Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 111

A Review Kate Lebo’s The Book of Difficult Fruit

By Jehanne Dubrow

A is for appetite. I come to The Book of Difficult Fruit, because I am writing a manuscript about our sense of taste. I suppose you could say I’m hungry for any text about devouring.

B is for body. Kate Lebo begins with it. The fruits she examines are sometimes food, but just as often medicine, cordials, and balms that might heal the ill parts of ourselves.

C is for cancer: perhaps the book’s most painful fruit of all.

D is for difficult. Lebo cautions us that,...

A Glamorous Retreat? No Thanks, I’m Good!

By Morgan Baker

The world is slowly opening, and we’re all trying to figure out what’s safe to do. I’ve started seeing notices and ads announcing writing retreats coming up in different locales – Italy, Florida, Cuba and Newfoundland – and notices about residencies to which a writer can apply to work in solitude and join others for meals.

I, for one, am not going to a movie theater any time soon, let alone any residencies, retreats or workshops in far-off lands. I have always looked at...

A Thumbnail Archeology, or, From Jottings to Contract & Beyond

By John Domini

It was wholly personal, first to last, yet I’d never have finished the book without thinking who else might read it and why — thinking, that is, of suspense, sequence, and the market.

At first it was only jottings, a diary. No Moleskin, rather a hand-sized spiral-bound thing off the Safeway shelves for “School Supplies.” I needed to get back to school, though I was approaching 40. I needed to start over, to forge a life that felt more honest. In the effort to renew, noth...

A Review of Deborah A. Lott’s Don’t Go Crazy Without Me

By Claire Donohue Roof

Deborah A. Lott’s Don’t Go Crazy Without Me: A Tragicomic Memoir is the story of a young woman’s coming of age and how she separates her own identity from her family’s. She recalls comedic and painful situations from her young childhood to teenage years.

Her story starts in 1968, in California, when Lott is sixteen and in the waiting room of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. Her father is hospitalized and even though doctors haven’t pinpointed her father’s ill...

How I Found My Fountain of Youth

By Eileen V. Finley

©Just Joy Photography 2013

Remember that feeling of anticipation that crept through our classroom windows every spring when we were kids? Remember how the warm, sweet air taunted us with restless longings for the beginning of summer vacation? Endless days of freedom stretched before us in a boundless field of possibility.

Youth is full of beginnings and recently I discovered the reverse is also true—beginnings are full of youth.

Scientists, doctors and self-help g...

A Review of Jennifer De Leon’s White Space

By Debbie Hagan

In the foreword to White Space: Essays on Race, Culture, and Writing, Jennifer De Leon tells of  a tragedy that changed her life. In eighth grade, she and her family traveled to California to visit aunts, uncles, and cousins whom she’d never met. As a way to introduce herself, she created the “Jenn Album,” a compilation of some of her favorite pictures. On the way home, however, the family was robbed, losing everything: suitcases, jewelry, camcorder, and the “Jenn Album.”

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Give Sorrow Words

By Eileen Vorbach Collins

I have an essay that went live this week. I wrote it months ago and I’m happy that it’s found a good home. It’s a very personal piece that was a sucker-punch to write and, if not for my critique group, would have ended up yet another discarded half-finished thought in a drawer.

I read that piece last night and cried. Not just a little whimper but a good long lament with lots of tears and noise. Then I thought, What have I done? I already know this story. If it...

Braids: A Braided Essay About Braids & Braided Essays

By Naomi J. Williams

The year I grew tired of braided essays was also the year when my hair grew long enough to braid.

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I was reading all the braided essays because I often review applications and entries for various writerly goodies, each of which required writing samples, and many of the samples were essays, and many of the essays—many—were of the braided variety.

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My hair had grown long enough to braid because of the pandemic. Before the pandemic I had a short, stylish bo...

I’ve Had Middle-of-the-Night Panic Attacks for Years. I Wrote a Song About Them

By Buick Audra

I had my first panic attack in rural England, in the middle of the night. I was there making an album of duets with Joss Stone, a doomed set of recordings that would never see the light of day, but cost plenty in effort, labor, and emotional energy. I was supposed to be sleeping on a makeshift bed at the home of Joss’ mom. But I wasn’t asleep. I was experiencing every fear, loss, and moment of shame I’d ever known all at once. I was very much awake.

I’d just gotten back ...

A Review of Gina Nutt’s Night Rooms

By Amie Souza Reilly

I’ve never been to Ithaca, but I know that it is famous for its gorges, that the land in that part of New York was carved out by glaciers and now deep cuts cleave the rock. A gorge is a gash in the earth. “Gorge” is also a verb and it means “to eat a large amount greedily; fill oneself with food.” The gorges of Ithaca roar with falls of water, which is both vital to life and deadly.

In Gina Nutt’s stunning essay collection Night Rooms, she writes this of Ithaca...