Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 81
July 6, 2022
Writing in the Anthropocene
By E.A. Farro
Today, the stars wouldn’t get between Romeo and Juliet. The lovers could call one another or share locations and avoid tragic misunderstandings. Cell phones and satellites are just two of the technological achievements that require resource extraction and consumption, changing the chemical composition of our air and water. The shipwrecks that begin The Tempest and Twelfth Night wouldn’t be acts of god today. The storms would be extreme weather made more likely by climate ...
July 5, 2022
How to Embarrass Yourself at a Writing Conference
By Eileen Vorbach Collins
Let’s go to this! I typed, along with a link to HippoCamp21’s website. Within minutes, Anne said, okay.
An impromptu decision to attend a nonfiction writers’ conference made late one night on a Messenger chat. But I wasn’t serious. Not really. It cost money, and there’d be airports and there’s a pandemic, and well, I’m not a real actual author…
This was not the first time Anne had nurtured my impulsivity. One day near the end of our years at the Baltimore Ex...
July 4, 2022
Spoiler Alert: A Comic
By Ali Solomon
We are pleased to share a literary-themed comic chronicling the delicate and often frustrating challenge of discussing books without ruining the reading experience for others.
Click the link below to view the entire comic in PDF form:
https://brevity.files.wordpress.com/2022/06/spoiler-alerts-ali-solomon.pdf
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Ali Solomon is a writer/cartoonist from Queens, NY who contributes regularly to the New Yorker. Her book, I Am ‘Why Do I Need Venmo’ Years Old, was ...
July 1, 2022
A Review of Rick Campbell’s Sometimes the Light
By Stephen Corey
Having to admit to myself that I’m not the world’s most perspicacious reader, I was about halfway through my second reading of Sometimes the Light before suddenly answering my own persisting question about Rick Campbell’s choice of title for this striking first essay collection (after seven poetry books): “Oh,” sez I to myself, “and sometimes the dark, dummy.”
And now I have to admit to you, my reader, that the term through in my first sentence is a bit misleading ...
June 30, 2022
The Importance of “Personal Story”
By Julie Ryan McGue
In the fall of 2017, I was in the hot seat. Several chapters of my memoir were up for critique before a writer’s group I had joined through the University of Chicago Writer’s Studio. Prior to the session, I’d emailed my classmates a synopsis of my work-in-progress and twelve pages of material from the midpoint of my adoption search journey. The chapters dealt with the pivotal moment when my birth mother denied contact with me. While this section of the memoir had been p...
June 29, 2022
Old Memories, Fresh Teaching Methods: On Meeting Students Where They Are
By Mary J. Breen
A few years ago, after teaching several CNF-memoir classes with the local university’s continuing education department, I decided to run a memoir class just for seniors. Several people signed up, but things started out slowly; no one appeared terribly interested in what I had to say. Then a friend offered to loan me a collection of objects she uses with her Alzheimer group: things like a tin eggbeater, a bar of Lifebuoy soap, old LIFE magazines, a pocket watch, a fount...
June 28, 2022
How a Sex Book Helped Me Overcome Writers’ Block
by Louise Julig
In June of 2019, I went from writing 2,200 or more words a week for a solid ten weeks to feeling like I was reaching through mud to get even a few scraggly sentences onto the page. I’d gone from feeling free and uninhibited in my writing to blocked, stifled, dried up.
The close to 25,000 words I’d racked up came during Joelle Fraser’s Thirty-Minute Memoir course, a memoir boot camp designed to get us generating lots of new material. Our daily writing goal was 300 words ...
June 27, 2022
Ten Ways to Stop Being a Writer
By Daien Guo
1) Develop carpal tunnel. Or some combination of carpal tunnel, cubital tunnel, tennis elbow and tendonitis. It doesn’t hurt that bad, but it never goes away. Buy three types of braces for your right arm. Wear them all at once when you go to bed so that your husband won’t try to have sex with you.
2) Meet someone who sold their book at auction and got a movie deal. Start imagining your book as a movie. Start casting it (hello, Constance Wu!) and brainstorming the ...
June 25, 2022
The Brevity Blog and Book Reviews
We understand the disappointment that some have shared since learning that the Brevity Blog will not be featuring book reviews going forward. The decision is not taken lightly, but was deemed necessary due to time and staffing issues. Though our blog editors understand the importance of promoting small press books, it became increasingly obvious in tracking our site statistics that book reviews were our least-read feature, while also among the more time-consuming.
Please note that Brev...
June 24, 2022
The Evolution of a Title
By Barbara Ferraro
Ever google ‘how to title a book?’ From YouTube videos to master classes, title generators to ten-step plans, there’s plenty of online help. Build on a theme or phrase from the story. Use a character’s name or memorable setting. Pull keywords from a hat, two by two, till you find a pair that sings. Lots of free advice but no easy answers. Which leads me to believe: maybe the book chooses the title.
Twenty years ago, I began writing memoir as an antidote to my dys...
