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...
No Ideas but in (Beautiful) Things
Like so many writers I know, my writing-self grew up on “show, don’t tell,” a maxim that demands sensory details and descriptions, action, scenes, and showing, and cautions against too much summary and backstory, exposition, and telling. Unfortunately for me, the advice show, don’t tell! written in the margins of my early attempts at creative...
Nancy Drewing the Essay: A Guide to the Literary Expedition
When I was first introduced to the creative essay, I was gobsmacked. An essay provides the perfect vehicle to explore the self while prying open the larger world. I’ve used the form to wonder and wander my way through topics as wide-ranging as class and gender ever since. It was a match made in genre-heaven....
What Do You Care About? How Compassion Leads to Dynamic Writing
Language is alive. The written word does not sit inert on the page, black symbols on a white background. It reverberates with the intangible of the human experience—suffering, love, pain, self-seeking, self-sacrifice, indifference, generosity— and also concretizes human experience. Literature rises above the anecdotal to meld the intangible with the concrete. How the writer manages...
Impatience and Craft
A few weeks ago, my partner, Jake, wanted to watch the movie Nocturnal Animals with me. The film is about a writer who uses his newfound talent to torment the psyche of his ex-wife who left him years before. Since I’m a writer and also spiteful, Jake thought the movie would be right up my...
Writing as Discovery
On a beautiful July morning in 2004, my husband, three kids, and I headed down the trail to Hidden Lake Overlook in Glacier National Park. The skies were clear, the air warm with a gentle breeze. About a mile down the meandering trail, however, thick clouds rolled in. The temperature plummeted, and we became ensconced...
THE LATEST DRAFT
REVISION ON MY MIND ON REVISION A DRAFT ON REVISION START HERE? THE LATEST DRAFT The hardest part about revision — this is what I woke up thinking today — the hardest part is to sleep on it. In the flush of the moment, two drafts in (or three, or seven, or ten) we might...
How to Untangle Environmental Stories: Five Contradictory Lessons
When we talk about environmental writing, one irony has always fascinated and sometimes frustrated me. Alongside chronicling the wonders of the non-human world, we’re writing about people trying to fulfill very basic needs—food, air, water, clothing, shelter—in sustainable ways, but doing so leads us into a dense tangle of politics, race, gender, and class. Too...
Recognizing Eternal Moments in Narrative Nonfiction
A writer too sure of her material and destination can weaken her potential to discover new insights, ideas and connections as she writes. On its face, nonfiction seems more vulnerable to this than fiction and poetry. All three may begin with real-world events or memories, but fiction and poetry automatically release these events from the...
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