Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 65

What to Do When an Agent Ghosts You

When they vanish on a requested full

By Sara Orozco

When I started looking for literary agents to represent my memoir, I anticipated rejections and braced myself for them. But I wasn’t prepared for agents to vanish after they’d requested my full manuscript. So, wearing my clinician hat, I pondered the psychological impact of being “ghosted” and why the practice left me obsessing for an answer.

In a 2020 study exploring online daters’ experiences with ghosting, most respondents report...

Expansion Theory: Big Ideas in Flash Packages

Canine conflict does not a War and Peace make.

By Lise Funderburg

I blame my 138-word essay, “What Bad Owners Say at the Dog Park,” on the photographer James Casebere. He and I were at the same artists’ colony in Italy some years back, and we seemed to have coinciding coffee break schedules, where we would join forces against a perplexing stove in the drafty kitchen of our castle. The extraordinarily detailed and hyper-realistic constructions James is known for involve specialized tools...

A Learned Lesson About Sharing Writing Before It’s Ready

By Jessica Carney

I bombed one of my first readings in the strangest place you can bomb—a hospice room.

As I was finishing writing my first book, my grandma had a medical crisis and was moved into hospice care. She was alert and not in too much pain, and because there are only so many things to do in a hospice room, my mom suggested I read some of my work-in-progress to her. It seemed like a good idea. The only problem with that plan was that my book was a draft, and some of it was roug...

The Season Finale—What if Your Memoir is Anticlimactic?

Joelle Fraser and her mother in Reno

By Joelle Fraser

Will it ever end, I mutter each morning as I venture onto the icy porch, boots crunching and breath billowing. In the black elm above, doves hover while I scatter seeds in the frozen feeder. It’s been an especially wet, cold winter in Reno. A chill has settled into my bones and my back aches from shoveling a crushing kind of snow we call “Sierra cement.” In the house, my cabin-fevered cats perch at the window, hunched and surly. 

But...

Writing for No Readers

By Carroll Sandel

After watching the chaos at the Kabul airport in August 2021, my husband and I decided to host evacuees. In November, a young Afghan family moved into our home. The following morning, I felt pulled to the computer as though a huge magnet yanked me there. I needed to write about this life-changing experience my husband and I were sharing.

“I noticed her first,” I wrote. “She emerged from the airline passageway wearing a black hijab, a long dark skirt and a maroon hoodie...

Why Write When There are Thousands of People Out There Not Reading Your Work?

By Ben Berman

We were at the home of some friends when I found myself in a conversation with their six-year-old son.

My dad told me that you’re a writer, he said.

I am, I said.

Then let me ask you something, he said. How come I’ve never read anything you wrote?

That’s a good question, I said.

Think about it, he said. Right now there are thousands of people out there who aren’t reading any of your books.

He shook his head and walked away, leaving me all alone in the kitche...

In Praise of Conversation: Celebrating Montaigne on National Essay Day

By Daisy Hickman

As Mark Twain once noted: “Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.” Could there be a timelier suggestion? The art of conversation—talking with others to discuss ideas and issues in depth—is disappearing like icebergs melting around the globe.

Maybe I’m simply partial to “talking it over.” I love to turn an intriguing topic upside down, rattle it around. I still see tremendous value in sharing experience and ...

Chill Subs—A Fun New Resource for Writers

AN INTERVIEW WITH KARINA KUPP AND BENJAMIN DAVIS

By Andrea A. Firth

In January of 2022, Karina Kupp, 26, a writer and web developer, launched the website and database—Chill Subs, where you can find places to submit your writing, share your work, learn about residencies, contests, presses and other resources, track submissions, connect with other writers and more. Think Duotrope 2.0 but cooler and free. A couple months later, Benjamin Davis, 33, a writer and editor, joined Karina to help ma...

How to Stop Feeling Anxious When Telling a Deeply Personal Story: You Can’t

By Andrea Askowitz

The morning of a teaching gig at the University of Pennsylvania, my alma mater, I woke up panicked, so I went for a run. The day was brisk, the way this Miami girl remembered the Philadelphia fall weather more than 30 years ago.

The Trustees Council of Penn Women invited me to teach storytelling at their annual conference alongside Meredith Stiehm, my college best friend and tennis partner. Meredith created the TV show Cold Case and wrote for ER and Homeland. The oth...

Why I Play Pickleball: On Calming the Writing Monster

By Tamara MC

I’ve ridden my bike 12.2 miles daily for the past three years. The night before, I make sure my Airpods are charged, and I head out in the afternoon during the warmest temps of the day. I live in Arizona, where we had 85-degree weather this past winter. Regardless, my muscles curse the wind when it snarls and snaps. I do one of several things on my bike ride. If I’m in a Zoom meeting where I can use audio and don’t need my camera, I Zoom. If I’m not Zooming and zooming, I lis...