Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 72

Surviving the Season

Hide a book in the bathroom in advance.

by Allison K Williams

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas, my loved ones gave to me

Twelve bosses texting

Eleven toddlers shrieking

Ten addiction triggers

Nine tacky sweaters

Eight guests arriving

Seven spouses slacking

Six in-laws nagging

Five traaaafic jaaaaams!

Four unwanted presents

Three loud screens

Two barfing pets

And an obligation Christmas party.

I am somewhat notoriously not a holiday person. I love my...

Piano Lesson

By Kresha Richman Warnock

In Mary Oliver’s “Music Lessons,” the piano teacher exchanges places with the student. As her fingers hit the keys, “Sound became music, and music a white / scarp for the listener to climb / alone.”

My own piano teacher is a young woman less than half my age. She is gifted and trained and apologizes for correcting me, which I try to tell her is what she’s paid for. On the days when I miss note after note, I would be happy if she would sit at the piano and play ...

And When Your Journal Passes On

By Anthony J. Mohr

When a literary journal disappears, a little hole appears in my heart. It’s happened too often. Now, when Duotrope’s Sunday morning Weekly Wire reaches my inbox, I race to the section marked “publisher listings with major status changes” and hope they don’t say a place that once published me “has permanently closed to submissions,” “is on indefinite hiatus to submissions,” or “is believed to be defunct.” The first two phrases are usually euphemisms for the third: defunct...

To Continue or Not? Writing the Memoir, That Is.

By Nancy L. Agneberg 

I worked on my memoir for years. Years. 

Revising. Restructuring. Changing the focus. Responding to feedback from my writing group (“Go deeper, deeper, deeper”), and incorporating what I learned in classes and from books about writing creative nonfiction. 

I was pleased with the current version of my book—and with myself—and decided it was time once again to share the manuscript with a writer whom I had hired to read earlier versions. I wanted her opinion and th...

Brevity’s Upcoming Special Issue: Trans* (Transgender, Gender-Nonconforming, and Gender Expansive) Experience

By Zoë Bossiere

Most people don’t know I’m trans. When strangers look at me, they see my long hair and high cheekbones, hear my soft voice. No one guesses based on how I present now that I grew up with so much ambivalence about my gender.

As a girl who never felt like girl, I lived and presented for much of my childhood as a boy, with a bowl cut and a strong preference for he/him pronouns. When puberty made passing untenable, I began to understand myself as androgynous, neither boy nor...

Is That All There Is?

What if publication isn’t your best goal?

By Allison K Williams

An author friend realized something while working on her memoir: faithfully rendering the stories of her life and preserving her experiences for her family was important. Quality writing, ideally at a publishable level, was also important. Actually publishing? Not so much.

Another author friend recently told me she’d just landed her dream job. Based on a similar previous job, she’d written a novel, a snarky, hilarious se...

How My Modern Love Essay Saved My Memoir

By Mary Alice Hostetter

A gentle question from a member of my writing group is how it all started. “Don’t you think you might include your coming to terms with being a lesbian in your memoir’s arc?”

“I do not want to be the poster child for Mennonite lesbians,” I responded, perhaps more forcefully than her innocent question warranted.

I thought I was finished with the first draft of my memoir, a quiet story about growing up in a Mennonite farm family in Pennsylvania. It was a tale o...

Ballet Barre and Memoir

By Kara Tatelbaum

Pliés, tendus, dégagés…whether you’re in Paris or Poughkeepsie, ballet barre exercises are the same. Most professional dancers are in class by 10 am every morning, whether they’re home or on tour. The routine is expected. You show up for class. You start with pliés. After thirty years of leotards and tights, I know this in my bones.

When I began to write my memoir, I was all over the place. The freefall of rants in the margins of my appointment book felt liberating at ...

17 Steps to Accelerate Your Writing Life

How simple changes propelled my writing productivity beyond my imagination

By Bethany Jarmul

I’ve loved writing since I was a child, but I haven’t always made it a priority. Last year, I published two pieces of writing. I was thrilled with those publications, but when it was time to make my 2022 New Year’s resolution, I decided to go all-in: to give it my best effort for one year and see what would happen. 

This year, I’ve had 33 pieces accepted for publication in literary magazines....

Sharing the Studio

Why aren’t we teaching writing technique?

By Allison K Williams

Writing is the only art form without a focus on technique. Sure, we take English class in high school and learn about the past perfect tense. College Composition 101 implants the five-paragraph essay, which must later be uprooted to write creatively. And workshops give us feedback on the emotional impact of our pages, the character’s journey or the storyline.

None of that is technique.

Technique—in any art—involves fo...