Eight Variations on the Idea of a Sentence
after Paul Gruchow in memory of Brian Doyle 1. Is it just that I like the sensation of my skin snagged on those sentences, the breathless anticipation of what he’ll do, the next “sharp sentence where the dagger enters your heart and the essay spins on a dime like a skater, and you are plunged...
Zooming In [Draft by Draft]: The Narrowing Lens of “Stranded”
for my father Jill Talbot looks at her revision process for the Brevity essay “Stranded“: *** The summer I turned six, I sat on the stinging concrete of our driveway in Lubbock, Texas, with a pair of new roller skates and a book about skating (I don’t remember the title—Amy Learns to Skate?). While my...
Come On In: The Writing’s Fine
I stared out my writing-room window, watching our yard transformed into a meteor crater. Enormous piles of dirt lined the edge of a twenty-four-foot wide, two-foot deep circular hole. The Bobcat had tracked a swath of sand across the yard to the fence. It was a beautiful mess. Two months ago my spouse and I...
What and So What: Loyalties
Childhood offers most of us ample trauma and exuberance and discovery for several lifetimes of writing. Folks say that Gabriel García Márquez told his friend Mario Vargas Llosa, “Everything I have written I knew or I had heard before I was eight years old.” (We will assume that his awareness of sex perhaps showed up...
Flash Nonfiction and the Art Student: Sharing Tools to Explore How We Make Art
with a sample essay by Mariana Yanes Cabral __ For artists who make things with their hands, their materials provide direct and immediate feedback: No hiding from the result. The lip of a vessel does not curve the way they thought it might. A new layer of paint moves an image from near perfect to...
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 Essay and the Art of Equivocation
Years ago, when I was in graduate school, I was struggling with a short story for a fiction workshop and turned to a close friend who was, and still is, a master of the form (let’s just say his short-story collection won all the big awards). I was hoping, as all apprentices do, that I...
Truth & Delight: Resisting the Seduction of Surfaces
Among the least pleasant chores of a writing teacher: dissuading students of the notion that what sounds good in a piece of writing is, necessarily, good. It’s the part of my job that I most dread and dislike, the part where I’m forced to play bad cop opposite a classroom full of good cops who...
Three Commandments for Writing About Race
A craft essay to accompany our Special Issue on Race, Racism, and Racialization: Race, unlike a monotheistic god, no longer has a singular ancestry. There are those who like to think it still has, but that paradigm shifted centuries ago. Thus the first biblical commandment, about a god liberating people from bondage can apply to...
How We See One Another: Our Guest Editors Castro and Sukrungruang in Conversation
Guest editors Joy Castro and Ira Sukrungruang discuss what they hoped for and what they learned in assembling our Special Issue on Race, Racism and Racialization. __ Joy Castro: Editing this issue with you has been a fascinating process, Ira, and I’m really glad to have gotten the chance to read these essays. Can you...
Mary Poppins and the Art of Sweetening with Scene
In the essay “Reflection and Retrospection: A Pedagogic Mystery Story,” Phillip Lopate tells us that he has always been attracted to the passages in memoir and personal essay “where the writing takes an analytical, interpretive turn.” He says that he considers these explicative moments to be “the dessert, the reward of prose.” Now, given Brevity’s...
Writing the Truth in Memoir: Don’t Skimp on Objectivity
My ex-husband didn’t love me. He was mean and selfish, and sometimes even cruel. The day he left, I found dating profiles on his computer along with e-mails from other women. He didn’t work for longer than a year at a time, and he drank like he deserved to. He spent most of our three-year...
To Do: Prioritize My Writing
This wasn’t a sabbatical, because I’m not a professor. I’m a professional tutor at a university writing center. It was not a vacation because I have only two weeks, not two months, of that. (No, to me, it was certainly not the vacation peers kept calling it—if it were, I’d actually go to Nepal to...
On Keeping a (Writing) Notebook (or Three)
In her essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion writes about the odd notes she has taken over the years – on conversations she has overheard (“That woman Estelle is partly the reason why George Sharp and I are separated today”), facts she has learned (“during 1964, 720 tons of soot fell on every square...
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