Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 18

A River Runs Through My Memoir-in-Essays

By Beverley Stevens

I have at last found a book—actually two books—that are close to what I envisage for the memoir I’m working on. Finding these models feels like a validation and fuels my not-so-secret hope that my manuscript might be publishable.

When I started writing stories from my life, I decided not to seek out books of memoir from my local library but to continue letting literary fiction lull me off to sleep each night. That resolution, which seems egotistical now, was an attem...

Brevity’s Bright New Issue

Our first issue of the new year explores Mealworms, Komodo Dragons, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, and Fifteen Facts About Zebras, and more. Issue 78 offers wonderfully concise and powerful essays from Michael Todd Cohen, Kayti Christian, Sonja Livingston, Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Amy Butcher, Jennifer Sinor, Karen Kao, Anne Panning, Lynda Rushing, Gretchen Ernster Henderson, Natalie Villacorta, and Carrie Gaffney.

We are also honored to feature drawings by artist/writer/filmmaker Char ...

On Retrospection

By Michael Copperman

In writing personal essay and memoir, retrospection is the engine of all of my work. Looking back allows me the angle of vision from which to interpret and understand what has happened— to show an audience how I was then, what I believed or thought, what I couldn’t know in the moment. It allows me to weight events with the years and perspective that has revealed consequences, significances, and clarity— I know now what has been made from the past, how it has echoed and...

Writing Success Won’t Fix a Damn Thing

By Natalie Serianni

This past year was one for the record books. As an emerging writer who is quietly becoming established, I’ve had success in teaching and getting essays published, even landing a byline in The New York Times. It still makes me feel giddy! Of course, I thought these accolades would, weirdly, offer me something more. I thought I’d have some kind of flashy request in my inbox, singing, “We Want Your Work!,” Or “Please Write A Book!” or “Here’s $10,000 for being awesome!” I ...

Free Books: A Dream Too Small

By Ellen Notbohm

“In my dream world, books are free and reading makes you thin.”

A writer pal posted this meme, with the caveat that she’d read it too quickly and saw the last word as think, not thin. But think is exactly what it made me do, an accelerating spiral of thought I couldn’t stop.

I began with: “This is a dream too small.”

With the illiteracy rate in the US at 21% (did you know?), a dream world of free books must start with the dream of people of all ages, origins, cult...

A Macro Micro-Memoir Challenge

By Deborah Sosin

Last spring, my friend Holly asked me to write about “A Thing I Can’t Part With” for her miniature zine. Exactly 50 words. “I’m in!” I said. I’ve always loved the challenge of concision and compression in flash prose—I’ve published short essays and a picture book, written a ten-minute play, and performed in a “Moth”-like storytelling event.

I sent Holly a piece about my beloved, bedraggled Teddy bear, the word count a thrilling exercise. So thrilling, I had the crazy id...

Decluttering Damages My Writing

By Rebecca Evans

I quit decluttering the way some might quit a bad habit. I quit because decluttering became unhealthy for my heart. And my writing.

I quit after I tried the KonMari method. I asked my stuff, Do you still spark joy? I tidied by categories, not locations, of my home at a time. I offered my stuff a three-pile approach—Trash, Keep, Donate.

I attempted the “No Contact” method, which meant I boxed and separated myself from my goods. I gathered wooden spoons, gift wrap, and...

Writing Through Loss

By Anne Pinkerton

I always start with the words of poet Ada Limón: “I think poetry is a way of carrying grief, but it’s also a way of putting it somewhere so I don’t have to heave it onto my back or in my body. The more I put grief into a poem, the more I am able to move freely through the world because I have named it, spoken it, and thrown it out into the sky.”

I start here in my workshops because I’ve lived this, and I believe in it fervently, like a religious ritual. For years, I’ve...

I Finished My Memoir: Now, What Genre Is It?

By Brian Watson

The manuscript (and the proposal) are complete. I’ve been querying for eight months and submitting to smaller presses since October. I can tell you what Crying in a Foreign Language is about—the different ways I came out of sexual and emotional closets during the first decade of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Japan—but I struggled to describe the genre.

My structure is—I won’t say unique—different.

There are five large sections, bookended with a prologue and an epilogue. In...

To Blurb or Not to Blurb

By Andrea A. Firth

I’ve blurbed a few books. It’s been nice to be asked to provide a brief quote about a book to be used on the cover or in the front pages.

To start, I took several books off my shelves to see how other writers have done it. A blurb is basically a snapshot of descriptive praise that will entice a reader to pick up a book. I quickly found that there are as many ways to write a blurb as there are to write an essay. But, how hard can it be?

Plus, it’s an opportunity to ...