Beyond Perhapsing: “Split-Toning” Techniques for Speculation in Nonfiction
When I teach nonfiction, one of my favorite essays to reference is Lisa Knopp’s Brevity essay, “‘Perhapsing’: The Use of Speculation in Creative Nonfiction.” During my MFA program, Knopp’s essay was prominent in my thoughts as I learned how to read and write “invented” spaces—places where imagination and speculation must be added to flesh out meaning....
A Review of Allison Coffelt’s Maps Are Lines We Draw
It’s a rare person who doesn’t like to travel. I know, because I am one, and when new acquaintances discover this about me, they often look as if I’ve pushed aside my bangs to reveal a third ear. But even though I don’t enjoy travel, I have immense curiosity about the world outside my living...
A Review of Lee Martin’s Telling Stories
Popular Mechanics was the only magazine my father ever read. In it were clever plans, such as turning a metal lunchbox into a radio, a VW Beetle into a travel trailer, and a coffee can into an electric doghouse heater. Actually, Dad made the latter, complete with a switch for turning the heater on and...
A Review of Natalie Singer’s California Calling
When I volunteered to write a review of Natalie Singer’s debut book, California Calling: A Self-Interrogation, I had one fear. What if I feel like the sad local girl California dumped in favor of this smarter, prettier, Canadian import? I wanted to be bigger than this. Sure, I did, but I still marked my territory by...
Transforming an Essay Collection into a Memoir
A year-and-a-half ago, I wrote a craft essay for Brevity about being a literary late-bloomer and finishing my first manuscript, an essay collection about my relationships, in my forties. In the piece, I said I was “done” with my book. Since then I’ve received encouraging feedback from agents and editors, but no solid bites. Over...
Capturing the Numinous: Mary Karr’s Sacred Carnality
When I want to pay attention, I make bread. The dough feels like skin against my own, drawing my focus as something to be attended and held. It demands lifting and patting; it asks to be placed on a bed of flour and coaxed it into a loose loaf, shaped and smoothed and weighed in...
A Review of Lia Purpura’s Scream: or Never Minding
In the midst of the recent #MeToo campaign, I turned to Facebook to ask the women in my life a question that burns in my bones every time another story of power abuse or systemic injustice violence bursts open on social media: what do you do with unfettered rage? I was soon inundated with a...
Good Faith
A house wren is making a nest in the wreath on our front door. When my wife and I want to go out on the porch, we make sure to knock on the inside of the door just in case the wren is there—just a little knock to warn her. We’re only six months married,...
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...
Anniversary Disease
Every day is the anniversary of something. May 26th is the anniversary of my mom pulling out half her hair while giving birth to me. It is also the anniversary of the public hanging of Alse Young, the first person executed for witchcraft in the American colonies. May 27th is the anniversary of my unquenchable...
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...
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...
A Review of Jennifer Sinor’s Ordinary Trauma: A Memoir
At a writing conference I recently attended, a panelist fielded a question from an attendee about what makes a good memoir. I’m intimately fascinated by this question since I devour memoirs and am writing my own. The panelist told this story: a creative writing professor he knows was asked by a student why she received...
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...
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