Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 90

How Humor and Essays Became Timeshare Partners in My Brain

By Nikki Campo

My first draft of an essay about losing my mom to cancer was a doozy. An overabundance of adverbs wasn’t even my biggest problem. I was going for “personal essay,” but landed squarely on “journal entry.” Complete with tear-stained pages and many corresponding descriptions of past tears, the copy was, by any standard, bad.

As writers, we know when our work sucks, but sometimes we don’t know why. Or, as someone only a couple years into my dedication to the craft, I don...

Alcoholics Anonymous and Storytelling

By Benjamin Selesnick

I left my twenty-eight day stay at rehab in the summer of 2011, a few months before my seventeenth birthday. The night I got home, one of my parents’ friends from our family’s synagogue, who, unbeknownst to me, had a few decades of recovery under his belt, took me to an A.A. meeting at a Methodist church on the other side of town. For the next two months, I went to meetings at that church three times a week, and when I reached my ninety-day sober anniversary, the...

The Third Way: Publishing Without an Agent

By Suzanne Roberts

Anyone who grew up around the time I did suffered through a number of school-sanctioned terrors; one such terror was dodgeball. I was one of the weaklings who could not dodge the ball fast enough. The school bullies always aimed for my face to see if they could smash my glasses. Sometimes they did. I have heard this game is now banned at schools around the country.

But even worse was the way teams were picked. Two captains took turns picking their team, one by one, w...

Searching for the Art Beyond the Struggle

By Rae Pagliarulo

“I’m having a writer/identity crisis,” I say to my therapist, whose smile is glowing from my laptop screen.

“I know!” she blurts back. “The very best kind. This is huge.”

I have never been one to buy into that narrative that to make art, a person has to suffer. The Struggling Artist trope is tired and typical, I think, and it only exists because capitalism doesn’t reward creativity – not because suffering begets it. But here I am, trying to navigate my own relation...

9 Things I Learned in Megan Stielstra’s Memoir Course

By Marisa Russello

When I read The Wrong Way to Save Your Life by Megan Stielstra, I knew I had to apply for her intensive year-long memoir course, the first of its kind offered through Catapult. These intensive “generator” courses are offered every so often for writing memoirs, essay collections, novels, and poetry. There are even generator classes aimed at specific populations, such as queer and trans writers or writers of color. Although the price is steep, they offer need-based schola...

I Love Zoom Writing Workshops

By Mary Hannah Terzino

I love Zoom writing workshops. I love the way some people name themselves on Zoom: Steve’s iPad, or Grandma Lois, or JCO, as if Joyce Carol Oates is slumming with the twenty of us on a Saturday afternoon.  I love the pronoun designations, eighty percent of them she/her, often the obvious ones; the rest silent, bestowing upon us the gift of guessing.

I love the beginning of these workshops, the participant credentialing. We hear from a novice, a nail technician co...

Becoming a Reliable Narrator

By Patty Mulcahy

My memoir is by definition my version of events, a view of the world filtered through the writer’s perception. But what happens when those memories are distorted by a brain that wasn’t processing sensory information correctly? I was confronted with this challenge when attempting to render scenes of deep psychosis while chronicling my six-year-long descent into schizophrenia. I had to learn how to write an unreliable character in a way that was trustworthy.

When I f...

Why Your Essay Got Rejected

Last month I responded to 113 essays and book beginnings. A fraction of what a literary magazine might see in submissions; a lot for me to comment on. Nobody got a form rejection, because the pages were for a webinar—What’s Wrong with this Work: Turning Rejections into Publications—and the learning was the point. The authors listed their previous rejections from literary magazines, mass media, websites and agents, as many as 35 rejections for a single essay.

I hadn’t expected so many subm...

So Many Places To Go, So Many Lives To Live

by Kathy Stevenson

Even though I am not actively looking for a new town or city to move to, and I am quite content in my home of the past twenty-five years, just north of Chicago, whenever I travel to a new destination part of the fun is imagining myself living there. I often travel or vacation with a subliminal purpose, leaving myself open to the possibility that someday I might decide to give in to a subconscious urge that has always pulled at me – the urge to just “chuck it all” and tr...

The Path to Creativity

By Stephanie Weaver

Stepping into the labyrinth on March 1st 2020, I heard the polished gray river rock crunch beneath my feet. Dawn was breaking on the last day of a creativity retreat in the Santa Cruz mountains of Northern California. This movement-based meditation helped me see that living a creative life is like walking a labyrinth.

You choose to step forward. Not everyone does. I’ve met plenty of people who tell me they want to write someday. Stepping forward might look like brea...