Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 76

Simmering My Story

By Morgan Baker

When my husband wanted to breed our second Portuguese Water Dog, Spray, I hedged. I didn’t think this was the greatest idea. Research told me that Spray could develop pyometra, a potentially life threatening infection, or ovarian cancer. Puppies could get stuck on their way out, and some puppies just don’t make it after birth. This all terrified me. I showed Matt all the literature on the dangers of breeding. He stood his ground. This would be a great family adventure. 

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American Idol as a Metaphor for the Writer’s Pursuit

By Evyenia Downey

Contestant number eighty-two thousand three hundred and the-market-is-already-oversaturated-with-women-writing-about-their-brains-and-boyfriends, step right up! Stand at the X on the floor — a coincidental representation of all your denied submissions. Make eye contact with the judges, but not long enough to expose the tears welling under the glue-on lashes you didn’t know how to put on but figured if you can inflate a CV you can fake an extended lash. 

Get that voice ...

Thoughts On the Road Not Taken

By Sandra Hager Eliason

“Two roads diverged,” I thought, recalling Frost’s poem, The Road not Taken. He describes his decision to take the road less traveled by, and the difference it made. I see the poem as a metaphor for my life. 

Reading and writing consumed my high school years, and I was confident my poetry, short stories, and essays would be published someday. In college, ideas blossomed and flowed easily onto the paper, the sticky keys of my manual typewriter preventing my finger...

Happy Birthday Seven Drafts

There’s a logic (and some magic) to the number 7.

By Andrea A. Firth

When you take a class from Brevity Blog’s editor Allison K Williams, she starts by sharing her hashtag, #FirehoseMe. Why firehose? Because she packs more information (and laughs) into a class than almost humanly possible. She’s literally a blast.

Last Fall, not long after the launch of Seven Drafts, Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book, I interviewed Allison for Catapult Magazine. She presents the same way i...

The Trouble With Reading

By Julie Holston

I love to read, as I assume most writers do. As a nonfiction writer, I know the value of studying memoirs and personal essays and reading outside my genre. I even belong to a book club where, instead of reading the same book for discussion, we show-and-tell the books we’ve each read or are currently reading. We exchange recommendations and sometimes even lend out a beloved book. Everyone goes home with additions to our Libby lists and GoodReads shelves. But whereas some of...

Close Encounters in Nonfiction

Rebecca McClanahan, in our newest issue of Brevity, uses a scale devised by an astronomer to describe three levels of UFO encounters to encourage encounters of the deepest kind in our memoir and creative nonfiction.

Here is an excerpt of her fascinating Craft essay:

 Indeed, how does any writer make contact with their subject and experience communion? First, by acknowledging the subject as an animated force, a life form with a language and structure different from ours but from which ...

Writing Prompts for Getting Lost

In a Craft Essay featured in our in our newest issue, Jill McCabe Johnson traces the literary roots of lost and found narratives — reaching “at least as far back as the French poetic form, the Chanson d’Aventure, when medieval poets ‘lost’ themselves in the countryside until they encountered or ‘found’ something inspiring and transformative” — and offers useful prompts, based on the work of Roxane Gay, Victoria Chang, and Joanne Nelson.

Here is a sample prompt:

Prompt:

Draft a l...

Brevity’s September 2022 Issue

Our new issue is here, featuring powerful new essays from Daisy Hernandez, Julie Marie Wade, Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, Shaindel Beers, Angela Morales, Jennifer Battisti, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach,  Kristin M. Distel, Anna Vodicka, Mika Sutherland, Meg Senuta, Ralph James Savarese, Heidi Fettig Parton, Tyler Mills, and Lori Jakiela. Plus stunning photos from Amy Selwyn. 

Our Craft section features three new essays: Jill McCabe Johnson traces the literary roots of lost and found narr...

Carving Joy From Grief

By Sally Jane Smith

My life has been blessed with pleasure and privilege. Like everyone, I’ve also had my share of troubles: there was a rape attempt that left me damaged for decades, the deaths of both parents in my twenties, the break-up that uprooted me from my home and shattered my illusions of romantic love, upheavals at workplaces I valued, a Sri Lankan collision that broke my body and robbed me of my wanderlust for ten years.

Not one of these came close to the agony of losing...

On Keeping a Journal, and the Act of Forgetting

By Eunice Tiptree

“It’s important that you remember everything.” 

I heard the commandment as I bee-lined for the living room. The voice came from my head, yet seemed to speak from the air. I was eight- or nine-years old. 

I may have paused a second, but I did not wonder at the statement or ask myself why was so important to remember. I went on my way — the Flintstones were coming on.

The commandment only survived as a curiosity. It did not influence my course in life. Yet looking ...