Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 45

Why Writing Your Memoir is Good for Us

By Jessica J. Hill

My client recently sent me a link to an article by Arthur Brooks from The Atlantic titled, “Why You Maybe Shouldn’t Write a Memoir.” She’s writing a memoir, and I’m the mentor and developmental editor she hired to help her. She wrote that she “laughed out loud” when she saw the headline. I wish I’d had the same reaction.

Brooks writes a weekly column about happiness. His argument is this: People should consider their mental health before they think about writing a mem...

What Grey’s Anatomy Taught Me About Finding My Readers

by Amanda Le Rougetel

I completed my course-based master’s program in communication, spending weeks researching a long paper and then ten days writing at a cottage. I loved being alone with my work, crafting an academic paper tightly focused on one question. By the end of it, I was proud of what I had accomplished.

After the requisite revisions, I was delighted when the professor pronounced my work done. At this point, I wanted to share my achievement with my nearest and dearest, so I h...

A Letter to My Teacher

By Marion Karian

Dear Miss Yowell

I wish you were here now to receive this letter as there are things I have always dreamed of telling you. It has been more than 60 years since I was your student, and while you might not remember me as the shy young girl sitting in the second row of your sixth period Junior English class in 1960, I believe you would remember the paper I wrote for you on immortality in poetry.

What I want to tell you is what writing that paper meant to me.

I was st...

Birthing a Book in a Time of War

By Jennifer Lang

Thirty-two days after Places We Left Behind: a memoir-in-miniature launched, everything that is my greatest fear of the country where I live, with which I’ve wrestled for decades, about which I write in my book, has come to fruition—only more, so much worse, beyond my imagination.

Places We Left Behind is the story of my falling fast in love with a Frenchman named Philippe during the First Intifada in Israel. Both 23, both Jewish, we had opposing outlooks on two fundame...

Heartbreak, Loss, and Writing in Gmail: It’s Always Something

By Rae Pagliarulo

This past summer, I attended a week-long writing workshop in Austria. It was a scary prospect – I had not written, at least not in a way that I felt was substantive, or generative, or serious (whatever that means) since 2020. Between unexpectedly losing my dad, the pandemic, broken friendships, mental health struggles, and a beautiful man who would not stop breaking my heart, I had a hard enough time getting from one day to the next. 

Amazingly, I stayed committed to m...

8 Ways to Become Fierce on the Page

By Sage Cohen

Photo by The Weaver House

The difference between good writing and unforgettable writing is specificity—which creates electricity. Yet because we all see differently, this can be tricky to execute. Anton Chekhov advises, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” Mizuta Masahide, a 17th-century Japanese poet, shows us a different moon:

Barn’s burnt down —
now
I can see the moon.

In this poem, our gaze is directed through the empty pla...

Angels of Christmas

By Felicia Magliula

The Kingston ReStore looks like someone raided my boomer mother-in-law’s garage and donated a generation’s worth of hoarded Christmas decorations. Six long tables are blanketed with holiday tchotchkes and abandoned misfit ornaments. A bin brimming with sparkly red and green garland just swallowed my two- and four-year-old daughters whole. My husband John snuck away to sift through a questionable pile of second-hand tools. I’m here for a chair for my new writing desk.

...

An Open Letter to Your Family and Friends This Holiday Season

By Heidi Croot

On a sunny October afternoon last year, my 33-year-old cousin told me his recovery program involved group writing, and he’d written a love letter to his recently deceased parents.

I recognized the writer’s eternal plea and asked if I could read it.

He literally galloped into the house to find his notebook. 

We stood under the fall canopy of reds, greens and golds—his sister, grandmother and me—and listened to him read aloud, a lanky six-foot-four boy on the cusp of ...

What I Learned About Writing From Donkey Kong

By Wendy Swift

My secret passion for Donkey Kong started when I bought my husband a Super Nintendo off eBay. It was his 70th birthday. This was a few years ago and since then, pretty much every Friday night we position our chairs in front of the TV, tell Echo to play 60’s rock ‘n roll, order-in pizza and grab a couple of beers before settling into a night of jumping the bad guys. And though it can be fun, it’s also quite challenging with surprise threats around every turn. I admit that I b...

Sister Arts: Three Ways to Write About a Painting

By Elissa Greenwald

Ekphrastic writing offers us inspiration through art forms such as music, dance, or architecture, but the connection is most often made through the visual arts, so much so that painting and writing are called the “sister arts.” Here are three approaches to how you might respond to the visual in your own writing, with examples from W.H. Auden, John Keats, and William Carlos Williams.

1.Write a story about a painting.

The two figures in Matisse’s mid-career painting...