Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 115

Writerly Things I’ve Learned from Navel Gazing

By Rick Brown

Meditation—a practice often shackled with the uncomplimentary term, “navel gazing”—is considered by some to be an esoteric waste of time. The pursuit of writing is similarly maligned, especially in our hurry-up-and-produce Western culture. The rewards for both often amount to private victories, after all, and the labor expended may not be conspicuous to the critical observer.

But make no mistake: both involve difficult and dedicated work.

No one will reap the benefits ...

Word Doulas

By Eileen Vorbach Collins

Pregnant at 31 with my first child, I was so excited to wear maternity clothes. I’d been loaned an entire wardrobe by my husband’s cousin’s generous wife. Though my normal, unpregnant weight was creeping up, the scale still topped out at 115 pounds. I really didn’t need those stretchy panels in the pants just yet. The tent-like tops and dresses were like nothing I’d worn before. I paraded around the grocery store, so proud. Look what we’ve done! Our miracle. I couldn’t,...

Are Journals Memoir?

By Rasma Haidri

On Twitter yesterday I saw someone ask if he can call himself a memoirist because he keeps journals. No, I wanted to say, but didn’t. I resist engaging in social media conversations with strangers (although I’m told that is the point of social media). Nothing proves Goethe’s adage, “The spoken word comes not back,” better than Twitter where every utterance is carved in cyberstone. What if I changed my mind? What if I got trolled? Anyway, he wasn’t asking me. And besides, w...

Not a Memoir But a Mystery

One common challenge for first-time memoirists is the manuscript that reads like a case file: scene after scene shows the main antagonist as an out-and-out villain; the protagonist’s responses are all appropriate and justified, and the whole story is summed up with how bravely the narrator strode forth into the light.

These memoirs don’t work.

They may be well-written, even delightful at the sentence level. But in terms of the dramatic arc, there’s no mystery, nothing to draw the reader. We know...

Humor and Trauma, Bathtub Bacon, and Writing While Parenting

Heather Frese and Keema Waterfield release their debut books, a novel and a memoir, respectively, this spring. They met while commiserating over launching a book while parenting during a pandemic and bonded over the element of humor in both their debuts, and below, they interview one another about those experiences.

Keema’s synopsis of Heather’s book:

In The Baddest Girl on the Planet bad girl Evie Austin of Hatteras Island, North Carolina, is in a pickle. She’s made choices. Like marryin...

Review of Rick Bailey’s Get Thee to a Bakery

By Jody Gerbig

When I was a college student visiting home, I chose to spend many of my limited afternoons and evenings with my grandparents, then in their mid-sixties and early seventies. They were, in their retirement, some of the most interesting people I knew, my grandfather playing violin with his chamber-music group or cooking the latest New York Times recipe, my grandmother trying new bridge tactics and attending symphonies. I enjoyed sitting among them and their friends, eating bri...

I Acknowledge Nobody

By Suzanne Roberts

Most writers have a love/hate relationship with their book’s acknowledgements page. It’s the writer-equivalent to the 45-seconds where the actress thanks everyone under the bright lights on the Academy Awards stage, only you were probably wearing your pajamas and not a made-to-order Vera Wang gown when you compiled your own gratitude list. Even so, it’s your moment to offer thanks for those who put up with you while you were working on your book. Writing the acknowledgements a...

Be Mused: Memories from a Non-Virtual AWP Conference

By Stephanie Hunt

“I walk into a large white room,” begins Twyla Tharp in her lithe arabesque of a book, The Creative Habit. In this large white room there are wall-to-wall mirrors, a boom box, skid marks on an otherwise clean white floor, and that’s it. Tharp describes how this vacuous blank space ignites her imaginative muscle, and despite its daunting void, how she begins every day by slowly moving into it, deliberately filling it with physical poetry, her limbs arching into verse, her...

Virtual AWP: Dinty W Moore “Signs” His Hellish Book

By Dinty W. Moore

The AWP Conference is virtual this year, and most current and former members are rather curious what that will look like and how that will go. No hotel bar? No hotel lobby stress-attacks? No book fair chocolates? Nonetheless, U of Nebraska Press has arranged for an author “meet and greet” to mark the release this week of my hellish new memoir To Hell with It: Of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante’s Entirely Ridiculous Inferno, and I hope someone, anyone, shows up.

...

Who Deserves the Truth?

Like this, but plummeting

When I was a circus aerialist, my act finished with a dramatic upside-down slide, dropping 16 feet head-downwards before catching in the aerial fabric, my skull inches from the ground. It was a crowd-pleaser, and it required more technique and timing than sheer strength, so it was a good trick for the end of a tiring show. The only problem was, the back of my knee was the “brakes.” Squeezing hard on the fabric with my upper calf kept me from concussion, but it also gave...