Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 98

To Do or Not To Do: On the Comfort of List Essays

By Jill Kolongowski

As a nonfiction writer, I’m scared of plot. Perhaps that’s why I’m a nonfiction writer. I’m drawn to writing about the way things are, or thinking about the way things could or might be. It feels like my job is to find a plot in the senseless.

And the past year and a half has felt utterly senseless. Our first daughter was born three months into the first lockdown in Northern California. I wrote some pieces about the weather, but they were fragments, incomplete. I fe...

The Power of Small Journeys

By Jeanne Bonner

I wasn’t visiting Manhattan to discover the tiny waterfall park on 51st Street, or the set of hidden stairs off Beekman Place leading to the East River.

No, I’d gone there in August for a research fellowship at the New York Public Library.

But stumbling upon the waterfall on my first night in town (and later the hidden staircase), I felt as though I’d never been to New York before, and this discovery was a reward for making the journey. The wall of water appears to ...

A Review of Ira Sukrungruang’s This Jade World

By Debbie Hagan

Several years ago, at a writer’s conference, I stood next to Ira Sukrungruang at a makeshift bar in the conference director’s kitchen, engaging in loose chitchat. For reasons that escape me now, Sukrungruang told me, he’d gotten divorced because he wanted a child. After this, our host shooed us outside to roast marshmallows, and, thus, I didn’t hear the rest of this story.   

The next morning, I couldn’t stop thinking about this yearn for a child, but not being able...

What’s Wrong With the “I” Word?

By Elisabeth Hanscombe

When I was a child the nuns taught us never to use the word ‘I’. It was too self-seeking. Better to slip into the passive voice, the way our university lecturers taught when writing up psychology experiments. A form of language that troubled me, even then. The idea that some mysterious person made things happen.

In English classes, it wasn’t easy, for instance, to write about what happened on the weekend, without inserting the word ‘I’. Even in fact-based subject...

Getting to the Truer Version of the Story

By Aimee Christian

Memoirists often ask themselves, Would anyone actually want to read my story?

That depends.

David Mura says, “I view the process of writing as a call to change: We start to write a book in order to become the person who finishes the book.”

I wrote an entire draft of my memoir and when I was done, I felt great. I submitted it to my writing group, who reflected back to me something I could not see myself. My first draft was not just shitty, it was ugly. Angry. Fu...

Rendering Truth Faster

By Melissa Uchiyama

Revelation while using an undersized lid: It was during an intensive, two-day Japanese cooking course taught by a chef and food writing legend, Elizabeth Andoh. Among the miso, dishes, and knives, one item was a drop-down lid called an otoshibuta (otōshee-bootah). 

Instead of the Western lid made to fit exactly on the rim of a pot or pan, cooks here employ wooden, ill-fitting lids that lightly sit atop. The diameter is smaller; a 20 cm pot may take an 18 cm lid. Any...

Drawing Inspiration from Micronature

By Mary Hannah Terzino

Nature: There’s inspiration for you. Everyone says so.

But what part of nature? The natural world writ large is too immense to tell me a story. White puffy clouds are too changeable, their reversion to gray disappointing. Tall firs are aloof, reliant on intimidation. I cannot be inspired by the fragile bowl of the sky; I cannot be inspired by something too mysteriously beautiful to understand. If I don’t understand it, how can I write it? I lose myself instead of...

What Metallica’s “Black Album” Teaches Us About Writing Briefly

By Brendan O’Meara

Thirty years ago, Metallica’s self-titled record Metallica, better known as ‘The Black Album,’ was released. It was Metallica’s fifth studio album and was a watershed moment for the band in terms of sound and, more important, brevity.

Metallica had made a name for itself with epic seven-, eight-, nine-minute-long songs, but it was ‘The Black Album’ where the four key players wanted to challenge themselves not by making increasingly epic songs with more intricate ...

A Review of Brenda Miller’s A Braided Heart

By Kelly K. Ferguson

Last week I found myself wandering Ellis Hall in Ohio University. Back when I was a creative writing grad student, I lurked all the time, acting as if I had official business, but really on the lookout for company, which I usually found. But that was seven years ago, and we’re in the second year of a pandemic. Ellis Hall has since been renovated to resemble a Hampton Inn. The dusty hardback copies of Ivanhoe? Recycled. The bat under the trash can? Disposed. No sensibl...

Writing and The Green-Eyed Monster

By Laura Davis

In the final weeks before the launch of my first book in nineteen years, I’m excited, exhausted, obsessed, and optimistic—when I’m not feeling overwhelmed and hopeless. As I get closer to my launch, I’m more emotional, on edge. It’s getting harder to remain grounded in all that’s good and steady in my life.

Yesterday, I started listening to one of many writing podcasts I subscribe to. The latest episode was about deconstructing a book launch. Oh, I thought, that’s perfec...