Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction | Brevity: The journal devoted exclusively to the concise literary nonfiction.

American Girl

by Amy Butcher

It’s 6pm on a Sunday when Brittany calls to tell me about the mealworms. The mealworms, she tells me, are laudatory—an honor, a reward for good behavior in this, her fifth year in what will almost certainly prove a lifetime sentence at the Ohio Reformatory for Women. I stand in...

Current Issue / Issue 78 / Feb 2025 / Nonfiction

Bridget Horan Rises from the Dead and Speaks Words Into My Ear

by Sonja Livingston

Práta means potato, child. Prátaí póir are seed-potatoes best planted on Good Friday. Iomaire is a potato bed and taobhfhód its own particular sod. Bachlóga are potato sprouts; millíní are the buds. Báinseog phrátaí is a patch of potatoes in bloom, lovelier than you might think. Caldar is a big potato....

Current Issue / Issue 78 / Feb 2025 / Nonfiction

Lonely As

by Jennifer Sinor

“Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.” —Philip Larkin We lost Aela on a Saturday, mid-morning, four weeks ago. One minute she was running along the path we have walked a thousand times and the next she was gone. She was a puppy, four years old, and...

Current Issue / Issue 78 / Feb 2025 / Nonfiction

Fallingwater

by Gretchen Ernster Henderson

Listen: On this night, the house is an organ, an orchestra, a bellowing storm. The stream roars under a bridge and balconies, channeling into rapids, leaping and crashing onto boulders below. Nothing is silent this night—forested as dusk without sun, cloaked by rain that thunders as if to announce water is coming...

Current Issue / Issue 78 / Feb 2025 / Nonfiction

Where the Komodo Dragons Live

by Karen Kao

You stand on the deck of a forty-four-meter wooden pinisi-rigged boat somewhere in the Flores Sea, close to where the Komodo dragons live. A brochure claims that this boat, the Ombak Putih, was made by hand in accordance with the traditions of the South Sulawesi people. You will spend the...

Current Issue / Issue 78 / Feb 2025 / Nonfiction

start with a murder

by Michael Todd Cohen

of crows, they who first saw me at the retreat: week in ohio, more than a little death at my heels. five or six of them, the crows, perched and rattling a dead-top tree, cackled me down a good morning (returned). a good morning (returned) is what I am seeking;...

Current Issue / Issue 78 / Feb 2025 / Nonfiction

Mystery House

by Sarah Fawn Montgomery

A door opens onto a wall. A window is trapped behind another. I visit the mystery house with my college boyfriend for an anniversary, but really, I am trying to uncover how I became a girl who accepts being torn down and rebuilt like this house. I am looking to...

Current Issue / Issue 78 / Feb 2025 / Nonfiction

A Barber is Born

by Anne Panning

Once upon a time, a young man with large ears and poor eyesight traveled from farm to city to pursue his trade. As his quick fingers spooled wet hair and snipped to the finest inch, a barber pole pulsed in the distance, spiraling him towards a spit-groomed future he was...

Current Issue / Issue 78 / Feb 2025 / Nonfiction

Let There Be More Spices

by Carrie Gaffney

1 In the beginning there was only absence. Of flavor. 2 The table of my youth was a darkness of bland, the burden of my mother’s type I diabetes baked into every surface. So as I stared at the jar of lard my new mother-in-law kept on the stove I...

Current Issue / Issue 78 / Feb 2025 / Nonfiction

Fifteen Facts About Zebras

by Lynda Rushing

My granddaughter has a toy I’ve come to hate. It’s one of those touch-activated gizmos with dozens of animal sounds: tap a picture of a cow and it moos, pat a horse and it whinnies. But touch a zebra and it sounds like a squeaky pump with hiccups. That sound...

Current Issue / Issue 78 / Feb 2025 / Nonfiction

My Mother Wants to Talk

by Natalie Villacorta

I’m on the sidewalk in front of my next-door neighbor’s house, just returning from my morning dog walk, when my mother calls. I tell her I’m just getting home, but I can talk for five to 10 minutes. Mom says, I want to talk for more than five to 10...

Current Issue / Issue 78 / Feb 2025 / Nonfiction

When I Was Someone Else

by Kayti Christian

The white ceiling looks like heaven, I say to the nurse who hands me a paper cup of water and asks me again, maybe for the third time, to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten. Three, I say, which is true. For once the hurt is...

Latest Issue

Issue 78 / Winter 2025

September 14, 2024

Amy Butcher, Jennifer Sinor, Karen Kao, Kayti Christian, Gretchen Ernster Henderson, Sonja Livingston, Michael Todd Cohen, Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Anne Panning, Lynda Rushing, Natalie Villacorta, and Carrie Gaffney, explore Mealworms, Komodo Dragons, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, and Fifteen Facts About Zebras. With wonderful artwork from Char Gardner.

Teaching with Brevity

January 25, 2024

Our TEACHING RESOURCES section (found in our top menu) offers a powerful collection of resources for writers and teachers of literary nonfiction, including prompts, craft essays, subject and craft element indexes, teaching tools, and much more.