Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 80
July 20, 2022
Write About Your Loss
By Ninette Hartley
“Well, he has a broken leg but that’s the least of his problems. He has suffered some trauma to his head. In this country we … how can I put it? …we would say he is brain dead.”
On the 13th of January 2011 my twenty-seven-year-old son Thomas, was rushed to intensive care in Porto, having fallen through a skylight whilst searching for somewhere to paint graffiti. I received a phone call from a doctor in the hospital, and when I asked her how bad it was she explained ...
July 19, 2022
Telling the Unwanted Story: an Interview with Memoirist Jill Kandel
By Sarah Coomber
Your second memoir, The Clean Daughter: a Cross-Continental Memoir, takes us to five different countries, yet all of your experiences tie into figuring out your prickly relationship with your father-in-law. How did you get to the heart of that story?
This was a hard book to write, because it is really personal, and it touches on not only my life, but my in-laws, my husband, my children and my grandparents.
It circles around three themes. One of them is my relati...
July 18, 2022
Why I Listened to One Song on Repeat While Writing a Book about my Mother
By Jocelyn Jane Cox
Some of us need complete silence in order to write. Others are fuelled by the ambient noise of a coffee shop. And some of us hit our groove with music. I prefer music without lyrics and have been writing with it in the background for over 25 years.
In late December of 2020, I watched Disney Pixar’s mesmerizing animated film SOUL with my family. I have trouble sitting through movies at home – I get antsy and bored easily, especially with action scenes – but this work of art ...
July 15, 2022
Crafting Beauty from Trauma: An Interview with Keema Waterfield
Keema Waterfield is the award-winning author of Inside Passage, a nomadic childhood memoir set along the wild coast of Southeast Alaska. Much of Keema’s body of work features drunk hippies, stoner parents, and traveling to play music from an early age. Her prose is lyrical and often humorous, even as she explores the impact of early childhood sexual trauma.
Summer Koester (rhymes with “luster”) is an award-winning writer living in Juneau, Alaska. Though they both grew up in Juneau, the t...
July 14, 2022
A Comic Year
Stonecoast MFA alums Penny Guisinger and Meaghan Reynolds sit down for a conversation about A Comic Year, Reynolds’ collection of poetry comics.
Meg, I know you as a beautiful poet, and I would love to hear about the journey into creating A Comic Year. How long have you been drawing? When and how did you decide to capture this story graphically?
Although I finished undergrad with an art major alongside my English major, I had abandoned my artwork in my early 20’s mostly because I ...
July 13, 2022
Self-Editing Mantras to Enhance Your Revision Process
By Deborah Sosin
I learned Transcendental Meditation just before entering college. As part of the training, my teacher assigned me a mantra, a one-syllable Sanskrit word. She instructed me to say my mantra out loud, then repeat it silently with my eyes closed.
It’s been fifty years, and I still meditate twice a day. And I still return to my mantra as a touchpoint when my mind wanders off, which it inevitably does. After so long, the process happens smoothly, with no conscious thou...
July 12, 2022
How Not to Write a Book
By Cheryl Boyer
Procrastinate – Find anything else to do, especially tasks you’ve put off because they’re unpleasant. Scrub the toilet. File the stack of papers on the corner of your desk. Schedule the appointments you keep forgetting about. Top off the bird feeders (even if they don’t need it), and while you’re at it, take inventory of available bird seed and calculate how soon you’ll need to order more, then check prices online where you’ll get distracted by ads for products you didn’t ...
July 11, 2022
It’s Not As Bad As You Think
Jane Friedman analyzes 2022 memoir deals to determine the role of platform in the author’s success.
Reprinted with permission, from The Hot Sheet.
In the last decade, I haven’t hosted a single class on the business of publishing that hasn’t led to at least one question along the lines of “How many social media followers do I need to satisfy an agent/publisher?” or “Do I need to join [social media outlet] to get a book deal?”
Is it really the case that writers need a sizable followin...
July 8, 2022
A Review of Jill Christman’s If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays
By Sonya Huber
If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays gives you what you didn’t know you needed: sloths and loss and Swedish Fish candy, alligators and avocados and bird girls, pain and loss and hard traveling back to confront that pain, googly eyes and wayward skirts and lipsticks uncapped in purses, electric eye contact with a fetching poet across a dive bar, all woven with joy. This expertly crafted essay collection works as a memoir and clocks in at a slim 205 pages, but it f...
July 7, 2022
Head’s Up: The Headmistress as Writer
By Ann Klotz
I had not thought much about being a writer when, 18 years ago, I became the head of a girls’ school. I’d been a life-long English and drama teacher and a college guidance counselor, but in those days, I did not write much for myself. Certainly, I knew how to evoke a Senior with a deft anecdote and strong verbs, and I kept a journal, but I identified more as a teacher than a writer. My students and I wrote together—big epic sagas about pioneer women and the French Revoluti...
