Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 68

Starting Your Own Retreat: How Hard Can It Be?

I guess that guest didn’t hate me after all.

By Allison K Williams

Writers often thrive in new places—residencies and retreats that allow us to expand our ideas and make big progress outside the demands of daily life. But residencies are often competitive and retreats expensive. After eyeing promising opportunities that may be distant, outside your childcare capacity, or require three references (on paper! In the mail!) you might ask, Should I just lead my own retreat? How hard can it b...

‘Caught up in the Jaws’: Writing for Theme

In our latest Craft Essay offerings, Aaron Gilbreath demonstrates how “theme” in nonfiction can “expand the gaze of one person’s life to reveal something larger about our culture, our times, or human relationships.” Here’s an excerpt from Aaron’s wonderfully useful essay:

Without a universal theme, personal essayists can end up writing anecdotes or catalogues of events that lapse into myopia and fail to connect our experience with readers’ experience. An anecdote is defined as “a short an...

Loosen Science Writing from Technical Grooves

In our latest Craft Essay offerings, Anna Farro Henderson explores the intricacies of world-building and narrative structure in effective science writing:

A key element of the scientific process is play. This is often overlooked. When I say play, I mean the kind of game that might end with everyone crying. The suspense, risks, hope, joy, and dead ends of making hypotheses, forging wilderness, and running experiments are messy. Wonder fuels inquiry and, often, human connection sustains it...

Revising Your Nonfiction Using “Lenses”

In our latest offering of Brevity Craft Essays, accompanying our first issue of 2023, Bryan Furuness joins Sarah Layden to advocate for using “lenses” in the revision process, and they also provide a series of highly effective editing prompts. Here’s an excerpt from that essay:

When the poet Tom Lux revised his own work, he used an approach he referred to as “lenses.” He took multiple passes over a poem but only focused on one aspect per pass. If he was reading the poem through the “clic...

New Brevity 72: Fantastic Flash

Our first issue of 2023 features powerful, concise nonfiction prose from Richie Zaborowske, Michelle Koufopoulos, Kaila Lancaster, Gabe Montesanti, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Patricia Foster, Sven Birkerts, Gary Fincke, Karen Kao, Robert Long Foreman, Patricia O’Donnell, Aliceanna Stopher, Heather Surls, and Hayli Cox.

In our Craft Section, Anna Farro Henderson explores world-building and narrative structure in science writing, Aaron Gilbreath demonstrates how “theme” in nonfiction can “expan...

Writing the Urgent

How might one writer’s call become another writer’s response?

By Beth Kephart

A word is a choice. A sentence is a story. Consonants and vowels are strike and extension, collision and hush. Every single letter we place upon a page, every mark of punctuation, says something about our writerly selves, about what sparks the urgent within us.

I think of urgency as the tale we must tell, the one that wakes us from our dreams and also permeates them. When we are urgent with a story, we do n...

Grey Ladies and Gymnastics: On Ageism at Writing Conferences

By Julie Ushio

In November, I hopped on a plane and took the forty-minute flight from Honolulu to Lihue to attend the Kauai Writers Conference. It was my third time at the conference and I looked forward to a week of Master Classes and the Conference.

As usual, women of a certain age filled the chairs. Not all had grey hair, but it was easy to see that demographics were heavily female and well over the age of fifty. I was not surprised. After all, this was Kauai and the cost of a plane...

Speaking Truth to Power: An Interview with Elissa Bassist

By Summer Koester

Elissa Bassist

I first discovered Elissa Bassist—teacher, humor writer, and editor of the “Funny Women” column on The Rumpus—as a student of her “funny personal essays” class. Her wit, hilarity, and generosity won me over instantly. Here she talks about her debut memoir Hysterical and the importance of using our voice.

Summer Koester: You write about how people hate women’s voices. I found the only way I can say things without annoying people is to say them in a pirate ...

Flash Lyric Essay About a Faculty Meeting on Artificial Intelligence in Student Writing at Which Professors Become Dejected and Lament the State of the World

By Yelizaveta P. Renfro

The history professor yells “Shit!” when he sees an AI-generated sentence, and “Show us the devil!” when the presenters offer to share a whole AI-written essay, and finally, “I’m going to retire!” The medievalist retorts, “I can’t retire for twenty-three years,” and then talks about the terrifying prospect of grading essays written by machines. Then someone else quips that with machine scoring of essays, one machine might be writing and another machine might be gra...

Exposing My Truth

By Regina Landor

My brother once said to me when we were discussing a disagreement I had with another family member: “Being right isn’t always what matters the most.”

I understood what he meant: peace is what matters. I’ve kept his words with me for many years. They’ve helped me scramble down from the high moral ground on which I sometimes find myself waving a flag.

But it’s tricky. I’m one who feels compelled to set things right. Maybe it’s my mild case of OCD. A picture hanging cro...