Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 51

Five Ways to Start Making Graphic Essays

The relationship between Graphic Literature and Flash Nonfiction

By Kelcey Ervick

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Kelcey Ervick is the author and illustrator of the graphic memoir, The Keeper: Soccer, Me, and the Law That Changed Women’s Lives, winner of a 2023 Ohioana Book Award. She is co-editor, with Tom Hart, of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Graphic Literature. Kelcey is the author of three previous award-winning books, and her comics have appeared in The Rumpus, The Believer, Washington Post, and...

Connecting the Threads—A Memoir in Essays

AN INTERVIEW WITH KELLY MCMASTERS

By Brianna Avenia-Tapper

Kelly McMasters

Best-selling author Kelly McMasters’s fourth book, The Leaving Season (W. W. Norton, 2023) is a memoir-in-essays about marriage, divorce, moving, and loss. McMasters’s prose is evocative and thoughtful, studded with images that will haunt you long after reading. The Leaving Season is also a masterclass in how to create satisfying narrative coherence from disparate essayistic threads. Literary Mama editor Brianna A...

Writing Our Flaws, Our Failures, and Our Glorious Shine

In his newest book, Death Prefers the Minor Keys, a series of brief prose meditations, many first composed on the backs of medical forms while on break as a third-shift medical technician, Sean Thomas Dougherty explores illness, survival, and the moments of grace and beauty to be found in a broken world. He is interviewed here by Dinty W. Moore on the line between prose poem and flash essay and how “the simple act of opening a pill vial … anything that deals with the lived life and labor can...

Writing Isn’t Safe

No publishing without penalties.

By Allison K Williams

A writer asks: My book is controversial, and publishing could open me up for harassment, maybe even violent threats. How do I get ready to face this?

Another writer: How do I build platform without opening myself up to unbalanced people or too many opinions or being too available to anyone who wants to get in touch? I’ve already deleted all my social media out of fear. I plan to market through speaking engagements, podcast appea...

They Walk, They Talk! Tips for Effective Characterization

By Dinty W. Moore

Any novelist with a modicum of craft knowledge or experience on the page understands the importance of bringing fictional characters to life, a necessary step so readers can imagine the invented person and see them moving through fictional space. Even non-writers, if they’ve read Dickens for instance, or Jhumpa Lahiri, have a passing understanding of the importance of vivid characterization.

But in my years of teaching, coaching, and working on developmental edits with...

Calling My Muses

By Sue Sesnon Salt

As if in a grande cathedral waiting to hear the voice of God, I sit on my balcony longing for a word, a phrase, a hint, but there is only the thrumming of hummingbirds as they swarm around feeders like bees buzzing around a hive.

Where is my muse? Come Calliope. Come Thalia. Even Melpomene with her love of tragedy is welcome as I wait for inspiration. Do they dig out from the depths harboring everything I know, or do they plant small seeds hoping they will grow and bl...

Brevity’s Latest Craft Essays

Brevity’s Fall 2023 issue launched yesterday, and with it three fascinating new craft essays. Rather than simply describing them, here’s a brief excerpt from each. We encourage you to read further, and to explore both our full Craft Section and our Teaching Resources as well.

The excerpts:

Carol Dunbar explores how and when we know a book is done:

The one question I get asked at every reading is: How do you know when it’s done? Maybe people ask me this because they know it took m...

Brevity Launches New Issue: With Unexpected Birds

Brevity launched a new issue this morning, with an unplanned avian theme drifting through many of the essays. The birds are brilliant, and so are the essays.

Issue 74 features essays from Molly Giles, Anne P. Beatty, Optimism One, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Terry Blackhawk, Allison Blevins, Shelley Roche-Jacques, Martha Petersen, Ann Camden, Sarah Beth Childers, Jennie Evenson, Ethan Gilsdorf, Ryan Habermeyer, Steven Harvey, and Terri Kent.

We also have three new craft essays which we wil...

The New Social Media Rules

By Allison K Williams

Social media is dead. Curated by airbrushed aspirational lives, fattened with frank capitalism, political outrage and carefully careless “authenticity,” led to the killing floor by algorithmic shopping, and stabbed through the heart by an unimaginably wealthy manbaby who—literally—can’t even buy friends.

Not an especially humane killing. Definitely not halal.

Even publishers are catching on. After the dismal sales of Billie Eilish’s book-shaped product (99.9 mil...

Hard Silences, Hard Stories: A Memoirist’s Difficult Journey

Suzanne Strempek Shea interviews Melanie Brooks

Sitting in summer shorts while reading Melanie Brooks’ heart-enveloping memoir A Hard Silence: One daughter remaps family, grief and faith when HIV/AIDS changes it all, I was reminded that the best memoirists’ long treks through the land of memory often require tactical gear.

A Hard Silence details with documentarians’ precision the story of Brooks’ 53-year-old father’s death from AIDS during Canada’s mid-1980s Tainted Blood Scandal. The a...