

Brevity’s 67th issue launches this morning, with startling flash essays from Beth Ann Fennelly, David Mura, Irina Dumitrescu, Abigail Thomas, Bret Lott, Elizabeth Dodd, Pam Durban, Amy Monticello, Carrie Jade Williams, Cameron Steele, Joe Plicka. Yi Shun Lai, Sabrina Hicks, Sarah Ebba Hansen, and L.I. Henley, and stunning photos from essayist Dinah Lenney.

In our craft section, Karen Babine explores how she finds friction in odd objects, Beth Kephart offers insights for writing about our ...

When the Contract Expires, and Your Publisher Gives You Your Book Back

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By Dorothy Rice

The e-mail from the publisher of my first book popped into my mailbox on a Saturday. I was sitting in the wooden bleachers at a baseball game. My nine-year-old grandson was pitching. I didn’t open it, not only because I was cheering him on through the chain-link fence. I had no expectation of good news. After the game ended and we’d all hugged goodbye, I sat behind the wheel of my Subaru, blasting the air conditioning in an unseasonably hot Sacramento spring. I clicked on ...

Writing in the Trenches

By Candace Cahill

I am a rule follower. But I am also independent, resilient, and stubborn. I like to do new things and expand my knowledge. So, in the summer of 2019, I set out to write a book. Was I a writer? No. Am I now? Absolutely. Well, I’m learning anyway.

Writing the book itself was an adventure. The initial draft felt like going on a ten-mile hike, falling at the two-mile marker, and continuing despite bloody knees and palms. During the second draft, my wounds wept, then becam...

Here Comes the Sun

Actual photo of the Brevity staff

With summer around the corner, the Brevity staff slips out to the deck and into our summer schedule of waterskiing, forest hikes, and celebrating our vaccination status around the campfire. A new issue of Brevity comes out next week—you’ll love the beautiful essays and thoughtful craft pieces, including our “Teaching Brevity” series to take right to your classroom or your own practice. Start making that summer reading list from Brevity book reviews (and pleas...

How To Find an Ending: What I Learned from Reading Fifty Contemporary Memoirs

By Cheryl Achterberg

I wanted to learn to write memoir, specifically, how to end a memoir. Some say you must read to write. So, I read 50 memoirs with a few questions in mind. If a memoir is a fragment of a person’s life, is every memoir time-bound? How long might that time be? May I write about a long relationship that cuts across a lifetime, but is not in itself my whole life? Is that fragmentary enough? Does it make a difference if the narrator is a young adult or an older adult? Accor...

After Birthing Three Babies and One Manuscript: 20 Ways I Am a Writer Who is Also a Mother

By Anri Wheeler

1.

I cringe at the term “mom writer.” I am a writer who is also a mother.

2.

“Two more minutes!” yelled frequently, doesn’t break my flow. Sometimes it lubricates it.

3.

When I can, I write at a library. I work for a university, thus have access to an embarrassment of library options. I have one for cranking when I’ve procrastinated, one for early stage ideating when I want to stare out a window, and one for when I don’t want to see anyone I know.

4.

I...

The Truth Is Out There: Your (Nearly) Free Publishing Education

My MFA taught me a lot about writing. It didn’t teach me jack about publishing. Yet somehow, I published. I queried. I got an agent. I’m publishing again. And through all that, I became someone who gets paid to teach people how to write and publish. I can tell authors how to write a query, when to send it and to whom. I can say why a manuscript is too short, what can be cut if it’s too long, and how to save a thousand dollars on editing with fixes you can do yourself in a (very intense) ...