Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 85

On Making Art: Quietly, then Loudly, for Personal Comfort

Negotiations Have Failed, Nina Gaby

By Nina Gaby

There’s so much to do, “real” stuff, the endless “real” stuff of life that we feel we have to finish before we can go do the unreal stuff. Before maybe a stroll, or writing an observation about that stroll, or scribbling a color found on that stroll. Whatever. We put all that aside so we can finish the vacuuming or the taxes or the real stuff of the day job. Maybe because we feel lucky that we have a day job or a floor to vacuum, we pay pena...

A Review of Melissa Febos’ Body Work

By Brian Watson

I wasn’t expecting my mother’s question.

She knew that I was working on my memoir; I had called early in September 2021 to let her know that a publishing company had requested the manuscript—an exciting turn of events that later led to a kind rejection from the publisher.

I had given her a very rough outline of the manuscript. How I had grown up gay, how my failure to process my father’s death when I was fourteen affected me, my choice to move to Japan in 1988 in...

On Husbands, Fathers, and Seeking Approval

By Melissa Fraterrigo

When I published my nonfiction piece, “The Night of the Fire,” which details a kitchen fire we had growing up, I sent the link to my husband. A few days later, I wanted to ask him what he thought. But I already knew the answer: he hadn’t read it. And writing these words even now, my stomach turns.

The rational part of my brain speaks up, says: You have to believe in your work above all others. Exactly what are you hoping for him to say about your piece? Why is it s...

Memoir of My Marriage: Finding the One [Version, Revision, Iteration, Incarnation] that Finally Worked

By Jennifer Lang

Six years ago, when I was confidently writing my first memoir, I broadcasted to the whole world, blogging about what I should—and shouldn’t—tell my teens about my cross-cultural, inter-denominational marriage, how I filled in memory gaps with old letters to my mother and friends, and why my manuscript eventually hit a wall.

Really, though, I started writing this story long before that. For my first workshop at Vermont College of Fine Arts two years earlier, I shared “Ro...

Do You Need an MFA? The Absolutely, Positively Definitive Answer

Not condescending at all!

I’m in a wonderful writing group, tailored to our exact needs: 20 pages, once a month, no written feedback. We are three people with writing or writing-adjacent jobs and one aerospace systems analyst. Between us are a PhD, a couple of MFAs, some BAs and Associates degrees. If you listened to our last discussion, ranging from The Yellow Wallpaper to Mr. & Mrs. Smith, you’d be hard-pressed to define anyone’s credentials from their writing or their critique. We’re all w...

Some Thoughts on Writing Hermit Crab Essays

By Laurie Easter

During a recent AWP conference panel on the lyric essay, Angie Chuang, Heidi Czerwiec, Sayantani Dasgupta, and I read excerpts of our essays appearing in Randon Billing Noble’s A Harp in the Stars anthology and talked about how we came to our forms. My essay, “Searching for Gwen” is a hermit crab essay in the form of a word search puzzle. What follows below are the thoughts I shared on the panel:

When I first tried to write about the subject matter in “Searching for...

Opening Literary Windows to Better Understand Our World

By Candy Schulman

It began during the pandemic lockdown. Teaching my nonfiction writing workshops to Zoom rectangles, I could hear Black Lives Matter marches outside my 14th floor Greenwich Village apartment. Their voices made me understand that my own reading habits and recommendations to students were still not diverse enough.

My millennial daughter pointed out that I was drawn to work by women whose lives mirrored mine. These writers made me feel less alone in a complex world. On...

Robe, Coffee, Crossword

By Melissa Ballard

Don’t worry. You won’t be asked to remember those three words. This is not part of a cognitive assessment. It’s how I start my mornings: put on my robe, make coffee, and sit on my living room sofa with the newspaper crossword.

I’ve tried doing actual writing first thing in the morning, but I’m not cut out for it. I could barely fill one page with my illegible cursive, much less the three pages suggested by authors like Julia Cameron. When I read the legible bits later...

Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Diverse Voices in a New Anthology

By Rachael Hanel

After years of teaching media writing to undergraduates, I received the opportunity this semester to teach creative nonfiction to MFA candidates. Ever since I learned that Debra Monroe had published an anthology of creative nonfiction in 2020, I knew I wanted to use that book in a class.

What excited me most about the anthology, Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, was Monroe’s clear intent to new, diverse voices among some of the CNF stalwarts we’re used to. Of course...

How Creating a Writing Workshop Brought Me Back to My (Neglected) Memoir

By Nina B. Lichtenstein

If you are anything like me, you have a partial or completed manuscript that you’re dreading getting back to. You have spent a lot of time writing, thinking about, workshopping, editing, developing, and fine-tuning this yet-to-be published project, but there are limits to your perseverance, so your darling has been stuck in the proverbial drawer for longer than you care to admit, even to yourself.

A memoir I am working on, My Body Remembers, started as writing a...