Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 46

Anchoring a Memoir in a Tumultuous Time

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOAN GELFAND

Joan Gelfand

By Christine Young

Forthcoming on January 16th, 2024 is Outside Voices: A Memoir of the Berkeley Revolution, Joan Gelfand’s debut memoir from Post Hill Press. Set in a volatile and high stakes time and place, Berkeley in the 70’s, the story tracks Joan’s activism and growth as a young poet.

Outside Voices is Gelfand’s seventh book, each having a different genre and publisher. Having sold this one on proposal, I had questions for Joan about h...

Magic Made Real

By Ploi Pirapokin

If pigs can fly, how might farmers secure their livestock at night?

During my time as a student at the Clarion Writers Workshop, Holly Black, most known for co-authoring the middle-grade fantasy series The Spiderwick Chronicles, offered us a set of questions to organize magical elements as a working system in our stories. Her questions were helpful in determining causality, point of view, and plot in fantastical fiction, but her last question about creating a magic sys...

That’s Tight: A Brief Lesson on Flash Writing

By Chelsey Clammer

It was nineteen years ago, when I was just twenty-one years old, that I kissed my dead father’s cold, gray, practically ashy forehead goodbye in a hospital in Austin. (29 words)

Cool sound there, but there’s the fact of unnecessary words. How you can try to fit an entire story in one sentence, but when you’re writing a flash piece, that fluffed narrative sentence takes away from the power of your writing. With flash, you have to accomplish exactly what the genre is as...

What I Learned About Writing from a Podcast on Celebrity Memoirs

By Christine Norman

I spend a lot of time alone in my car, checking on parents a four-hour drive away, then continuing along a series of backroads to tend to a vegetable garden on an old family farm. Driving—one of those in-between spaces—does something to my normally lucid thought processes: they become untethered, and I find myself latching to anxieties old and new, swirling, increasing in intensity, as the miles go on.

At such times, I must have a distraction. I recently came across ...

It’s Not You. Really.

By Allison K Williams

There was nothing wrong with Goldilocks (other than a little breaking-and-entering, of course). Or the beds. The problem was the fit.

This is also true of every residency, grant and fellowship we apply for. It’s not enough to be good (augh!) but, sometimes we don’t even have to be “good enough.” While publication and prizes require a minimum level of quality of writing plus a good fit, awards aimed at creative development and project support have much broader latit...

Writing Struggles—How a DIY Retreat Helped

By Lina Lau and Jennifer Robinson

Lina Lau

Two decades ago, we met in grad school, where we sat across from each other in libraries and coffee shops and struggled to write term papers. Two years ago, we reunited as writing buddies working on more lyrical prose, bonding over shitty first drafts and sharing acceptance successes.

We know that writing can be exhilarating, but also maddening. Our writing struggles fall along a continuum: from the practical (word choice! submission strategy!) ...

Why Taboo Topics Can Make the Best Creative Nonfiction

by Katie Bannon

For many of us, writing about a stigmatized topic like mental illness, sex, and violence can seem akin to stripping in public. We might feel embarrassed, afraid, and terribly exposed. But here’s the rub: It’s often our most vulnerable stories that read as the most human, engaging readers and making them see the world in a new way.

The first time I shared my own story, about a hair pulling disorder I kept secret for 20 years, I expected readers to be shocked, maybe even o...

Thank You For Being Honest

By Sarah Canney

The dead-end road climbs to the little 1800s farmhouse they bought when they sold my childhood home. I’m speeding through the dark as if the spark of courage that led me here might be snuffed out. On the seat next to me are two thick stacks of paper, still warm from my printer—one for my mother, the other for my father.

This is how my family communicates. Afraid to have difficult conversations in person, we skirt around charged emotions by putting them on the page, passi...

Journaling as a Private Playground: In Search of the Burning Question

By Olga Katsovskiy

At the recent Boston Book Festival, memoirist Kelly McMasters told her fellow writers that she simply does not believe in writer’s block, because the drive to write comes from a nagging question.

I love the sentiment as it mirrors much of what I have seen written on craft, the notion that a compelling essay revolves around a personal question, a shadow over the author’s life central to an internal conflict. In these essays, the resolution is not as important to the re...

What to Do When the Vitriol Comes for You

By Blair Glaser

Though she knew better, memoirist Suzanne Roberts (Animal Bodies; Bad Tourist) bit into the forbidden apple of Goodreads reviews. In a resultant Facebook post, she shared how she dealt with the “cesspool of not-so-nice things” readers had to say: she took one particularly egregious insult and made it into a mug. She now enjoys her morning coffee in a cup labeled Self-righteous Slut.

I call that move humor judo: transmuting the negative energy of your opponent by owning t...