Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 33

On Writing Home with James Agee

By Beth Kephart

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—a book some think of as an extended poem and others consider a mystifying elongation of art journalism—recounts two summer months in 1936 when the photographer Walker Evans and the writer James Agee travel south to prepare an article on the lives of sharecroppers. Seeking to observe the daily rhythms of an “average” family, Agee becomes deeply acquainted—spy like, he says—with three particular families, including those he calls the Gudgers. He b...

How to Write When Time is Scarce: Meet the Bunny Hop

By Lorraine Comanor

Lorraine and Zoey

Though I prefer writing in the mornings, I often don’t have much time to spare between walking my dog Zoey, a healthy breakfast, and a 30-minute commute to my 9 a.m. fitness class. With barely 15 to 20 unspoken-for-minutes, I’m left with just enough time for bunny hop practice.

The bunny hop is one of figure skating’s most elementary jumps—a forward glide on one foot, hopping to the toe pick of the other, and landing back on the forward outside edge ...

A Letter to the Brevity Blog Community

Dear Writers,

Happy Solstice!

Solstice, from the Latin sun (sol) plus to stand still (sistere), represents a time to pause, to reflect, and is often associated with rebirth and renewal. We thought we’d take a moment on this auspicious day to look back at where we’ve been over the past year on the Brevity Blog. Plus, there’s something magical in the folklore of solstice, and we’ve got something magical happening here too.

The Blog’s reach continues to grow—and for that we thank you fo...

Faster Than a Speeding Adverb

By Ronnie Blair

As a boy in the 1960s, I enjoyed few things better than buying 12-cent comic books and immersing myself in the adventures of Spider-Man, Batman, the Flash and the Avengers. The crimefighting and universe-saving drew me in, but the cheap pulp-paper pages had other enticements as well: advertisements for X-ray glasses, Sea-Monkeys, and the Charles Atlas muscle-building method that would “make you a new man.”

The best feature of all, though, was the letters page, where comi...

Getting Ready for My Close-Up

By Lisa B. Samalonis

The phone rang an hour after my essay on buying a home for myself and my two sons after divorce went live. The caller ID had a (212) area code: New York City.

Reflexively, I let it go to voicemail.

Minutes before I had received an email, a LinkedIn request, and tweet from producers at a major national morning news show: Good Morning America.

Was this some well-coordinated prank? Or was it really a GMA producer calling me, a camera shy and video averse essayist...

Why I Write to Timed Prompts

By Barbara Krasner

During my MFA years, I prayed that each graduate and faculty lecture I attended wouldn’t require real-time writing. I needed time and space to think, after all. If speakers offered prompts, I doodled instead.

But after earning my MFA in 2006, I didn’t, couldn’t, write for a year. I felt completely burned out, especially from a workshop where my writing was torn apart by peers jockeying for position with the instructor. Everyone’s writing limped along as sacrificial la...

The Map We Carry: Writing Place

By Sonya Huber

Yesterday I drove from my hometown of New Lenox, Illinois, to Columbus, Ohio, a six-hour drive that I’ve made many times over the past twenty years. Sometimes I drove alone, singing over the noise of the wind rushing in the windows of a red pickup truck with no air conditioning, and later I drove with my son strapped in the back car seat as he grew and grew. The drive is as familiar to me as the lines on my palm: western Ohio along I-70 to the woods of eastern Indiana, to th...

Writing Difficult Stories: How Do They Do It?

By Diane Reukauf

“When we write our stories, we change the way we carry them.”

That’s what Melanie Brooks said at the end of an AWP panel she moderated a few years ago. I wrote those words in black ink on a 3×5 card that I kept on my desk while writing a collection of fragments about my granddaughter’s sudden death a decade ago, just weeks after passing her four-month checkup.

Earlier, I had read Brooks’ first book, Writing Hard Stories, based on interviews she conducted with 18 auth...

Going Viral: A Curse and a Blessing

By Joanna Good

March 12th at 7AM, one snooze button away from getting up and getting my kids ready for school, I hit the big yellow button and closed my eyes—then remembered what day it was, shot up and grabbed my phone, scaring my cat off the bed.

The email sent two hours prior was simple: a link, and “It’s up!”

This was it, I was finally a published author. The dream I’d had since I was 6 had finally happened 33 years later.

I opened Facebook to share my news, but instead was fl...

Writing a Memoir With My Daughter

By Carol Weis

My daughter was five when I got sober. Her dad left four months later. It was a difficult time for us, one that I processed by writing, something I’d never done before. It started with primitive poetry, like a 4th grader might scrawl. But it helped move me through some of my grief. Feelings I didn’t want to take out on my only child.

Fast forward 10 years. And this will come as no surprise—this child, who sat on my lap until she was 14, was now in high school and wanted li...