Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 60

Witnessing the Self

By Joanna Penn Cooper

Faith is found here, not in a destiny raiding and parceling out knowledge and the earth, but in a people who, person by person, believes itself.  Do you accept your own gestures and symbols?  Do you believe what you yourself say?  When you act, do you believe what you are doing?

–Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry

How might writing memoir and personal essay help us as we claim our role as observers and shapers of our own lives?  On a simple level, when I think ab...

Five Mental Health Tips for Writers

By Sweta Srivastava Vikram

What’s common between Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allen Poe, Sylvia Plath, and F. Scott Fitzgerald? These writers all struggled with mental health challenges and dealt with painful ends. A few died by suicide and others battled depression and alcoholism. According to Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychology professor at Johns Hopkins who wrote Touched with Fire, writers are around eight times as likely to suffer from mental illness than those who don’t pur...

What Stephen King Taught My Husband About Writing

By Marie F. Cahalane

I looked busy—piano, interior design projects, laundry, Candy Crush Saga—but the swirl of activity I generated belied a larger issue.

I couldn’t fool my husband, Tim. He noted my lack of engagement in revising my memoir, or in any writing task, but fortunately for him, he stayed quiet. 

Until he didn’t.

Tim’s no writer but he reads—a lot, and as much as I love to read, we differ stylistically in how we attack a good book. Tim reads like he consumes a pasta din...

Books are Compasses

By Shawna Kenney

My first trip outside of the United States was a month-long backpacking trip in Europe. I’d saved money from many jobs for two years so I could treat myself after graduating from college, heading out with a friend, a Eurail Pass, and the Lonely Planet’s Shoestring Guide. This was the mid-90s, so we depended on the hostel phone numbers, the suggested itineraries, the historical snippets, and the occasional tip-off to vegetarian-friendly establishments.

Of course, sometim...

How My Substack Bridged a Communication Gap With My Mother

By Tamara Cutler

“Mich, I’m working on waste this morning,” my eighty-four-year-old mother announced when I walked into her house to get our dog.

I write a weekly round-up for my Substack Zine, That Place You Love (TPYL), on Fridays. Mom wanted to make sure her flash essay on Waste posted in time.

I launched TPYL on January 2, 2023, to create community. We’d been living in a rural village in southern Spain for years, and I missed hanging out with old friends and sharing stories. I a...

Writing With Your Breath

By Evan Youngs

A Q&A WITH GAYLE BRANDEIS

In her essay collection Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss, Gayle Brandeis experiments with the structure of prose to explore the complexities of womanhood, motherhood, and authorhood. Her writing ranges from the deaths of her parents to the use of breath as a symbol. I had the pleasure of asking Brandeis what inspired this collection and what impact she wants to leave with it.

Evan Youngs: Whether the subject is motherhood ...

My Daughter Has an Intellectual Disability. Should I Be Allowed to Write Her Story?

By Catherine Shields

“I’m gonna write a story about you.”

My thirty-year old daughter, Jessica, says this in her sing-song voice. It almost sounds like a taunt. I look up from the sink to see her flash a smile. It’s seven a.m. on a Sunday morning. Yesterday I picked her up at the group home for our weekend visit and tonight, she’ll go back. I am unwilling to admit it, but I have already started the countdown to the end of this day. For a moment, my impatience subsides.

Jessica gives ...

On Witty Asides and Sly Insinuations

In our May issue of Brevity, launched this past week, Jack Lancaster looks at works from Jia Tolentino Joan Didion, and Zadie Smith to explore the power of a carefully constructed parenthetical aside, the perfect sly insinuation:

Understanding what the writer says between the parenthesis, and why they do, lets you feel like you’re on the inside of an inside joke. In nonfiction, these asides follow the shot of action with the chaser of the writer’s voice, an embodied clarity that the w...

The Secret Class

How to make regular writing a given.

By Julie Marie Wade

Whether you’re a writer just beginning to submit work for publication, a writer who has fallen out of the submission habit and is looking to build it back, or a writer who submits regularly and has been widely published, the ideal—and the struggle—we all share is to keep generating new work. No matter how busy you are with the demands of authorship, not to mention the demands of the rest of your life. 

One strategy I’ve used si...

Negotiating the Writer Editor Relationship Successfully

In our May issue of Brevity, launched this past week, Amanda Le Rougetel reminds us that the writer/editor relationship, when approached with skill and respect, can be fully rewarding for both author and editor.

Le Rougetel writes:

At its best and most productive, the writer/editor relationship is based in respect and unfolds as a creative process that aims to realize the full potential of a piece of writing. Every writer stands to benefit from the input of a qualified editor; however...