Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 84

Revising a Tiny Love Story

In Brevity’s newest issue, Lori Tucker-Sullivan talks about revision, feedback, and how much is too much when taking the advice of editors or other writers. What do we owe ourselves as writers, through revision? Is it right or wrong to release our control of our own words?

Here is an excerpt:

… crafting a one hundred-word piece for The New York Times’ Modern Love Tiny Love Stories. It was a demanding exercise to tell a story that took place twenty years earlier about a letter writt...

Consider the Platypus

In Brevity‘s recent May issue, Randon Billings Noble examines the “daringness” of the lyric essay, how it relies on intuition more than exposition, image more than narration, and question more than answer.

“But despite all this looseness,” she writes, “the lyric essay still has the responsibilities of any essay: to try to figure something out, to play with ideas, to show a shift in thinking (however subtle).”

Noble sees in the lyric essay a mammal of sorts, but

one that lays eggs; ...

Brevity 70 Springs Forward

Our newest issue, live this morning, features exceptional flash essays from Debra Gwartney, Jessica Handler, Cherri Randall, Anne Panning, Todd Davis, Aliki Barnstone, Amy Miller, Lori White, Wendy Wallace, Mariah Rigg, Tyler Whichard, and Bhante Sumano.

In our Craft Section, Lori Tucker-Sullivan discusses revising her one hundred-word Tiny Love Story for The New York Times, Degan Davis uses the words of Dante, Mark Doty, Rebecca Solnit and others to explore “how to keep our eyes ope...

Towards a Daily Writing Practice: A Credo

By Karen Babine

I don’t believe in inspiration anymore.

I believe in compulsion.

I believe in friction. I believe in the energy of phrases pulled from a stranger’s conversation, of ideas that don’t quite match their contexts, a belief in being so aware that you stand next to Alexander Smith and become the world’s amanuensis because you have no choice.

I believe the world is an interesting place.

I believe in doing the work of being a writer, the work of studying at the page...

A Review of Brahna Yassky’s Slow Dancing with Fire

By Jennifer Lang

By the time Brahna Yassky, author of Slow Dancing with Fire: A Memoir of Resilience, realizes her skin is on fire, it’s almost too late; fifty-five percent of her body, including her right arm—her painting hand—is marred. In her early thirties, she spends three months in a burn rehabilitation unit followed by the better part of a year in her parents’ house outside NYC, where she has no choice but to surrender and accept help with the mundane acts of living, from being ...

A Review of Tarn Wilson’s In Praise of Inadequate Gifts

By Renée E. D’Aoust

One summer when I was about seven years old, I decided I wanted to set up a little stand to sell things. (I had probably seen a Charlie Brown cartoon where Lucy sets up her lemonade stand.) The problem was twofold: no one ever came by the dirt road at our island cabin, and I didn’t know what to sell. I didn’t have any lemons to make lemonade, and we were on a rural island with no stores. My mum and I brainstormed what to sell: fresh-caught fish, bouquets of fir boug...

In Praise of One Beat Words

By Linda Button

Here’s to one beat words. Short and sweet and quick. Hot in your mouth, fast to say, they leap from tongue to brain in a flash. They amp up your tone and add salt to your prose. And by one beat words I mean short.

Short words are honed to work fast. Why? Most hail from the harsh north, where each breath is hard won. Blunt like chipped tools. Tough to make it through dark, cold nights. Not like the tongues from the warm south, born of sun filled days, where time stre...

A Review of Olivier Haralambon’s The Cyclist and His Shadow

By Cheryl Anne Latuner

For my husband, born in France, there are only two sports: soccer, which he played semi-professionally before moving to the U.S., and cycling. Soccer plays year-round on our TV, and I’ve come to know teams, players, even coaches, as well as terms for play—off-side, corner, penalty, shoot-out—watching the players dribble up and down the field, ball between their feet. But come July, our TV is tuned to the twenty-one stages (race days) of the three-week cycling mar...

Becoming a Writer in the Third Chapter of Life

By Carole Duff

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.  -Anatole France

Western culture divides life into three stages: birth/student, work/family, and retirement/death. My husband and I, moving into our retirement years and building a new house, borrowed the Hindu concept of four stages, adding a time of spiritual growth and reconnection between retirement an...

The * Fact * of * Memory

By Dinty W. Moore

THE

The challenge Aaron Angello set for himself is daunting, maybe a little insane, borderline brilliant, and truly fascinating. For roughly four months, Angello woke at 5 am, brewed himself a cup of coffee, carried his cup to a small writing desk, and wrote – one per day, in order – a word from Shakespeare’s 114-word 29th Sonnet.

One word. The word “the,” for instance, or “of,” or “bootless,” or “possessed.”

He sat with the word a while, and then, “Once I fe...