Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 62

Memoir is Exploration, So Keep Yourself Open: An Interview with Abigail Thomas

Like Abigail Thomas’s previous memoirs and essay collections, Still Life At Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing, is wise, reassuring, funny, and at the very same time unsettling. Thomas manages this apparent contradiction through her signature style: passionate and unwavering honesty. Nothing is off limits, and everything is examined with eager eyes and a dash of acerbic wit.

The primary subject, as her title signals, is aging, how it feels to be turning eighty, facing diminished capabili...

Raising the Dead

By Rona Maynard

After my friend Val died at 57, I kept trying to write her back to life. Thirty years of memories flared on my screen. The young journalist, a recycler ahead of her time, who turned in a story on scraps of paper stitched together with yarn. The mentor who helped me land a better editing job and promised me I’d “knock their socks off.” I tasted the hot and sour soup we always ordered at the Chinese dive where the waiters spoke in grunts.

Writing my friend pulled me into ...

Rejection Is (Still) Not Feedback

By Allison K Williams

Five years ago, I wrote about rejection:

Rejection is not feedback.

Rejection is not feedback.

No really. Rejection. Is not. Feedback.

As writers submitting our work, we often get mad at ourselves and the process when our work is rejected. It’s easy to feel they thought my work was terrible, or I’m a bad writer, or I’ll never be any good.

None of those things can be determined from any single rejection.

The process of reading work for publication is...

Keeping It a Small World After All

The Challenges of Bringing Your Narrator into the Broadest (and Most Magical) Places on Earth

By Margaret Anne Mary Moore

It was the section of my memoir that I was simultaneously excited and apprehensive about writing—the trip to Disney World.

My rationale for including this part was clear. My debut memoir narrates my childhood experiences growing up with a physical disability, Cerebral Palsy, relying on a wheelchair, walker, and speech device, losing my father to cancer, and being ...

Writing Group Feedback: How to Maintain Moral Integrity

By Barbie Beaton

In memoir, the narrator’s journey often starts in a forest of confusion as she navigates moral conflicts toward her truest, most whole self. My story is no exception.

My memoir is about surviving the wrongs of my ’80s upbringing—poverty, neglect, violence, erasure—but the younger me of the story exhibits questionable behavior at times, providing a dubious container for my narrator’s moral conflict. I risked readers who sided against me.

Recently, I learned just how ...

The Perils of Publishing: A Hidden Gift

Rejections and Setbacks Hurt, But Given Time, They Make Great Stories

By Pamela Jane

Before I began writing full-time, I pictured the glamorous life of a published children’s author waiting for me just around the corner.

My author fantasy seemed to be set in the 1940s: I work quietly at home, I don’t have to market or promote my books, and I’ve had the same editor for twenty years.  She publishes everything I write, and my books stay in print forever.  If I need a little extra money,...

True Flash

Is there a recipe for writing successful flash?

By Heather Sellers

I love reading flash essays—true stories that fit on a page or two, the shorter the better. I love how they often work as double-duty shapeshifters, serving as both stand-alone pieces and  parts of an arc in larger narratives. I’m thinking here of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling, A. Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, and Abigail Thomas’s Safekeeping. It’s like having a pile of gorgeous photogr...

A Very Small Writing Practice

By Carmella de los Angeles Guiol

These days, when people ask me how my writing is going, I try my best not to roll my eyes and bite their heads off. I have a two-year-old and a one-year-old, both of whom were born during the pandemic. How do you think it’s going?

But the other day it dawned on me: I do have a writing practice. A very small one, but a writing practice, nonetheless.

When I got pregnant in the fall of 2019, some friends put together a care package and sent it to me. I w...

A Full Circle Moment Ten Years in the Making

By Melanie Brooks

Exactly a decade ago, only two months into my MFA, I attended my first Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference. I knew little to nothing about this yearly literary gathering and what it was all about, but I’d been urged by people in my program to attend, and, since it was in Boston, only forty-five minutes from my house, I went. I wasn’t prepared for what it would be like to join for three days the swarm of 13,000 writers filling the Hynes Convention...

Ayurvedic Eye Care Tips for Writers

By Sweta Srivastava Vikram

Over the years, especially since the pandemic hit, and we went on PAUSE …  I have noticed that many of my clients have started to complain about their eyes. The power has gone up. Eyes feel drier. Some started to wear reading glasses. Blurry vision. Sure, the new way of working and life post-pandemic involves too much screen time. We check emails on the phone. Read books on the iPad. Research is online—when was the last time you sat in a library, with highlighte...