Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 69

How My Vaudevillian Great-Grandparents Taught Me to Love Shameless Self-Promotion

Hap Hazard

By Melissa Hart

I started writing when social media meant word-of-mouth, an article in the newspaper, or if you were lucky, a minute on the radio to plug your project. Before Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and all the rest, “shameless self-promotion” ranked up there with the F-word. Somehow, readers were supposed to find out about your work without your input. And so, I blushed at the audacity of the poet I met at a writing conference wandering the halls with a w...

A Whole Life: Essay Collection as Miscellany

By Steven Harvey

The beech tree rising in our bow window finds its own shape without any help from me. It is a gift from my friend, the artist and naturalist Dale Cochran, who walked the woods with me before I built my house spotting which trees to keep. “Definitely that one,” he said pointing to the healthy beech sapling with a split trunk, each one about as wide as my arm, that I have watched bulk up mightily over the years. He was right. In the summer it sprouts lovely, light-green...

Go Into the World and Listen

By Margaret Hawkins

Simone Weil supposedly said that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. We speak of paying attention, as if this gift is a currency. Writers certainly want to be paid in this currency (as well as in others, let me go on record as saying), but attention is also what writers pay to the world. Annie Dillard advises us to “admire the world for never ending on you – as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes from him, or walking away.”

How to begin...

Writing Despite the Odds

By Sarah Fawn Montgomery

We write nonfiction to witness the world. We write nonfiction because we believe in its power to reflect reality, and so we hold up our observations to readers like an offering. But chronicling contemporary culture is difficult when the world no longer makes sense.

I began writing my latest book, Halfway from Home, at the start of what seemed like the end of the world. When the pandemic began, time stretched on but also seemed to be running out. The environment...

Go Figure: A Year’s End Accounting

By Jennifer Lang

Were someone to quickly scroll through my Submittable account dashboard and see the overwhelming number of asphalt grey and pencil lead black boxes, they’d probably assume I was a Loser, in need of new tactics or in the wrong profession. Not one beloved, coveted shamrock green box since November 2, 2021, for a story that cascaded out of me in hours and was snatched within a few days by The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.

Between January 5 and December 31, 2022, my ...

36 Hours in Cobblestonia

By Russell Frank

*By early 2020, The New York Times’s 36 Hours column had been running for nearly two decades. The series — one of the Travel section’s longest-running — offers readers a recommended itinerary for a weekend trip in a bustling location…Now, 36 Hours is finally back. – New York Times, Oct. 7, 2022

**With apologies to Stan Mack’s “Real Life Funnies,” every word is guaranteed verbatim from The New York Times, except the name of the town.

With its inventive food scene, excelle...

Sechs on New Year’s Eve

By Heidi Croot

I was sitting across from my grandfather at the game table one New Year’s Eve as he clutched his belly in helpless laughter.

“Mein Bauch, mein Bauch!” he said, barely able to form words.

I was seventeen years old that night and learning euchre at the round pedestal table in my parents’ little brown bungalow. My German immigrant grandparents, then in their seventies, had made the two-hour train trip from Toronto to ring in the new year with us in our small bedroom commu...

The [Panel] Art of Memoir

Promoting a Comprehensive View of a Memoir’s Purpose through Thematic Structure

By Margaret Moore

When I look at the complete manuscript of my debut memoir, I see panel art.

Panel art, formally termed a polyptych, is an image divided into sections that are depicted on separate canvases. Side by side, the canvases collectively show the entire image.

In this butterfly polyptych, for example, the side panels solely feature the wings while the center focuses on the tagmata. Viewers can s...

Conditions of Artistic Safety

By Tommie Ann Bower

My predators were winning. A debris field of drafts and reset strategies surrounded the couch where I watched tiny house videos over a bowl of potato chips for breakfast. This was a surprise because I can name my trauma triggers in three notes. But this time, a kudzu-like growth was smothering the hilly lobes of my prefrontal cortex. I couldn’t think my way out of stuck.

The latest science on trauma suggests running towards the disturbance in the force. But until I n...

The Celestial Vault

By Deborah M. Prum

Years ago, I read a book that animated and forever changed my creative process.

In The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers says, “It is a universal experience that a work of art has no existence apart from its translation into material form.”

That is, people think a painting doesn’t exist before it’s painted, a sculpture before it’s sculpted, or a story before it’s written.

But Sayers went on to posit that a work of art, let’s say a story, not only lives in our mi...