Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 27

Brevity’s Fall 2024 Issue: Sea Oats, New Pronouns, and the Words of our Ancestors

Our newest issue features fifteen stunning flash essays, focusing the nonfiction literary lens on NICU moms, biological brothers, Cindi Lauper, and so much male loneliness. With Bethany Jarmul, Wendy Elizabeth Wallace, Jessica Petrow-Cohen, Daisy Elizeth Magallanes, Ana Maria Spagna, Janet Burroway, Jillian Barnet, Julia Watts Belser, Diane Gottlieb, Michael Meyerhofer, Sydney Lea, Emad Jabini, Rena Willis, Charlee Simacek, and Bea Forkan.

Accompanied by Tyler Haberkorn’s haunting 4×5 cy...

My Teacher, My Students, Myself

By Liz deBeer

Many years ago, when I was working toward a master’s degree in English at Rutgers University, my instructor, an acclaimed author, saw himself as a gatekeeper: a judge who determined who had a story worthy of telling, as opposed to everyone else whom he felt was wasting his time.

He responded to a short story I handed in with a single word: NO. It was typed on white paper, centered in the middle. No comments, no encouragement, no reflection.

Just NO.

I felt like Veruc...

My Polished Marketing Strategy Lacked More Than Brilliance

By Karen DeBonis

One year out from the release of my debut memoir Growth: A Mother, Her Son, and the Brain Tumor They Survived, and a month or so after releasing the self-produced audiobook version, I decided to become more strategic about my marketing.

Over the previous two years, I’d said yes to every podcast or interview opportunity that came up. I held book talks at tiny local libraries with an average of five people in attendance, one of whom was my husband. Michael and I drove 600...

From Blog to Book: How the Digital World Can Launch a Writer

By Dr. Tamara MC

Pictured: Tia Levings

A Q&A WITH TIA LEVINGS

Tia Levings’ memoir, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape From Christian Patriarchy (St. Martin’s Press, August 2024), recounts her escape from the fundamentalist Quiverfull movement, a group that encourages large families and strict adherence to patriarchal roles, viewing children as “arrows” in a “quiver” for God’s purposes. This interview traces Levings’ writing journey from early online forums to viral social media content, expl...

My Top Ten Rules for Writing

By Lea Page

#1. “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” ~Elmore Leonard

Leonard’s rule rules. Writing that sounds like writing—where the writer tries to grab the reader with a display of superior skills—yanks the reader’s attention away from the story. It’s the equivalent of saying “Look at me! Look at me!” Let the reader lose themselves in what you’re writing about. They can admire you later.

#2. “Be brief and tell us everything.” ~Charles Simic

Simic is a poet, so there’s tha...

Moth-Style Storytelling and Creative Nonfiction: Driving Directions and Polaroids

By Olga Katsovskiy

Participating in workshops often gives me the extra push I need to work on my writing, and observing other instructors in action helps me refine my own teaching philosophy, so I recently took a class geared towards The Moth StorySLAM style of storytelling. Going in, I assumed creative nonfiction translates well into telling true stories on stage.

The Moth StorySLAM format allows storytellers 5-minutes in the limelight to tell a personal story. While those of us in the...

Your Body, Your Wunderkammer

By Nina B. Lichtenstein

A week before my first writing packet was due in my first semester of the Stonecoast MFA in creative nonfiction, I had completed the assigned readings and annotations. I was used to and (almost) enjoyed the “academic” part of the monthly assignment (a PhD in French had implanted enough muscle memory in me). But I had yet to come up with the twenty pages of creative writing. I felt paralyzed. I didn’t come to the program with a specific or partially complete project ...

Writing Regularly: The Gift of Mailing Lists (and Substacks, and Blogs…)

By Allison K Williams

You’ve heard it.

You need a mailing list.

You’ve heard this, too:

Everyone’s on Substack.

You may have even heard Blogs are dead. (Hello, we’re not).

And sure, you like sharing your work and one day you’re going to publish a book or another book and it would be nice to tell people about it all at once, but what the heck do you do to get started? Or maybe you’re started, but it feels like no-one is reading, so how can you stay motivated, let alone grow ...

Rejections and Acceptance: On Taking Time to Write About Our Grief

By Jenn Hall

In 2020, my best friend Ginny died at home. She was my sister friend. My ride or die friend (before that was a thing). She was the one who made everything OK. In the months that followed, I developed odd habits. I wandered my early pandemic hallways in pajamas like a neo-Victorian ghost, staring out windows at shifting skies. I sought solace in tarot cards and text chains, her voice evoked silently in black and white. One day, I made a six-hour playlist of every song that remi...

Distillation: My Secret Sauce to Storytelling

By Abby Alten Schwartz

In March 2020, days before the world shut down, my friend called, frantic. She needed me to check on her ex-husband who lived in my cul-de-sac. Their 16-year-old son had tried to wake him, but he was unresponsive and my friend was still 40 minutes away.

I called 911 and took off running, straight into their former bedroom, where I performed CPR until the EMTs took over.

Neighbors congregated outside the house while emergency workers tried unsuccessfully to res...