Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 74

Crafting a New Genre: A Conversation with Jamie Gehring

Jamie Gehring’s glad her initial pitches got rejected.

Jamie Gehring, author of Madman in the Woods: Life Next Door to the Unabomber

By L.L. Kirchner

I’m not typically into true crime. I prefer relatable memoirs. Then I discovered Jamie Gehring’s new book, Madman in the Woods: Life Next Door to the Unabomber, and found both in one—a relatable memoir about a true crime.

In 1996, Gehring learned the identity of the nation’s longest-running domestic terrorist, Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the U...

Squirrels in the Writing Attic

By Serena Jayne

A dear friend once shared a concerning problem. She was dealing with squirrels in her attic. While the said squirrels weren’t a euphemism, I couldn’t help but consider my own issues with creativity as a “rodents in the rafters” type of problem. Festering story holes, failing to finish pieces I’d started, the inability to focus on one project at a time, to name a few, could easily be attributed to a plethora of squirrels scuttling about my mental attic.

After reading On W...

Paint What You See

By Cole T. Bennett

“Paint what you see, not what you know,” Tony said. 

The odour of oil paints and turpentine rags mingled with a whiff of fabric softener — the scent of the Bianco family. 

I was a thirteen-year-old wannabe artist, and Tony Bianco, a painter earning a living creating art, had agreed to give me lessons at his home studio down the road from my house. 

Rather than painting each individual branch and leaf on a tree, Tony encouraged me to squint my eyes, blur my perce...

Writing on Walls

How graffiti’s origin story helped me make peace with writing for the Internet

By Liz Charlotte Grant

I almost never see my words in actual ink. I’m an elder-Millennial a decade into a writing career. Most of the essays I have published have never made it to paper, existing only on the intangible wires of the Internet. This is the experience of most of my literary generation. We translate our sentences into a digital language we do not understand in order to reach across voids, where ou...

The Old Agony Trope

By V Hansmann

Writing is agony. 

This trope drifts through the ages as a truth self-evident and universally acknowledged. Its corollaries – solitude, perfectionism, discouragement, envy, alcoholism, book – compound the blood-letting sacrifice of putting pen to paper. If creativity hurts that much, why do it? 

Fear, probably; fear and its slutty handmaiden, pride. Those two feelings are the perpetuators and destroyers of expectations. Fear will concentrate one’s energies to focus on t...

Bella Tuscany, Bella Scrittori

Greetings from Tuscany!

Eleven writers and a couple of partners and friends joined Brevity Editor-in-Chief Dinty W. Moore and Social Media Editor Allison K Williams for a week of writing time, craft lessons, Italian cooking, Italian eating, and walking the same cobblestoned streets as writers and artists have for hundreds of years. Our tiny hill town, Certaldo Aldo, is enfolded in the countryside and enfolded us in fellowship and creativity.

Yeah, that’s a little cheesy.

But it’s ...

Writing about the Landscape of Loss

By Rachel Dickinson

At 8:00 pm on February 6, 2012, the unthinkable happened. I was sitting in my dining room when I heard a loud noise come from the upstairs. I ran up the stairs and into my 17-year-old son Jack’s bedroom where I found him lying on his bed with a shotgun across his body. I can’t really remember what happened next.

The ensuing decade has been a nightmare for our family – Jack’s three sisters, his father, and me. We have all had bouts of severe depression, anxiety, ange...

Watch Out for the Unexpected

By Andrea A. Firth

I walked out the doors of the tiny airport in Fayetteville into the blazing afternoon sun. At the curb I was greeted by Shari, my ride to The Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs where I was doing a residency. My plan for the week was to complete drafts of two essays and start a third. 

When I got in the car, Shari asked me where I was from. 

Northern California, I said.

She told me that she was a transplant from the Pacific Northwest and that she ha...

Learning to Speak

By Beth Kaplan

I sit on the bed in the hotel room, staring out the window at the rusty fire escape, sipping water to wet my dry throat and trying to calm my thudding heart. Notes beside me, I whisper my talk to myself for the hundredth time, taking peeks at the paper to be sure I haven’t left anything out.

I’m about to deliver the Wexler Lecture in Jewish History at the Jewish Community Centre in Washington, D.C., and I am terrified.

What awaits me tonight is the nightmare audience I...

The Power of Constraints to Unlock Creativity

By Amy Goldmacher

It’s my dedicated writing time. I’m at my desk, coffee next to me. It’s quiet. A blank document is open in front of me. 

Nothing happens.

Sound familiar?

Frustrated with the lack of words I got on the page, this June I participated in the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge: to write an original short story of 1000 words max within 48 hours using the assigned genre, location, and object. 

By the deadline, I had a short story in the spy genre that took place i...