Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 88

Quiz: Is It a Critique from The Great British Baking Show or a Response from a Literary Magazine?

By Lori Barrett

Can you guess which of the statements below are from judges sampling baked goods and which are from editors sampling my writing?

This piece is not for me, but I like the way you [write/bake].

I worry about this one. First off, it’s very thin.

This [pastry/story] sparked a discussion among our [judges/editors].

It’s a real mess, isn’t it?

There are some clever beats here, but I think this could use a stronger through line. 

Sometimes simplicity is a way...

How Time Whispers a Different Story

By Lisa Witz

As a child, my father told me about living in the one-story house in Owl Canyon, just up the road from the modern house where I was born. He’d light a fire with newspaper in the woodburning stove, and he’d show me where his mother set the pot used to cook every meal. They had no electricity, no running water, he told me, his long fingers pointing to the outhouse that served as their bathroom for his entire childhood. He’d talk about the cold mornings, about the way the eucaly...

What Am I Doing? A Writer at Eighty

By Abigail Thomas

I’ve always been curious about why one chooses fiction for one story and nonfiction for another. For me it’s pretty simple—some stories need to be served straight up. That’s nonfiction. Others need more architecture, that’s fiction. It’s a decision best left to the gut.

It has been a long time since I wrote fiction, it felt like flying when it went well, but then so does everything; it was thrilling to go chasing some bright scrap of cloth, or a pregnant Dalmatia...

One Writer’s March Madness

By Jennie Burke

People ask if I am the mother of basketball players. My four children tower above me, the son and the daughters, scraping the door jambs at six-four, six-one…the high, high fives. They rest their chins on top of my head, and say how cute when I ask, “can one of you reach me the sugar off the top of that shelf?” They fold around and over me in embrace. But they do not play basketball. None of us do.

I cannot reach the sugar, and I cannot write, even though I want to. Ev...

The Power of the Prompt

By Colleen Kinder

I’m one of those writing teachers who swears by prompts. Narrative directives like, “Write about a childhood memory, set in a car.” or “Begin every single sentence with ‘I remember.’” (Hat tip, Joe Brainard). “Write an apology letter to a place.” 500 words, tops. Ready-set-go.

Usually, the more specific the prompt, the more magnificent the outcome. Students I would not have called exceptional writers burst out with essayettes I’ll remember for years. In ten minute...

A Review of Peter Wayne Moe’s Touching This Leviathan

By Jonathan Frey

Once, we found a kestrel on a field edge. We were walking the dirt road that intersected a thousand acres of wheat, and the kestrel lay there on the margin, wings splayed. My wife picked him up, spread his wings, found beneath the downy chest the thrum of a heartbeat. She handed him to me, and it was like holding a breath in my hand. I had looked at many books about birds, admired paintings of kestrels from Audubon to Sibley. I had identified them atop utility poles b...

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to English

By Kaja Weeks

I was born to World War II refugees from Estonia, a tiny country on the Baltic Sea. When they escaped the horrors of war, they couldn’t take much—but they wrapped up their language, as precious as a baby in a blanket, and carried it with them to the new world.

Despite being born in America, my early life was cocooned within an all-Estonian speaking family and community. What I remember from being a five-year old is landing in American kindergarten as a fluent speaker ...

Of Book Burning, Nostalgia, and Little Women: An interview with Jennifer Niesslein

By Brooke Champagne

How does a self-proclaimed nostalgic square her affection for the past with progressive politics?  How can one remain a nostalgic American when others use that sentiment for ill intent?  Jennifer Niesslein, editor of Full Grown People, addresses these and other issues in her exciting new collection Dreadful Sorry: Essays on an American Nostalgia.  She spoke with me about race, class, family, humor, and Little Women for the Brevity blog.

Brooke Champagne:  Jennif...

AWP Thursday Event: Flash (Nonfiction) to the Future

If you are attending AWP this week, please drop by Flash (Nonfiction) to the Future: A Speculative Brevity Reading on Thursday morning at 10:35 am, in Room 124 of the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

Deesha Philyaw, Natalie Lima, Ander Monson and Ira Sukrungruang will discuss future possibilities for the flash nonfiction form and genre hybrids just now emerging, along with brief readings and audience discussion. Brevity’s founding editor Dinty W. Moore will moderate.

With the popular...

A Review of Randon Billings Noble’s A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays

By Celia Jeffries

When I first taught the essay, it was in the form of five paragraphs: a nice model for young writers used to counting on their fingers.

When I taught high school English, we pushed beyond five paragraphs to more formal essays: persuasive, descriptive, narrative, and expository, all of which may be as necessary as learning table manners, but each of which sometimes felt like writing with one hand folded in the lap.

In college I taught the requisite freshman comp...