Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 37

An Unlikely Writer

By Deborah Ann Lucas

We moved every year when I was young, making me the perpetual new kid. One day during the summer after fifth grade, I complained I had nothing to do. Busy making dinner, Mom sent me out into the small Michigan town to find a library—my first. I walked around the block, climbed the stairs, and entered a cavernous room. The smell of musty books enveloped me. As my anxiety grew, the room blurred. I couldn’t figure out the catalog system. But Mom expected me to bring home ...

Writing Memoir—It’s a “We” Program

By Elizabeth Jannuzzi

The other day I was trying to be a good student—something I never was when I was in school—and I was completing my homework for a writing course. At the start of this year, I enrolled in a five-month program to learn how to seek representation for my debut memoir about my recovery from alcoholism. I was working on the summary of the book for the query letter when I plummeted deep into a pit of self-doubt.

“Why am I doing this?” I asked myself with my head in my han...

I Gave Up Creative Writing for a Decade

It was the best thing I could ever have done

By Anna Rollins

The summer after graduating with my Master’s in English, I made myself a promise: I was going to write.

During my course of study, I’d begun a collection of essays about characters at my Appalachian fundamentalist Christian school and had been told the work had potential. I didn’t know what the collection was about necessarily, but I was determined to figure that out in process. My teaching job did not begin until the fall,...

Chasing Narrative Arc—One Writer’s Path to Totality

By Andrea A. Firth

As we drive to the airport to catch an early flight, I see a sliver of moon, the waning crescent, in the morning sky. I look at the weather app on my phone and report the five-day forecast for our destination: “Hot and sunny for two days, clouds over the weekend, and on Monday a 45% chance of rain starting at noon.”

“Doesn’t sound like eclipse watching weather,” says my husband.

The classic, chronological construction of a story has five elements: exposition, risin...

Stitch by Stitch and Word by Word

By Carolyn Roy-Bornstein

When my foster daughter recently got a job as an assistant veterinary technician at a local animal hospital, she bought a brand-new pair of scrubs. Because she is petite, they needed to be shortened. Janine climbed onto a stool at our kitchen counter and turned in a slow circle while I measured and basted, some of the common pins in my mouth rusty from lack of use.

After everyone had left for work, I sat down on the couch to hem. I hadn’t done any hand-sewing in...

The Joys of Writing to Wordcount

By Olga Mecking

“On the test, you will have to write an essay of around 200 words,” my English teacher said.

I first encountered the idea of wordcount in EFL classes and was taken aback. Where I come from, long essays written in flowery style are the norm, especially in school. Teachers said, “Write for as long as you need to include all the necessary information,” but their preference was clearly on the longer side. Lacking any other guidelines, I submitted one-page assignments and was...

The One Topic I’ve Struggled to Write About

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

Over the past 35 years, I’ve written about everything from my sex life, hoarding, and binge eating, to declaring bankruptcy, dropping out of law school, being an obsessive worrier, and more. If you’d asked me a year ago, I’d have told you there was nothing I was afraid to write about. That was true, until last summer, when pretty much overnight I became the sole caregiver for my mother, who’s in the early stages of dementia.

At first, I was so overwhelmed with th...

Writing as Real Life

By Olga Katsovskiy

I avoid disclosing anything about my life to my students, nor do I ask them to share any facts about their personal lives when we first meet. My teaching philosophy is to let the writing do most of the talking.

In my Adult Education classes, we get acquainted by examining published essays and flash fiction I’ve selected to demonstrate a point. We talk openly about our emotional responses, then dissect the craft. Sometimes someone doesn’t like an essay I assign for “ho...

My Poetry Background Helped Save My Memoir—But Not Before It Nearly Did It In

By Ona Gritz

“Things take the time they take,” Mary Oliver says in a poem kindly titled, “Don’t Worry.” My memoir took ten years to complete. No one who knows my painful, complicated story is surprised by this. The book centers on my sister Angie who, twenty-five and pregnant, was brutally murdered with her husband and infant son.

As the youngest in an insular, secretive family, there was a lot I didn’t know about my beloved sister’s life. When I finally began to write about her thirty ...

Truth Is the Arrow: Steve Almond on Comedy, Tragedy, and Forgiveness

In his newly-released craft book, Truth Is The Arrow, Mercy Is The Bow, subtitled “A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories,” Steve Almond offers essential lessons on the basic building blocks of storytelling such as plot, character, and tone, alongside less technical essentials like mystery, intuition, bravery, and authenticity. He offers this advice with his signature clarity, and often wit, alongside specific examples from books and writers he has learned from along the way.

Brevit...