Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 79

Get Out There Like Gaga

By Jason Prokowiew

On the press junket for A Star is Born, compilation videos show Lady Gaga repeating the story of how no one wanted to cast her as an actor, but Bradley Cooper did. She said:  “There can be 100 people in the room and 99 don’t believe in you. And you just need one to believe in you, and that was him.” Though I laughed at the repetition, I took the story to heart. If Lady Gaga could stomach rejection, couldn’t I? Is success a numbers game built around not giving up?

Toda...

Dear Me, Sincerely You: First Drafts, To-Do Lists & the Forever-Present in Life Writing

By Dr. Sarah Barnette

Dear Me,

Upon commencement of your task to complete the first full draft of your memoir, I write a set of instructions for its completion.

Your Primary Goal: To complete a Minimum Viable Product of your book in its entirety. It does not have to be perfect. It has to be on the page.Reminder: you are writing memoir and therefore must tackle the tension that exists between preserving the nature of memory and providing narrative structure. Mimic the way you remember...

Don’t Start at the Very Beginning

By Allison K Williams

When Julie Andrews sang “Do-Re-Mi” in The Sound of Music, she stressed the building blocks. Her seven Austrian stepchildren-to-be needed to understand the scale before yodeling their heartfelt emotions through the Alps. As writers, we need building blocks, too—a sense of the seeds of our story, the events in our background shaping our family’s behavior and our own, our cast of characters, an overview of the dramatic structure.

Our readers don’t need this information.

...

How Truthful are Memoirs?

In his essay “How Truthful are Memoirs?”, Roy Peter Clark, a journalist and Senior Scholar at the Poynter Institute, offers a detailed list of ten “rigorous steps to an honest form of writing,” making a firm argument that there is a clear line between fact and fiction in memoir. We present his steps below, followed by a link to the full essay (featuring Mary Karr and Vivian Gornick). We’d love for you to weigh in through our comment section as to your level of agreement with Clark’s standard...

Writing What I Don’t Remember

By Helen Bouchami

For the first two years of my life I lived, with my parents, in the coal cellar of my grandparents’ boarding house. In the immediate post-war years, housing was scarce, but other rooms in the house, proper bedrooms, were available but kept locked, reserved for visitors who might seek respite from the ‘dark satanic mills’ of inland Lancashire in this, their favourite seaside resort.

I suspect this experience had a profound psychological effect on me, the more potent for...

The Brevity Blog: Should We Rebrand?

As both Brevity (the magazine of original essays) and The Brevity Blog (discussions of craft and the writing life) both grow and expand their audience, we see more and more folks confusing the two. That’s not a huge problem, and mainly we are just happy you are here, but maybe some folks don’t realize we have twice the flavor.

So a small thought for a late July Wednesday: should we rebrand The Brevity Blog as The BrevityBlog, or maybe just BrevityBLOG to make the distinction more apparen...

Finding Joy in the Struggle: Kathleen Rooney’s “Where Are the Snows”

Kathleen Rooney, photo by Beth Rooney

Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore sat down to discuss the line between essay and prose poem with Kathleen Rooney, author of Where Are the Snows, chosen for the 2021 X.J. Kennedy Prize by Kazim Ali, who calls the work “a smart, fierce, and intelligent take on contemporary life that everyone should read.”

Rooney’s book is also heartbreaking and wickedly funny

And hard to classify.

 *

DINTY: It strikes me that so many of these poems could easily ...

Trolls Can Be Teachers, Too

By Candace Cahill

I scrolled. 

Past the title, the social media share icons, and the “listen to this article now” button. I slipped by the newsletter sign-up prompt, a “Read More Like This” section, advertisements for Covid Vaccinations, and a notice for a Van Gogh exhibit in Anchorage. 

And there, just beyond the sponsored content and the “Popular in the Community” segment, I came to my destination: the conversation. 

More commonly known as the comments. 

I’d been warned. Cha...

You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth

By Abby Alten Schwartz

I’m 11 years old and reading under my covers by flashlight, trying not to get caught by my mother awake past my bedtime. I’ve discovered Judy Blume books, and I don’t mean her stories for little kids about pet dogs and turtles and dogs named Turtle, but the ones about ‘tweens, a term that hasn’t yet been coined in the late 1970s.

Blume writes about bullying, periods, masturbation—taboo in kid lit until she disrupted the genre. At school, my friends and I pass her ...

Memoir Teacher as People Pleaser

By Beth Kephart

“How to tell if you’re a people pleaser: the 8 signs you’re too nice and why it’s impacting your wellbeing, (Amy Beecham, The Stylist)” the headline reads. I text the link to my son with a note: I’m afraid that if I look too closely, I might check all the boxes.

The phone rings. He wants to talk, to go through the signs in their order. I’m in a bruise mood. It’s the teaching. I have memoir-teaching rules: Love every student. Fall into the uprise of their stories. Find th...