Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 92

Do I Hafta? Why and How to Be a Writer on Twitter

Waaaaaaahhhhhh…do I hafta be on Twitter? Of course not! But Twitter has plenty of benefits for writers even if you only check in once a week.

Twitter is the smallest of the major social platforms. Compared to almost 3 billion Facebook users, YouTube’s 2B, and Instagram and TikTok’s 1B each, Twitter’s under 500 million seems positively quaint. For writers, this smaller audience means it’s easier to find and interact with your community.

Agents and publishers casually interact, answer qu...

Writing as a Death-Defying Act

By Karen Traub

It’s June of 2018, and I am sitting at a table in the basement of a classroom building in Newport, Rhode Island, eating a turkey sandwich and getting to know my MFA cohort.

As I pop open my can of lime soda, Katie Moulton and Edgar Kuntz introduce themselves. Katie is a freelance music writer and Edgar is a poet who will be teaching at the Salve Regina University residency this week. Katie has the prettiest dark eyes and a smile so bright and friendly I feel like I’ve kn...

A Review of Tom Kizzia’s Cold Mountain Path

By Vivian Wagner

I read Tom Kizzia’s Cold Mountain Path: The Ghost Town Decades of McCarthy-Kennecott, Alaska after a recent move to Alaska, and the book captures my experiences of the palimpsest nature of both the McCarthy area and the state as a whole. This is a book about layers and about the difficulty of getting to any one truth about a place.

In this book, Kizzia tells the story of what he calls “the ghost town decades” of McCarthy-Kennecott, exploring how layers of stories t...

I’d Be Grateful for Your Blurb: Making the Ask (a little) Less Awkward

By Mallory McDuff

Oprah. Terry. Cheryl. Janisse. Brené. Liz.

It took ten seconds to write their first names on a blank index card, as if I were brainstorming party invites or recalling past lovers. I was a member of their virtual paparazzi, following these famous authors on social media, not to suck up, but because I thought of myself as a close friend of their work.

When my editor later reminded me of the deadline for endorsements for my book, Our Last Best Act, about revising my f...

Writing Memoir Goes Like This

By Cassandra Hamilton

You decide to write about a topic; let’s call it orange. You embrace writing about orange. Near the end of the first draft, you realize you’re writing about rainbow.

Excited about this rainbow discovery, you begin anew, throwing yourself into the passion of writing about rainbow, the thrill of researching rainbow, of waking invigorated by rainbow dreams. You’re tickled noting rainbow synchronicities (“Oh wow! A car drove by with a rainbow sticker just as you said,...

Learning to Write Memoir

By Sherry Mendelson Davidowitz

I woke with a start, sweaty and frightened. It was the same anxious dream I’d had since retiring after thirty years as a psychiatrist. I was back in medical school unprepared for an exam when suddenly I remembered that I was already a physician and a psychiatrist. What was I doing taking an exam after having earned my degree? I was relieved to realize it was only a dream.

After I retired, I’d experienced waves of emptiness that remained with me for mo...

A Review of Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory

By Lindsey Anthony-Bacchione

To read Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief  is to step inside the making of a sculpture, to feel the deft hands of an artist carving a body of language from scraps of memories, histories, trauma, and hope. Dear Memory is a masterful work that births a new genre-bending narrative, a true experiment in capturing the experience of the generational effects of losing a language to migration, a culture to assimilation, silence, ...

The Obituary We All Need (To Write)

By Jeanne Bonner

When my father died last month, I had just enough room in his obituary to say he was a masterful gardener, had had four children, and once worked as an engineer on the Apollo space missions. But there wasn’t nearly enough room to reflect how he lived. I couldn’t mention that he was born on the kitchen table of his family’s home or that he chided me for not seeing the movie Schindler’s List, which he hissed was “seminal.” Not to mention his vast repertoire of sounds – ...

Happy Writing

By N. West Moss 

My first rule of writing is to never beat myself up about the work, and I don’t. I don’t beat myself up if I sit down and write something lurid, crappy, sentimental, or incomprehensible. I don’t beat myself up if weeks go by without finding time to write, and I don’t beat myself up if I write something great and no one wants to publish it. Writing is the great passion of my life, and because of that, I protect it, even from myself. 

The world can be a sour, judgmen...

Writing Is Writing Is Writing

By Michelle Redo

“She said yes!” I squealed to my husband Phil.

“What?” he exclaimed, unable to read my mind, as I always assume he can do.

It was a Sunday morning, mere moments after extending an invitation to Zibby Owens, mastermind behind the Mom’s Don’t Have Time To Read Books podcast. She’d said yes, she’d talk with me on my little podcast! Zibby launched her podcast in 2018. Since then she’s expanded into a Mom’s Don’t Have Time To do much of anything empire. She knows a lot a...