Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 61

Research and Memoir: Toggling Between Yourself and World, Part 2

By Jody Keisner

A Q&A WITH MINNA DUBIN, SOFIA ALI-KAHN, and ERICA BERRY

Sofia Ali-Kahn

Here is the second half of my interview with Minna, Sofia and Erica where we dig deeper into how to use research in writing memoir. If you missed Part 1, the first half of our discussion, you can find it here.

JK: Can you provide another example of how research transformed a story, either about yourself or your broader subject?

MD: My interviews helped guide the book. One mom share...

Finding Heart Through American Idol

By Rebecca Francesca Reuter Puerto

I am watching American Idol intently this season. My heart has been captured by one of the contestants, Iam Tongi, a Hawaiian teenager living in Seattle because his family was “priced out of paradise.” His showstopper rendition of “The Sound of Silence” moved me to tears and silenced the audience.

How does he do it?

“To connect with the audience, sing from the heart,” the American Idol judges offer as advice to contestants. 

The first version of ...

Research and Memoir: Toggling Between Yourself and World, Part 1

By Jody Keisner

Jody Keisner

A Q&A WITH MINNA DUBIN, SOFIA ALI-KAHN, and ERICA BERRY

It sometimes surprises readers when they finish my memoir, Under My Bed and Other Essays, and find a selected bibliography at the back: six pages of sources I used to further my exploration of fear as a woman, mother, and person living with a chronic illness. Writers of creative nonfiction often investigate familiar topics such as body, home, nature, identity, and family within the framew...

Is Chat GPT Coming for Creative Nonfiction?

Could a personal essay be crafted by 1s and 0s?

By Lise Funderburg

At the close of every semester, I’m plunged into nostalgia for the fierce band of young writers I’ve come to know, and filled with pride at all they’ve absorbed and attempted and achieved. They’ve learned the sound of their own voices and come to see their strengths and blind spots, not only in terms of craft, but also in how they portray themselves in relation to their world. I’ve witnessed their deep, deep pleasure whe...

Brevity Reading Period to Close in Two Days

Brevity’s reading period for general submissions and also for our special issue on Transgender Experience will end on April 30th, giving our brilliant assistant editors time to catch up with the backlog before summer arrives.

The last day is coming soon — just two days away!

Please send us your best & brightest flash nonfiction (750 words or fewer) before we close!

And thanks so much for your reading and writing.

Submit: http://brevity.submittable.com/submit

It’s Going to Have All the Right Stuff

By Victoria Lynn Smith

I’ll write the best damn piece of shit that I can write today.

I’ll bare my soul, not keep anything back, not be afraid to reveal my inner being to the world, you know, I’ll get real. Truth will explode from the prose.

I’ll hybrid, genre bend and mix, braid and twist, and be lyrical in all the right places, in just the right measure.

It will have a hero’s-journey, three-act-play, save-the-cat plot all rolled up into one.

The tragic will be seasoned with a...

How Breadcrumbs Are Making Me a Better Writer

By Amanda Le Rougetel

They say teachers make the worst students, but I am loving my writing apprenticeship program—and I am top of the class.

True, it’s a class of one and a self-initiated, self-directed training program, but naming it My (big fat) Writing Apprenticeship makes it real and fuels my drive to keep learning my craft.

During my college-teaching days, I taught communication skills across a wide variety of trades—from electricians to plumbers. Their apprenticeship programs ...

Finding Inspiration in the I & the Eye

Connecting with readers through heart and head.

By Suzanne Cope

More than a decade ago, in the haze of finishing my dissertation, I came across a listing for an interdisciplinary food studies conference in my city of New York. Prior to my intensive graduate program I had written about my community garden and food memories, and was excited to get back to more personal writing. But I was also excited to try out the new research skills I had honed over the previous few years.

On a hot J...

In Favor of Clicking the Submit Button Too Soon

By Kate Langenberg

It was a fairly straightforward challenge: write an essay of no more than 500 words about a vacation gone wrong.

I hadn’t been looking to enter a contest about travel writing. I was just reading the news online like I do every morning and happened to click on the book club section where I found the call for submissions. I laughed a little as I remembered the mishaps my husband and I had had on our honeymoon.

Being adventurous and thinking we were invincible, we had...

Zen and the Art of Querying

By Deborah Lindsay Williams

I am not by nature a patient person. I think microwave popcorn takes too long.

You will thus perhaps understand my pain when I tell you that I’m querying agents for a new book project, a process that by definition necessitates waiting. A voice in my brain urges me to keep refreshing my email: you sent the query two days ago, shouldn’t they have answered already?

When my son was a toddler, he would chant “mommommomMOM” on infinite repeat until I broke down ...