Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 95

7 Things the New Beatles Documentary Can Teach Writers

By Rachel Bucci

From virtuoso jam sessions to the fantastic late 1960s fashions, The Beatles new documentary “Get Back” has captured our collective imagination. I was mesmerized watching their creativity coalesce into iconic lyrics and melodies, and along the way, gleaned priceless reminders about the writing life.

1. First Drafts are Messy
When one of the Fab Four brings a song to the group, it’s rarely fully formed. They may have a few key lines or a riff to get started, but we se...

A Review of Sonya Huber’s Supremely Tiny Acts

By Emily Dillon

You probably know Sonya. You may know her award-winning essay collection Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System. You likely know her from her Brevity blog post in October. If you do, you know her like I know her: as an empathetic intellect charging through the halls of writing with a megaphone for the disabled and the outsider.

I know Sonya in other ways too–as a colleague, professor, and friend–and yet, if I’m being honest, I’ve had diffi...

The Writer in the Changing Room

By Margaret Moon

Trying to become a writer is like trying on lots of new outfits to see what suits you. You start with what’s fashionable but quickly realise that the skirt is too short for your knobbly old knees and the colour is all wrong for your complexion. No matter how much you squint or look sideways at yourself in the mirror, you can’t take off the forty pounds you gained sitting at a computer writing business reports for the last thirty years and you can’t fool yourself that ...

Clear Your Decks

Not everything we start is worth finishing.

The practice of writing is also practice. And practice/rehearsal/training involves mistakes, screw-ups, wrong paths, poor choices and loss of interest. Dancers don’t save videos of every rehearsal. Artists throw away plenty of sketches. Yet writers often work and rework a piece to death, hoping the next draft will finally be the one that gets published, sometimes stopping ourselves from writing something new, because we have to clean our writing...

It’s Nothing Personal: How Essays Make Secrets Seem Silly

By Nikki Campo

When I published an essay recently about my lifelong struggle with emetophobia, the clinical fear of vomit, my dad sent me a text message: “Wow! I’m surprised you’re willing to publish something so personal.”

I scratched my head. Really? I had previously published stories about grief after losing my mom, about my exploration of psychedelics for anxiety (though I never partook), even about my pesky mustache. None of those topics had garnered that kind of surprise from my ...

A Happier Writer

By Melissa Fraterrigo

Lately, when I catch myself feeling content, it feels weird, like I should be complaining about my colleagues or boss. I’ve done that before, but I’m not doing that now. Happiness, it seems, takes some getting used to.

Instead, I marvel at the beauty of the poem I just read, or consider my student last week who shared how writing her memoir has allowed her to make peace with grief. The other students in the class and I had nodded behind our Zoom screens. Inside I ...

SOAP (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan) Note for Patient 117342 BAKER, Sarah

By Sarah Baker

Chief Complaint: Writer’s Block 

Subjective: (PMHx: Past Medical History): Childhood hx severe persistent asthma requiring repeated hospital admissions, gradual resolution over adolescence, adult history of mild intermittent asthma. Also, “bunions,” early onset severe bilateral functional hallux valgus, where her hallux (big toes) nestle snugly into their neighbors. Pt denies pain, or impairment of ambulation. Reports rare anxiety-well managed. Pt’s two front teeth are ...

A Review of Ona Gritz’s Present Imperfect

By Ellen Blum Barish

I first came across Ona Gritz’s work when she submitted an essay to my literary publication, Thread, in 2015. The piece was titled “Should I Feel Anything Yet?” and I was in from the first sentence: “It was the eighties but we wanted it to be the sixties, those of us in divided Boulder who claimed Pearl Street, ‘the mall’ as opposed to ‘the hill’ where the University of Colorado students fratted or whatever they did besides look down on us through their Ray-Bans.” 

...

Drip, Drip, Drip

By Heidi Croot

Writing the first-draft hot mess of my memoir was easy—a mudslide down the inky slopes of several thousand journal pages.

Rewriting countless drafts, fun—an archeological dig I’ve never tired of.

Restructuring the thing, hell—as I struggled to place backstory at the precise moment of reader thirst. 

But none of those ups and downs compared with the anxiety I felt about sending my manuscript to my two aunts and my uncle, who appear frequently in its pages.

I had ...

A Review of Laura Davis’ The Burning Lights of Two Stars

By Debbie Hagan

I stare at my eighty-seven-year-old mother, who stands in the hallway, sweaty and flushed, breathing hard and telling me how she’d tried to walk around the block, then fell and crawled into the bushes, hoping no one would see her.

Really? Mom’s knee is so bad, she can barely hobble from the living room to the kitchen…never mind walking around the block. Still, her pale, sweaty face and deer-in-the-headlights stare tell me something happened. What? I’ll never know, b...