Notice
“Notice,” my yoga teacher coos. I open one eye to notice that on the Zoom screen, he’s sitting upright. Sukhasana. I settle myself in the same posture on my yoga mat in my living room, legs crossed, spine straight. “Notice your grieving,” he says, his voice small through the laptop speaker. Yes, I think....
Waxing Episodic: On Meg Tilly, Early Trauma and the Rise of the Fragmented Memoir
I have fallen for a thirty-year-old memoir. That fact that a memoir snagged me isn’t surprising. For all the genre’s pitfalls—the dogged self-reference, unmitigated earnestness and occasional fibbery—when a story is both well-told and true, its power is unparalleled. A good memoir can magnify silenced voices, shed light on overlooked places and connect us beyond...
Structure: Lifeblood of the Lyric Essay
Writing mostly poetry for the last two years, I had pretty much given up on prose. Until I met the lyric essay. It was as if I found myself a new lover. I was on a cloud-nine high: I didn’t have to write a tightly knitted argument required of a critical essay. I could loosely...
Inside the Box: On Queering the Fragment
To preserve the author’s preferred formatting, this Craft Essay is available here as a PDF document.
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...
White Memory & The Psychic Sherpa
Oftentimes, in an alcoholic or abusive family, there is one member who first acknowledges the problem, who remembers the painful and harmful acts of the past and the damage caused by those actions, who chooses to break the zones of silence the family enforces about their past, who points to the craziness and denial at...
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...
Resources for Teaching Brevity
Alongside our primary mission to publish outstanding contemporary flash nonfiction, Brevity also works to provide diverse resources for writers and teachers of the flash form. On the pages that follow, we’ve assembled numerous perspectives on writing brief prose as well as tips for teaching individual essays found in The Best of Brevity, prompts for writing...
Teaching With The Best of Brevity
Perfect for use at any level—beginner to advanced—Brevity‘s 20th anniversary anthology The Best of Brevity features brief memoir, narrative, lyric essays, literary journalism,, hermit crab essays, hybrid essays, and more, from writers such as Brian Doyle, Roxane Gay, Daisy Hernández, Ander Monson, Torrey Peters, Kristen Radtke, Amy Butcher, Diane Seuss, and Lee Martin. Also included...
Strategies for Teaching Brevity Essays
One excellent reason for teaching the flash form is that it encourages experimentation—the first drafts come quickly, and if draft one isn’t working, you can always wipe the page clean and start again. The flash form also allows a student, over the span of a week-long or semester-long course, to try her hand at multiple...
Partido
I am eight years old and lost in my daydreams outside Kmart as I weave in and out between the iron bars used to keep people from stealing shopping carts. Suddenly I become aware of my father’s gaze. I meet his eyes and find myself immobilized by the disgust in his scowl. He speaks—calmly, matter-of-factly:...
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...
Rain on the Wind
My sweatpants bound my ankles together. An inventory on the sink beside me: on a clean paper towel, a shiny packet of lubricant and a mint-green catheter wrapper, ripped open. The toilet seat numbed my butt cheeks, flesh on chill porcelain. A table-top mirror balanced atop a milk crate in front of me, poked up...
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