Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 119

The Boy Who Drew Cats

By Jesse Lee Kercheval

Outside there is a pandemic and I am in lockdown in Montevideo, Uruguay, far from my daughter and son also locked down, but in Kanazawa, in Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan, and I am inside drawing, drawing, drawing, filling sheets of paper, pages drifting to the floor, as if I were the boy in the Japanese fable who also draws and draws and draws but only cats. Cats, cats, cats until his farmer father gives up and sends him to a monastery where the boy draws the monastery...

Brevity Launches Issue 66: Fresh Flash Nonfiction and Craft Essays

Our new issue launches this morning, with wishes for a safer, healthier world and brilliant essays from Jesse Lee Kercheval, Elena Passarello, Hiram Perez, Michael McAllister, Dorian Fox, Tyler Orion, Noah Davis, Ira Sukrungruang, Sonja Livingston, Anne Panning, Kate Hopper, Lizz Huerta, Melissa Stephenson, Francis Walsh, and Laurie Klein. Also, an array of wonderful photos from Kim Adrian.

In our Craft section, Nancy Reddy explores the “community we” and David Perez uses his acting backgroun...

Changing the Rejection Narrative

By Jennifer Lang

For the past few years, my literary journal submissions have become more regular, my Submittable account more colorful. The grey DECLINED rectangles far outweigh the green ACCEPTED ones, with a smattering of black WITHDRAWN rectangles, along with a mix of two cool blues. This past year, I’ve received 56 no thank yous and 4 yesses, we love your work and would like to publish it.  

But today, I had an epiphany similar to one in my memoir-in-progress. I can wallow in my l...

Nobody Gets What They’re Worth

Emrys Fleet, ratcatcher and master negotiator

Years ago, I sat backstage at a Renaissance Festival, hot and sweaty after eating fire in the Florida sun. (What really sucks? Fire is harder to see in bright light, so I’d endangered my life to look less impressive than usual.) My partner and I were talking contracts with a more experienced performer (this guy). We were going to ask for more money. I said doubtfully, “I know the management is pretty cheap, but I think we’re worth it?”

Our wiser frie...

Writer Unlabeled

By Victoria Lynn Smith

Ask me how I decide if I’m going to write about an event as fiction or nonfiction. I have a mental flowchart for that, and I can explain it clearly.

Ask me how I choose a point of view or tense. I can’t explain that as easily, but I sense when my choices aren’t working and try a different approach.

Ask me if I consider myself a writer, and the waters are murkier. It depends on the day. Did I write? Did I get a rejection? Did I submit a piece of writing? Did I ...

The Auxiliary Verb of Guilt

By Deborah Williams

The holidays are behind us and with them go the season of “should”: should send holiday cards, should bake festive treats, should go to worship services. Even though the pandemic may have altered some of our plans, I would imagine that for most of us, there were still “shoulds” ringing loud and clear in our minds.

And it continues to ring, that “should,” as we move into the new year and the onset of what I like to think of as flagellation season: all those resolutions, all th...

Asking the Question I Can’t Answer

By Rae Pagliarulo 

As the Associate Editor of an online nonfiction magazine, I manage the incoming flow of submissions, and work with a team of 12 smart, capable, and opinionated people to determine which pieces we should publish in the magazine. As we read submissions and try to make thoughtful choices, we come up against a seemingly simple question over and over again – why? When we’re reading submissions from the slush pile, we’re always thinking about the intersection of two critical ...

Review of Debra Di Blasi’s Selling the Farm

By Sarah Curtis

“It’s one of our great tragedies of contemporary life in America, that families fall apart,” the playwright Sam Shepard once said. “Almost everybody has that in common.” I kept thinking of Shepard’s quote while reading Debra Di Blasi’s memoir (if that’s the right word) Selling the Farm: Descants From a Recollected Past (C & R Press, 2020). Written in a series of lyrical vignettes, the book is an elegy to the wild Missouri farm where Di Blasi grew up and to the complicated ...

I Already Have a Real Job

By Joshua Diedrich

I have a hard time putting my finger on exactly why the arts are so looked down upon as a career in America. I’m a classical figure and portrait sculptor, so it’s something I think about a lot, but the answer still eludes me.

It could be our Puritanical past telling us that they’re frivolous or a waste of money. It could be that there’s such a huge emphasis on the arts in early schooling, making us think of them forever as a childish activity that everyone ought to be able t...

Improve Your Writing by Watching Reality Television

By The Rev. Elizabeth Felicetti

My addiction to reality television started six years ago at the gym. I detest working out so must distract myself but reading books on the elliptical makes me dizzy. Having exhausted reruns of scripted crime shows, one day while changing channels I caught a glimpse of Los Angeles, where I lived in my twenties. The people on the program worked in a restaurant but had acting or musical aspirations, reminding me of almost every twentysomething I knew in LA in ...