Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 28

Should All Writing Prompts Come With a Trigger Warning?

By Jennifer Leigh Selig

When I lead memoir writing retreats, I like to kickstart the mornings with writing prompts. One of the tricks of my trade is a manilla envelope stuffed with images I’ve printed out of vintage and iconic toys and games from across the decades. It’s a ritual I cherish—spreading these images out on the long conference room tables, imagining my students’ delight as they light upon a special toy or game that brings back fond memories, and then watching them begin to furi...

Reading Challenges? Count Me Out

By Ellen Notbohm

How many books did you read this month? Last year? How many minutes do you spend reading each day? How many pages? Howmanyhowmanyhowmany?

Simple answer: I don’t know. Somewhere north of 100 books a year. I no longer keep score.

But you’re an author! Don’t you keep a list?

True dat, I’m an author, hence my creative space festooned with reminders like Stephen King’s “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way aroun...

Processing Flax: Contending with the Violence of Revision

By Jessica L. Pavia

Despite my many years spent in school to be a writer, revision remains utterly mysterious. I finish a piece and comb through its mess, lost in where to start, how to make it better—wishfully hoping, instead, that it’s immediately perfect and polished.

So it was a shock that a breakthrough came not in the classroom, but during summer camp at a local living history museum as I walked my campers towards the farm to do their favorite activities: muck sheep poop and proce...

Air and Light and Time: Pruning Your Writing Projects for a Better Harvest

By Sue Repko

This summer, I had set aside space for five tomato plants, envisioning an abundance of red and gold fruit come July. While I had been camping, hiking, and wordsmithing far from home for the better part of a month, they had grown furiously. Their branches spread wide across narrow paths, partially covering the eggplants on one side and parsley, basil, and chives on the other. The cages grumbled under the weight of the plants, leaning into one another, entangled.   

Now it wa...

What Is a Brand Story and Why Do Authors Need One?

By Johnna Lacey

When you hear “branding” or “marketing,” do you get that paralyzed feeling? Or get nervous because you are a writer, not a marketer? Does the term “brand story” make you break out in overly commercialized hives?

What is a “brand story” for authors anyway, and why do you need one? Shouldn’t your book speak for itself?

Your brand story is who you are, not what you do. Think identity and values, beyond any single essay or book.

Humans connect with like-minded people. ...

Writing About My Father

By Laura Zinn Fromm

A few days ago, one of my students emailed. She had read an essay I’d just published about my father—-dead now 19 years but still giving me plenty of juice to write about.

The essay was about how volatile my Dad had been, and how loving—-a love I rediscovered in letters he’d written to my mother at the end of their marriage. My mother had given me the letters during the pandemic, while she was cleaning out her house. I knew my parents had once loved each other fierc...

Weathering A Storm of Ideas: On Shaping a Nonfiction Story

By Ann Matzke

I grew up in Chicago and my summers were spent on Lake Michigan. I wanted my children to have that lake experience, but living landlocked in Nebraska made it difficult, until we discovered a lake a few hours away. My husband’s idea was to rent a cabin, but I dreamed of a sailboat. Put to a family vote, sailing won, and we bought the 32-foot Catalina sailboat.

Oh, did I mention, I was the only one with sailing experience?

During the summer and early fall we lived on the ...

Stop Drop and Roll: How and When to Share Your Work Online

By Allison K Williams

Not the show where I caught on fire.

The first time I was accidentally on fire was in Chicago. As the finale of a nightclub performance of fire-dancing and fire-eating, I blew a fireball. The air conditioning kicked on and blew the fire back. I’d heard since childhood to “stop, drop and roll,” but I didn’t. Instead, I frantically brushed my body with both hands, trying to whisk the fire off. A patron shoved me down and rolled me, and after a trip to the emergency room...

Digging into Memoir: The Phases of Psycholiterary Mining

By Ellen Blum Barish

In the twenty years I’ve been coaching writers of memoir, I have seen two diametrically opposed truths about the process.

On the one hand, writing a story from one’s life differs wildly from one writer to another. I have never seen two people go about it in the same way.

Yet on the other hand, there are patterns. Recurring phases. Points in time in which the writer dwells before successfully moving into the next stage. Not every writer travels through these stage...

To the Young Queer Bookseller in Small-Town Tennessee

By Lane Michael Stanley

We were feeling stranded, an interracial gay couple in your town for a family emergency, this town that last year, briefly banned men holding hands in public. But I needed a book for a book exchange at a writing workshop I would travel to when the emergency passed, so we headed to Barnes & Noble, careful not to touch each other on the way. I joked with Jess that if we were lucky, maybe we’d find a stray copy of Milk Fed in the fiction section.

We were coming fro...