Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 64

Who Gets Final Say in Our Family Stories?

By Esther Aarons

My mother killed my memoir. My father helped.

I’m not angry with my father because he didn’t lead the charge. If this had happened ten years ago, we would’ve fought for days, then made peace. He’s not up to leading a charge now. He gets lost driving to the grocery store. I don’t know that I’ll ever be livid with him again. I miss it.

My family has a lore: My grandparents were Jews who fled Nazi Germany with my father and his siblings. They smuggled just enough money...

The Lyric Essay as Resistance: An Interview with Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold

By Laura Laing

The lyric essay is not new, but 25 years after Deborah Tall and John D’Agata gave it a name, the form is being anthologized and has earned a place within the literary academy. Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold’s The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins (Wayne State University Press) collects lyric essays that not only resist form and content but also our expectations of the world at large. In this Q&A, essayist Laura Laing talks with Bossiere and Trabold about the...

Writing For Craft, Not Clicks

Social media often feels like a distraction from our writing work, or weirdly transactional (I posted 10 minutes ago, did anyone like it yet?) But mindful social media makes us better writers. Ignore follower counts and clicks—instead, consider Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, blogging and newsletters as literary forms.

One of the world’s greatest short-form writers contemplating the delivery of his next publicly-available serial content.

A great Facebook post is a 100-word microflash essay wi...

Why Finding the Right Image Can Be So Challenging

By Ben Berman

I place the six-pack of beer on the counter.

The clerk looks up at me, then down at the beer, then back up at me, then leans in and says, I thought I was gonna have to ID when you first walked in, but now that you’re up close I can see all the gray hairs on your head.

I’m not sure whether to be flattered that he thinks I look twenty years younger than I actually am or upset that he’s noticed that I am starting to go gray.

Although, after I get home and examine my hea...

Inventing the Wheel: Hosting a Successful Virtual Book Launch

By Caroline Goldberg Igra, Ph.D

January 2022: Publication date was approaching. Time to launch my book. I couldn’t stop thinking about the lovely launch of my first book, people milling around and smiling, picking up a copy and asking for my signature, attentive faces regarding me as I read aloud.  I’d felt loved and appreciated by the crowd of supporters that had gathered to hear my words on that summer evening. But this was different. We were in the middle of yet one more wave of the cor...

On Interpretation, Translation, and the Poetry of Deaf Signers

By Paul Hostovsky

“Are you the deaf interpreter?” the nurse asks me. I get that a lot. I’m actually the hearing interpreter. I’m a sign language interpreter and I make my living interpreting for Deaf people and for hearing people who want to communicate with Deaf people. “No,” I tell her, “I’m the hearing interpreter. The Deaf interpreter is on her way. She should be here soon.” That’s the truth but for some reason the truth is hard for hearing people to hear. She knits her brows together...

From Writer to Publicist: An Unexpected Pivot

By Jennifer Lang

Last summer, a year before my book release, I reached out to a poet who’d posted her lineup of author events on Facebook, asking how far in advance she began planning them. Her answer: you can never start too early.

With Labor Day looming, I began to brainstorm. I Googled San Francisco Bay Area, where I was born and bred, in search of synagogues, yoga studios, and bookstores. I zoomed with an old camp friend who’d stayed put and planted deep roots in the Jewish world, ...

Who Needs Your Words?

The joyful secret of building audience

By Allison K Williams

Memoirs sell because the writing is strong, the story engaging, and there’s an audience who wants to read this book. Agents and publishers determine the first two from your query and pages. Proving an audience exists is up to you.

Most memoirs sell with proposals. Your proposal shares the plan and purpose of your book, shows you’re organized and professional, demonstrates your writing skill, and most importantly, establishe...

Developmental Editors: For Manuscripts and Life

By Joanne Nelson

This is about prostate cancer, my daughter’s floors, and developmental editors. One I want removed from my spouse, one I’m curious about, one I’d like to shadow me for the rest of my life.

Developmental Editor. Someone who fixes the big picture in a narrative, perhaps even finds the big picture. Someone who catches those digressions. Or, as defined at ziprecruiter.com, someone who “works with an author to define and improve the structure and content of a manuscript.” 

...

AWP: All Writers Pining (to be there)

Another year, another AWP

By Allison K Williams

Another AWP, another year of watching AWP happen on social media. Writer friends and writer acquaintances are coordinating meet-ups and announcing their readings. Editors I admire are posting about their panels, and how their panels went. Everything is liminal. Or intersectional. Or intersectionally liminal. In a few days, countless editors, writers and journal staffers will depart the giant conference in Seattle, heading back to their hom...