Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 75

The Apprenticeship Model

By Angie Chapman

As a writer teaching writing to adults in colleges, universities, and community organizations for over a decade, the most frequent question I get from my students is, “When will I get my paper back with your comments?” Never mind that it’s on the syllabus that I return papers within a week of submission if they are submitted on time. For many of my students, that is never soon enough. 

The Instagram/Tik-Tok/YouTube/Twitterverse has trained us to expect feedback, satisfa...

Artifacts, Essays, and Exploring a Non-Binary Genre

In Curing Season: Artifacts, Kristine Langley Mahler blends lyrical, inventive-hermit crab essays with memoir to create a thoughtful, distinctive examination of place-based, experimental writing. Curing Season examines the author’s sense of displacement, after being uprooted from her pioneer-like upbringing in Oregon to the Southern traditions of Pitt County, North Carolina, a feeling that surges into her adulthood. It’s about adapting, fragmenting, and extrapolating memories and merging the...

Rivering the Memoir: Chris Dombrowski on Time, Nature, and the Geography of the Body

Chris Dombrowski’s forthcoming memoir The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water revels in the wilderness of parenthood and western Montana, traversing discovery and wonder with the deftness of a wolf crossing a stream. The author of three acclaimed poetry collections and the highly celebrated non-fiction book Body of Water, Dombrowski lives with his feral family at the confluence of three great rivers in Missoula, Montana. Noah Davis sat stream-side with Dombrowski in early Septe...

Believe It or Not: What Makes Us Weird Actually Unites Us

Allison Landa’s debut memoir Bearded Lady: When You’re a Woman with a Beard, Your Secret is Written All Over Your Face is a powerful first-person narrative of her struggles with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia since childhood. In the interview below, Allison and Chris Young discuss the book and the steps involved in writing, editing, and publication. 

Chris Young: From conception to print, how did Bearded Lady evolve? How did your perception of the book change over time? How long was that ...

The Magic of 750 Words

By Jill Kandel

I brought a 1,500-word essay to my first writing workshop. So proud of it I could barely spit. After two hours of lecture and discussion on writing short, the instructor said, “Bring it back tomorrow. Cut it in half.” I spent the night cutting, pasting, moving, revising, and proudly brought exactly 750 words to class the next morning.

Six days later – our writing workshop nearly over – I sat down with the instructor for a one on one. I was a lifelong reader and a nurse by...

No Bad Assignments: Selma Lagerlöf Took a Yawn-Worthy Topic and Turned It Into Nobel Prize Gold

Selma Lagerlöf

By Debra Moffitt

As speculation flutters about who will win the Nobel Prize for Literature in the coming week, let us tip a titanic, plumy hat to Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf who, in 1909, was the first woman to win the honor.

Mostly unknown in the United States, Lagerlöf’s first novel made her famous in Sweden, but she’s beloved in her home country for her children’s book, “The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.” When Sweden honored Lagerlöf by featuring her face on its c...

The Sanctity of the First Read

By Alyson Shelton

“What are you working on?” Someone new in my life might ask.

“An essay.” I’ll answer.

“About what?” 

“Something.” 

And that’s that.

I’m actually a decent conversationalist but not when it comes to my writing. Perhaps I’m superstitious, worrying that the heat of the idea will cool with sharing, but I also cherish that time when my idea is nascent and full of promise. And so, I don’t read very early drafts and I don’t ask anyone to read mine. It is a mostly u...

Anatomy of a Reader

By Amanda Le Rougetel

To write is one thing, to be read — deeply read, seen on the page for the writer we can be — is another. 

Words on a page amount to something or nothing, until someone other than the writer reads them, and then those words amount to a whole new world. A world of response. A world in which the words give shape to life beyond the writer’s hopes and dreams and take hold as the reader’s. 

The ultimate reader is one who, like you, reads the piece in published form. B...

Hello, It’s Your Book Proposal. Stop Ignoring My Calls!

Writing your proposal will help you finish your book.

By Lisa Cooper Ellison

You’ve been avoiding it for years, but deep down you know it’s time. I get your procrastination. What artist wants to work on a business document, let alone one with nicknames like “soul crusher” and “creativity killer”?  

Like you, I once banished book proposals to the level of hell that contains root canals, moth-ball-scented stickers, and elementary school violin ensembles. But working on my proposal—and ...

Why I get up early

By Becky Jo Gesteland

I ponder this question and peruse my blog to see if I have an answer. I find several relevant posts.

November, 2019 Time to myself.

I’ve been writing about my lack of time since July. Not sure why I felt I had so little time then, because I have even less now. Shifting priorities? New medication to combat depression? 

Women writers have always struggled to find time to themselves to write. Right now, I’m writing at 6:23 a.m. when I really wish I was still sle...