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

Kinship: One Week in LA

by Ana Maria Spagna

“Ki” to signify a being of the living Earth. Not “he” or “she,” but “ki.” So that when we speak of Sugar Maple, we say, “Oh that beautiful tree, ki is giving us sap again this spring.” And we’ll need a plural pronoun, too, for those Earth beings. Let’s make...

Current Issue / Issue 77 / Fall 2024 / Nonfiction

When the Scheduler Calls and Refers to My Upcoming Procedure as an “Emergency Colonoscopy”

by Bethany Jarmul

The images that flash in my mind are not my grandfather’s last breaths, his frail wrinkled body giving up after cancer ate away his insides. Not my mother lying in a hospital bed after the surgery to remove nine inches of her diseased intestines. Not choosing the cheapest wooden casket...

Current Issue / Issue 77 / Fall 2024 / Nonfiction

How Beautiful That Unruly Tongue Unfurls

by Daisy Elizeth Magallanes

Para tod@s that still spit back Caló, trilongo, dialect, jargon, pachuco slang, pachuco caló, “code-switching” (as some academics like to call it), or simplemente el lenguaje que nace del barrio is my favorite way to commune with those I choose to commune with. To make myself legible and illegible, and...

Current Issue / Issue 77 / Fall 2024 / Nonfiction

Transition Lenses

by Jessica Petrow-Cohen

My mom is doing karaoke in the kitchen, holding a microphone that our neighbor ordered for her on Amazon, belting from her chest. Her hair is silver. Her shirt, a creamsicle orange polo. Her glasses are thin rimmed, the kind that turn dark in the sun. Transition lenses, they’re called....

Current Issue / Issue 77 / Fall 2024 / Nonfiction

A Small, Previously Unknown, Hole in My Heart

by Jillian Barnet

The afternoon my husband left me, I collapsed on the floor in a fetal position, my face at the level of the birds on our stone patio. Through the sliding glass door, I watched juncos, sparrows, and chickadees alight to peck at seeds, jostle one another, then fly away. Over...

Current Issue / Issue 77 / Fall 2024 / Nonfiction

I Hear You Man

by Emad Jabini

I don’t remember a time when men, young, elderly, or middle-aged, stranger, or familiar, didn’t randomly confide in me the most traumatic horrors of their reality. Is there something about my bespectacled face? My half-broken nose? Is it my beard? Is it too philosophic, should it be more fundamentalist? Or...

Current Issue / Issue 77 / Fall 2024 / Nonfiction

Surf

by Janet Burroway

Peter says, “I can’t sleep in this relentless surf.” “You’re the one who loves ritual and repetition.” “Ritual, yes. But this pounding is relentless.” We are sitting on the screened porch of our friend Fita’s beach house, Alligator Point near Tallahassee, watching the sun slide down from cirrus to cirrus in...

Current Issue / Issue 77 / Fall 2024 / Nonfiction

An Abecedarian Nocturne for the NICU Moms

by Bea Forkan

An angel got its wings today, the caption reads beneath a photo of a mother’s baby the size of a hand posted to the Facebook NICU parents page. Night nurse clicks around vital sign jumbo screens. The whir of my breast pump punctuates each beat as I doom scroll...

Current Issue / Issue 77 / Fall 2024 / Nonfiction

It’s Only Fair

by Rena Willis

When the ax falls, we stand perfectly still, as is expected. We don’t close our eyes. We don’t take a step back to avoid the splatter. We stand off to the side, breathing through our mouths, tasting the stench of chicken shit and sweat. We can hear the chimes of...

Current Issue / Issue 77 / Fall 2024 / Nonfiction

Just a Joe

by Sydney Lea

Alaska’s winter darkness can almost drive a person insane. That’s a commonplace, but I could tell from one visit to Anchorage, its absence of true darkness in June might do it too. I stepped out of a bookstore, a bit too cutely called “The Title Wave,” where I’d bought a...

Current Issue / Issue 77 / Fall 2024 / Nonfiction

The Last Time I Climbed A Mountain

by Julia Watts Belser

There are a thousand things I can’t recall: the date, the place, the details of the trail. I was nineteen, maybe twenty. It was a strong ascent, somewhere above St. Gallen in the Alps. All the rest has gone to mist. What stays: the incandescent sunshine. How the air bit...

Current Issue / Issue 77 / Fall 2024 / Nonfiction

Where the Dust Goes

by Diane Gottlieb

It’s 8 a.m. You’ve dropped the kids at school and you’re on your way home when this crazy blur of squirrel runs onto Allen Drive. You don’t hear a thing. Instead, you feel him. A small bounce of the car, a tiny jolt, and now he’s just a bump under...

Current Issue / Issue 77 / Fall 2024 / Nonfiction

Lamentation for Junior

by Michael Meyerhofer

A few months after my biological brother’s funeral, my father calls to say my stepbrother just got shot and killed by Milwaukee police. They say they tried to pull him over but he sped off, crashed, fled on foot with a gun in hand. You can imagine the rest. When...

Current Issue / Issue 77 / Fall 2024 / Nonfiction

Jiaozi

by Charlee Simacek

Changsha, China, I’m fourteen months old. My life has swiveled on its axis and turned west, towards the United States, a new life and new family. However, before I leave, I get one last dinner. One last farewell. I sit in my highchair, next to my new parents. Curious eyes...

Current Issue / Issue 77 / Fall 2024 / Nonfiction

Return Journey

by Wendy Elizabeth Wallace

The night of the Space X Dragon launch, my father collapses at the kitchen table. A week earlier, he had his third surgery to correct the way his muscles, spasming with Parkinson’s, pulled at his spine, forced it into a parabolic function instead of a proud column. For the third...

Latest Issue

Issue 77 / Sept 2024

September 14, 2024

Our newest issue features Bethany Jarmul, Wendy Elizabeth Wallace, Jessica Petrow-Cohen, Daisy Elizeth Magallanes, Ana Maria Spagna, Janet Burroway, Jillian Barnet, Julia Watts Belser, Diane Gottlieb, Michael Meyerhofer, Sydney Lea, Emad Jabini, Rena Willis, Charlee Simacek, and Bea Forkan. Accompanied by Tyler Haberkorn’s haunting 4×5 cyanotypes submerged in black tea.

Teaching with Brevity

September 14, 2024

Our TEACHING RESOURCES (found in our top menu) offer a diverse set of resources for writers and teachers of the flash form, including teaching tools, syllabi, prompts, craft essays, subject and craft element indexes, and much more.