Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 77
September 9, 2022
Brevity by the Numbers Part 3: Hard Math and Harder Math
By Leslie Stonebraker
Welcome to part 3 of “Brevity by the Numbers,” a three-part series detailing my discoveries from analyzing the hard (and squishy) data related to five years of Brevity essays. For the genesis of this research project, read Part 1: “How I cheated my way into a Brevity byline.” To discover Brevity’s most overused words and best-favored subjects, read Part 2: “Word clouds and other squishy results.” This final installment is where a non-analyst tries her hand at hard math.
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September 8, 2022
Brevity by the Numbers Part 2: Word Clouds and Other Squishy Results
By Leslie Stonebraker
Welcome to part 2 of “Brevity by the Numbers,” a three-part series detailing my discoveries from analyzing the hard (and squishy) data related to five years of Brevity essays. If you want to learn why I began this research, how I built my data set, and what qualifies me to write about it (spoiler alert, not much beyond chutzpah!), go back and read Part 1: “How I cheated my way into a Brevity byline.” In this installment, I make pretty word clouds and sad discoveries.
...September 7, 2022
Brevity by the Numbers Part 1: How I Cheated My Way into a Brevity Byline
By Leslie Stonebraker
It was a simple enough idea: Read five years of Brevity, log each piece in an Excel database, then tickle the data until it tells me something useful about the common features of flash nonfiction essays. As a writer new to flash, I wanted to understand the rules of the genre, so I could be deliberate about breaking them. When I couldn’t find much literature to guide me, I decided to make my own. A secret, shameful part of me wondered if graphs and statistics coul...
September 6, 2022
What’s the Big Idea?
How arguing with yourself can sell your book.
By Allison K Williams
One key way to sell a memoir? From a “hot essay”:
a well-argued, passionate, strongly written essay or OpEdpublished in a major media outletthat garners attention online and off.Simple, right? Just write your piece and go viral! But first, let me tell you what the Powerball numbers will be this week…
Nobody can guarantee virality (not even people with millions of fans already!) Fortunately, your work...
September 5, 2022
The Other Side of the River
By Morgan Baker
I’m at an impasse. I’ve carved out time to write in a beautiful setting with a pond and ocean before me. Just me and my two dogs. I walk them almost every morning on the beach before towels and coolers cover the sand and people run in and out of the sea.
I walk watching the ground under my feet as we traverse the curve of the cove. Is there anything there that is going to trip me and send me flailing and falling? What I discover however, as I gaze at the ground, is that ...
September 2, 2022
A Review of Jody Keisner’s Under My Bed and Other Essays
By Jeannine Ouellette
When I was ten years old, my mother’s boyfriend, Spider took my sister and me to the Rialto Theater in downtown Casper, Wyoming. My mother had recently divorced for the second time, life was bleak and increasingly violent, and I was in it for the popcorn. I could never have known—and to be fair, neither could Spider have known—that John Carpenter’s Halloween would gain notoriety as the most boundary-breaking horror film of its time for, among other firsts, the fa...
September 1, 2022
Welcome to Heidi Croot
The Brevity Blog keeps expanding, growing in readership and fielding an increasing number of quality submission, so we’re expanding our team. A hearty welcome to Andrea Firth and Heidi Croot who join us as Blog Editors, alongside Allison and Dinty who are still on the job, looking for fresh voices and fresh perspectives. Andrea introduced herself yesterday, and Heidi does so today. We are thrilled to have them on the team.
Heidi Croot
Brevity Blog is that place writers dream of.
...August 31, 2022
Welcome to Andrea Firth
The Brevity Blog keeps expanding, growing in readership and fielding an increasing number of quality submission, so we’re expanding our team. A hearty welcome to Andrea Firth and Heidi Croot who join us as Blog Editors, alongside Allison and Dinty who are still on the job, looking for fresh voices and fresh perspectives. Andrea introduces herself below (and Heidi will do the same tomorrow). We are thrilled to have them on the team.
Andrea Firth
Hi! I’m a writer, editor and educator bas...
August 30, 2022
Byline
By Melissa Ballard
“What’s that?”
“It’s a magazine that published one of my essays. See, you can read this.”
I pointed, and Adah read, “By Melissa Ballard.”
My almost six-year-old granddaughter is not easily impressed, but her eyes opened wide.
She looked at me and said, “Woah!”
Truth be told, I was excited, too. Most of my essays these days are published online, but in this case, there was also a print edition. It arrived on my birthday, while Adah was visiting, and both we...
August 29, 2022
Starting the Next Chapter
By Meg McGovern
In my sixty-one years of life, most have revolved around a school calendar. Unlike people in the business world whose fiscal year is January to December, a student-who-has-become-a-teacher’s new year begins at the end of August.
When the school year culminates in June, teachers are exhausted and have a lengthy to-do list for summer vacation; clean the basement, organize pictures, shred old receipts and bank statements, get the carpets cleaned, tend to the gardens, sched...
