Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 56

Good Art Friends

By Jason Prokowiew

This month I spent a week at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at U-Mass, in workshop with eleven other writers, led by T Kira Māhealani Madden. One of the other workshop participants was the writer Lorena Hernández Leonard, who’d been my peer in a year-long intensive (and intense) memoir incubator program  from 2021-2022.

Hernández Leonard’s memoir-in-progress, Salsipuedes: Leave if You Can, tells of her childhood in Medellin, Columbia at a time it was plagued by...

Where We Write: A Desk in the Family

By Thomas Reed

A friend was showing me his old barn-turned-writing-study in rural Virginia when I had one of those rich moments where the thing you’re looking at starts to morph into writing—in the form of a metaphor. (That my friend is a poet probably didn’t inhibit the process.) There were twin hay lofts on either side of the barn’s central space, and mounted on the cross and support beams of one of them was a massive, flat-fronted but funnel-shaped grain hopper that vee-ed down to a di...

Just Show Me the Good Parts: Deconstructing Situation and Story

By Brooke Champagne

Which sounds the most engaging: Situation or Story? Don’t overthink it. First thought, best thought.

If you’re a writer, you’ve likely been inculcated with the notion that story, with its inherent drama, character, and action, hews more closely to your ultimate writerly goal. Because how compelling can situation—that brief interlude, that mere place—really be?

But if you’re familiar with Vivian Gornick’s 2001 primer on personal narrative, The Situation and the Sto...

Don’t Ever Tell Me What To Do

By Natalie Serianni

Sometimes, there’s a logical way of doing things, and sometimes, you just have to feel your way through. This works in writing and, well, car washing. 

As a college student, home for the summer, I woke up late one humid mid-Atlantic morning and decided over a bowl of Fruit Loops to wash my car before my afternoon waitressing shift. The cicadas were already in concert as I approached my once-white beater Pontiac 6000 STE. 

Armed with sponges and old t-shirts, I dum...

Generational Wealth

By Katy Goforth

After I hit 40, my relationships started to change. I’d heard this can happen, but I thought it was one of those things that people over 40 said to people under 40. Turns out I was wrong. I also started to understand that the dynamic between me and my parents was shifting.

They were getting older—slower and softer. Neither was bad necessarily, but it was different. I was growing more sentimental. What didn’t change was my special connection to my dad.

Growing up, I lo...

A Letter to the Brevity Blog Community—Let’s Keep Talking

Dear Writers,

Thank You—let’s start there.

Thank you for being part of the Brevity Blog, as both writers and readers. We launched the Blog in 2006 as a companion to our flagship magazine Brevity, and it quickly became a vibrant and ongoing conversation about the art and craft of creative nonfiction writing. To date, we’ve published more than 3,000 of your essays.

We don’t call them posts, because what we publish are essays, with a beginning, a middle and an ending, with the arc and m...

The “Ugly” Route to a Beautiful Memoir

By Jennifer Cramer-Miller

“You’ve got to be uglier,” Kate said.

As my editor and friend, she advised me on how to improve my memoir’s first draft, a version that breezily recounted the story of my incurable illness.

I avoided sinking into the most depressing details of my ill health, opting instead for swift and light. But that was exactly Kate’s issue; while I’d skimmed the surface of my story, effective, engaging memoirs plunge into the guts of the story.

“We need to dive deepe...

Meno-specula-pause: How the Speculative Makes the Impossible Possible

By Laraine Herring

It is inconceivable that I am aging. That my eggs are gone, along with my knees, my ability to sleep through the night, my tolerance for spicy foods, temperatures over sixty-five degrees, and meetings that could have been emails. I walk into rooms and forget why I’m there. Words jumble in my throat. My skin itches, bumps, and flushes.

Those details, though specific and accurate, are neither interesting nor new. They don’t tell you anything you haven’t heard before abo...

On Little Libraries and the Divine Unrest

By Thomas Rayfiel

I have many extra copies of my own books. What was I thinking? That I would magnanimously inscribe copies to grateful friends and relatives? To fans? One day, they will be thrown out. I accept that in theory but want to forestall such a final reckoning, give them a last chance to belong, to find a place on a reader’s warm, welcoming shelves. It’s nostalgic and romantic and sentimental, I know. These previously suspect emotions no longer horrify me.

So I walk. There is...

Seeing Through the Dark: Revision and Research

By Tamara Dean

Long ago, as a beginning writer, I dreaded revision. I believed the axiom, “All writing is rewriting,” but I wasn’t confident that I could improve my drafts significantly by spending more time with them. I tinkered—replacing weak verbs and cutting unnecessary bits—enough to tell myself that I had revised. Then I submitted my stories and essays.

Sometimes they were published in small journals.

But usually they weren’t.

I’d sent them out before exploring and exploitin...