Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 49

Why I’ve Decided to Be Choosy About Where I Submit

By Amanda Le Rougetel

Once, when I was teaching an academic writing course on contract at a university, I calculated my hourly pay.

It came to well below minimum wage.

That bottom line shattered my sense of self and financial security—until I shifted the paradigm of what I was doing from teaching to learning.

This was in my early “take any contract offered” teaching days. Facing an amphitheatre of bored university students in class only because it was a program requirement, challe...

Being a Literary IT Girl

by Allison K Williams

Nylon magazine’s recent article, The Makings of a Literary It Girl, describes six young woman authors’ book release parties:

In the last few years, the traditional literary world has gotten a lot more fun. Parties aren’t just thrown at bookstores that close at 9 pm but at punk bars and hotel ballrooms. They have custom merchandise, relevant DJs, and Botox. They’re photographed like celebrity parties. Publications like Forever Magazine, The Drift, and Copy are pub...

Sunday School Taught Me to Pitch Personal Essays

By Anna Rollins

At age 12, I practiced writing my religious testimony in a Southern Baptist Sunday School class. Our teacher distributed Dixie cups of apple juice and napkins filled with vanilla wafers before presenting a lesson on the genre.

A testimony, our teacher said as she wrote on the moveable dry erase board at the front of the room, is a focused narrative with three parts: a person’s life before religion, their conversion experience, and their life in the present-day.

In ot...

Bright Fragments

Compiling a Book of Published Essays

By Beth Kaplan

Through the 1990s, I wrote a lot of essays. A 40-something former actress and single mother without money or confidence, I was struggling to turn into a writer in my spare time. One day I saw that a national newspaper had reserved its back page for thousand-word personal essays by the general public. I sent in a story about an elderly neighbour teaching me to garden, and two weeks later, it appeared. The paper paid a big fat $100.

A...

Her Insult Saved Me

By Kristine Laco

 “Good first draft.”

First words from the developmental editor who had reviewed my memoir.

She could not have known what she read was my eighth or maybe forty-seventh draft, because I’d stopped counting.

I couldn’t see beyond those three words. I tried, but tears blurred the screen. I closed my laptop and collected tissues and a pint of ice cream.

First draft? Who does she think she is?

Scoop.

What does she know about me?

Scoop, scoop.

She’s right. ...

Brevity’s Best American Notables

We are entirely pleased that three essays from Brevity magazine have been chosen as ‘Notables” in the Best American Essays 2023 edited by Vivian Gornick and Robert Atwan. Congratulations to Mika Sutherland, Anna Vodicka, and Daisy Hernandez.

The three brilliant essays are excerpted below for your reading pleasure.

We are Stardust by Anna Vodkicka

Skin: our thin animal hide. An organ on the outside. Our blood running in blue rivers just below the surface. How vulnerable we are....

On Bending Genres and Expectations: An Interview with Ana María Caballero

By Amy Goldmacher

Ana Caballero

I “met” Ana María Caballero because she was a finalist in the AWP Kurt Brown Prize competition in 2022. I immediately followed her on social media to see what else she had written and was impressed with the variety and depth of her portfolio: art, poetry, prose, and technology. Since then, I’ve watched accolades of her work pile up, and the publication of her memoir-slash-medical-essay in May 2023 presented the perfect opportunity to interview Ana María and l...

Protect Your Creative Self: A Manifesto on Author Priorities in the Digital Age

By Heather Lanier

I’m “launching” a book. It’s a lucky position. It means I spent ten-plus years on sixty or so poems. It means I listened to every syllable of every line, put every word on a scale, measured every vowel in my mouth, felt them whole and alive, or dead and deleted them. It means I assembled and arranged and rearranged all the poems, cut ones that didn’t belong, heard the poems beg for new poem-neighbors, and wrote those too, so that all the poems made a conversation. Or a j...

Querying Your Memoir in 2024

LIFE photo collection via @blackarchivesco

By Allison K Williams

Querying can feel like jumping through a million hoops. A million invisible hoops that are also covered with spikes and on fire. You’re right—querying is indeed harder than it was, even five years ago. Now that most agents accept queries emailed or through online portals, the mild speedbump of photocopying our pages and visiting the post office with $3 and a SASE is gone. The field is open to people who are truly broke, have ...

My Orphan Memoir’s Second Life

By Susan Spector

In 2019, I was writing for my life. Somehow, with help from brilliant coach Susanne Dunlap, combined with my own frenetic energy, I managed to write a full-length memoir called Keep Calm, It’s Just a Brain Tumor: My Year of Wabi-Sabi Healing.

Oh, the irony. 

The title turned out to be the prescription and the writing the medicine. The title continues to serve as I move into my fourth year of “watch and wait “for two inoperable brain tumors. It is ongoing practice and...