Review of Sue William Silverman’s The Pat Boone Fan Club
For most of my adult life, I’ve struggled with identity issues, not knowing where or with whom I truly belong. To explain, I spent much of my childhood overseas, as the daughter of a diplomat, moving every few years and not establishing strong roots in one community. I felt as if I could fit in...
Review of Sue William Silverman’s Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir
University of Georgia, 2009 In her book about memoir writing, Sue William Silverman begins by showing us what not to do. She takes us to the beginning of her career, as she’s sitting in writing class, facing an instructor holding up a magnolia blossom and saying, “Describe this.” Silverman complies by writing, “The flower is...
Writing as a Doorway to the Unknown in Ourselves
Dante’s often-quoted beginning of the Divine Comedy has the narrator arriving at a dark wood, unsure of which way to turn. To many writers and artists, Dante’s predicament is a familiar, disquieting, and essential starting place. Leonard Cohen wrote, “I write to reveal not what I know, but what I don’t know.” And of an...
Your Personal Prescription Information
Patient: Sue William Silverman Medication: Heart Infusion Common Uses: Morbus Cordis. To discourage love with married, inappropriate men. Quantity: Daily Directions: Swallow first thing in morning before you have second thoughts. Before you have ANY thoughts. Patient Allergies: Single Available Men Ingredient Name: cor meum infusionem Before Using this Medicine: Be sure you are currently...
The Ten-Year Wake
I sit in a rental car in an office parking lot in Atlanta watching for a blue Pathfinder, the car my former therapist, Randy, drives. I glance at my watch. He’s late. It’s 10:15 a.m., Friday, May 13, 2005. I stopped seeing him regularly when I moved to Michigan several years ago. Maybe he drives...
On Turning Twenty: A Brief History of Brevity
Twenty years ago I had an idea for a magazine that combined the swift impact of flash fiction with the true storytelling of memoir, and Brevity was born. To be honest, I expected it to last a year. Issue One had five stories and a horrible design. Issue Two didn’t look much better, and I...
Using Fiction within Nonfiction to Navigate Difficult Emotional Terrain
My mother was one of the most significant adults in my childhood, as mothers are for many people. Yet when I tried to write about her, my writing fell flat. I was unable to capture her complexity or the complexity of my feelings for her, and she came across as annoying and the narrator (me)...
The Ant in the Water Droplet: Locating the Mystery within Memory
The memories we have of our lives are not a continuous narrative. Instead, they are more akin to the several arcs of a skipping stone—three, four, five, six splashes and onward. Flash nonfiction is in many ways an ideal form to capture the world of those splashes of memory, fueled by the energy of the...
Fans
1. In St. Thomas, where I live as a child, I stand on the verandah at noon watching heat itself shimmering aluminum flecks across the Caribbean. I cool my face with a fan constructed of small palm fronds – woven strips attached to a wood handle. At dusk, when the trade winds finally gust the...
Brevity 40 / Ceiling or Sky?
Our 40th Issue, Ceiling or Sky? Female Nonfictions After the VIDA Count, is focused on the important contribution of female writers to the creative nonfiction movement, with strong new work from Judith Ortiz Cofer, Jenny Boully, Sue William Silverman, Laurie Lynn Drummond, Brenda Miller, Thao Thai, Lynette D’Amico, Diana Cage, Kristen Radtke, Sonya Lea, Debra S....
Innocence & Experience: Voice in Creative Nonfiction
When I was studying fiction for my MFA degree, one of my teachers told me that “voice is everything.” As true as this is in fiction, it’s equally true in nonfiction. For even though I’m telling my own personal story, the voice I use isn’t my everyday speaking voice. In fact, my observation, both from...
Archipelago
When I was thirteen, my family and I left our home in the West Indies. On the day of our departure I plucked a red hibiscus, putting it in the pocket of my French madras skirt. I lagged behind my family as we walked from the tin-hangar airport, crossed the tarmac, and climbed into the...
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