Vulnerability is Strength
The most important thing writing has taught me is this: the more vulnerable you allow yourself to be, the stronger you become. It sounds counter-intuitive, I know. It sounds like bullshit. Here’s the thing: you can’t change the past, but if you can face it, both the present and the future will shift. And it’s...
Writing the Animal Other: Beyond Anthropomorphism
Some of my earliest writing advice was to beware anthropomorphism. Whenever an animal flew, stalked, or swam into an essay, I’d receive that warning at least once in any critique. Having come to writing in middle age after experiences as a naturalist, park ranger, field biologist, and graduate student of ecology, this happened often. Early...
Good Noticing: A Whole-Body Strategy
Several years ago, I took a beginning mindfulness class. It was held in a sad room in a hospital: no windows; buzzing fluorescent lights; uncomfortable plastic chairs. But I loved our instructor. She was probably in her late forties, with long russet hair and thick bangs that almost covered her eyes. When she sat in...
Here’s Looking at Me: Lessons in Memoir from Self-Portraiture
Conveying ourselves as characters on the page is tricky business, like expecting a butterfly to pin its own wings. As James Hall explains in The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History, when Montaigne put pen to paper, he referenced those who had put brush to canvas, citing King René of Anjou: “I saw…King Francis II being presented...
House as Home: Writing the Places That Raised Us
Childhood was rooms and doors, gaping lace in open windows, potted parsley in yellow kitchens, splintered floorboards, buckled carpets, the bug-zapper sound that the basement light made when your father pulled the string, and then that tube of violet light abuzz over his box of tools. Childhood was place as much as it was people,...
Odd Objects: In Praise of the Wunderkammer
No matter how abstract your topic, how intangible,your first step is to find things you can drop on your foot.—John Maguire The world is too big today, so I close my pandemic journal after I’ve made my notes for the day, and head to various mudlarking Twitter accounts, marveling at the clay pipes, Roman pottery,...
Writing in Persona: Language, Lipstick & a Mirror
My mother kept a large wicker basket, the size of a trunk, filled with what she called dress-up clothes. There was the red accordion-pleated organza dress my mother wore to prom, a couple pairs of what we called ‘princess’ shoes, a collapsible stovepipe top hat that my father had inherited from his father, pirate eye...
Run Your Essay into Shape, Dance or Drum It Free
Two months after I began an MFA program, deep in a pandemic winter, I fractured my ankle. “A chunk of bone came off when you tore the ligament,” said the emergency doc, looking at the CT scan. “No running for a few months,” said the physio. Excellent. Running is how I self-medicate out of low-level...
Speak Your Writing to Life
What might happen if you read your memoir aloud as if talking to a therapist, or your personal essay as if jogging on a treadmill? What might an unexpected whisper or pause bring to your novel or poem? A few years ago, I developed a “Speak Your Writing to Life” workshop that uses improvisation, theater...
Writing the Community “We”: Approaches to First-Person Plural Point of View
Memoir is typically a first-person singular affair—the intimate story of a particular childhood or adolescence or other slice of life. But first-person plural, which I’ll call the community we after Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola’s suggestion in Tell It Slant, can create what they call “community” or “communal” memoir and can convey the experience of...
Experiences of Disability: Our Guest Editors in Conversation
Sarah Fawn Montgomery: Editing this Brevity special issue, Experiences of Disability, has been an interesting process that reminds us of the power of language and the privilege of publishing. Can you both talk about why you initially wanted to edit this special issue, as well as the ways the emergence of COVID-19 and our current...
Everything Has Changed, but Craft Still Matters: Lessons from a Top Travel Editor
When editor Lavinia Spalding started reading submissions for Volume 12 of The Best Women’s Travel Writing (BWTW), forthcoming in October 2020, she couldn’t know that a pandemic was on its way, one that would claim hundreds of thousands of lives and make travel problematic, if not impossible. She also couldn’t anticipate the cultural upheaval and...
A Memoir Takes Its Place: A Conversation with Rebecca McClanahan
In 1998, with a sublet lined up but without jobs, Rebecca McClanahan and her husband left North Carolina and moved to New York City. They were well into middle age. (“Isn’t that backwards?” asked one of McClanahan’s nieces. “Don’t most people go to New York when they’re young?”) Expecting to stay for two years, they...
Out of the Iron Cage to Swim
When I think about the writers whose prose makes me groan with gratified envy, Virginia Woolf leads the posse. In her company are Annie Proulx, Sylvia Plath, Anne Enright, Peter Orner, Tania Hershman, and more. This “worship” of writers are stylists, and their sentences sing to me, letting me know that my own scrabbling in...
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