The Brevity Blog

By Libby Kurz

Last summer, my husband asked (once again!) if I’d join a 2v2 beach volleyball league with him. I was the only member of our family of five who didn’t play, and I’d been reluctant to join an activity where I’d clearly be the worst one. Surprising us all, however, I relented.

As soon as I stepped on the court, a voice in my mind got to work on me: You’re a forty-five- year-old mom, what do you think you’re doing? Silently judging others from the sidelines had been so much more fun. I’d hoped my family’s advanced skills might magically osmose through my body after years of watching them play, but instead, I was chasing my shanked balls across the beach and scolded by the opposing team for messing up the score.

The assumption in midlife is that we should just know how to do things. Amid the daily responsibilities of work, parenting, or scrubbing dog vomit off the family room rug, it can feel absurd to try something new. But starting from zero brought an unexpected, albeit humbling, sense of freedom, and I wondered what would happen if I applied this to other areas of my life— particularly my writing.

I completed my MFA over a decade ago and have taken countless workshops since. I should know what I’m doing by now, right? But as journalist Stephen Marche shares, one of the great paradoxes of writing is that the more we do it, the harder it is and the more we will fail. “The public sees writers mainly in their victories,” he says, “but their lives are spent mostly in defeat.”

Marche tells the story of yet another writer, Nathan Englander, at dinner with Philip Roth. “Is it ever easier?” Englander asked Roth. “My skin will get thicker with each book, right?”

No, Roth replied. “It’ll get thinner and thinner until they can hold you up to the light and see through.”

A similar sense of defeat and exposure pervaded my own writing a few years ago, when I crossed from poetry to memoir, a notoriously rejected genre. Last summer, five years and four drafts into my manuscript, the project had proved more ponderous and vulnerable than anything I’d attempted. I was stuck.

But as my body trudged through sand each week, learning a new sport, I realized that if we need instruction as beginners, why wouldn’t we also need it once we’ve become proficient, committed players? After all, even professional athletes have coaches. And if this applies to a sport, how much truer must it be of writing, an artform that demands skill, endurance, and mortifying self-exposure? At risk of adding more humiliation to my life, I decided to hire a writing coach.

I’ve been working with my coach, Peter Mountford, for a few months now, and though it’s terrifying to receive feedback on chapters I’ve already spent years revising, the journey has instilled curiosity and joy back into my process. Brené Brown shares a similar realization in a recent NPR interview, in which she compares learning pickleball to her faith in God and how both things feel unreachable. “Who thought I’d ever become the student of a game again and never want to stop playing because you never get there?” I was reminded that amid my embarrassing mistakes and endless revisions, there’s a surprising sense of delight in trying to master what cannot be mastered.

William Faulkner told The Paris Review that the futility which defines the writing life is actually the healthiest state for a writer to live in. “All of us failed to match our dream of perfection,” he said. “So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.” Besides, if we finally surpassed the pinnacle of perfection, what would we have to work toward?

Each time I step on the volleyball court or continue editing my memoir manuscript, that accusing voice in my mind still crops up. But I’m learning that if I can trade the safety of the sidelines for the inevitability of failure, I open myself to the possibility of making contact with others in our messy, shared humanity. We will never achieve perfection, but what might happen if we try?

There were moments this past summer when I paused between points, marveling as the setting sun illuminated our half-naked, sand-caked bodies, trying to keep a dumb ball afloat. At its core, volleyball is an effort to defy the ubiquitous force of gravity, which, in the end, always wins. The ball will drop, but amid each player’s futile attempt to keep it in play, we were connecting with ourselves, each other, and the vital energy of life itself. Our sunlit skin was so thin you could almost see through.

________

Libby Kurz is a writer, RN, and military veteran. She’s the author of a poetry chapbook, The Heart Room, and her work has appeared in The Iowa Review and elsewhere. She lives in Virginia Beach with her husband, three teens, and 115lb. lap dog. She’s still revising her memoir. Find her on Instagram or her website.

By Allison K Williams

As an editor, I see a lot of explaining. The family history the reader “has to know to understand the story.” The reflection from the narrator mid-scene, clarifying how they felt in the moment.

Too often, we worry we’re not good enough to get our point across in fewer words. That our audience won’t “get it.” As memoirists, this hits even closer to home—what if someone reads my book and they don’t understand me? What if I don’t sound logical, or reasonable? What if I don’t make sense?

But storytelling is the art of strategically withholding information. Stories hinge on hooks: that something is going to be important, but I’m not going to tell you why just yet.

Remember that guy I told you about?

You’ll never believe what happened at Target today!

Hamlet, I saw a ghost last night that looked like your dad—and he tried to tell us something.

Spelling everything out distances the reader—as soon as they understand, they can stop paying attention. They lean back, trusting that you-the-writer are going to keep telling exactly what they need to know, with a minimum investment of their attention required.

Instead of offering the whole picture, spread out the puzzle pieces. Make the reader a detective, gathering clues to understand behavior, noting dialogue and actions that seemingly contradict each other, guessing a character’s thoughts from their gestures. Don’t lay the evidence out neatly with an explanation—let them meet you on the page to investigate the scene of the crime.

How can we do this in our writing? With silence and juxtaposition, through the arrangement of text on the page.

Offer silence.

“Silence” on the page comes in two forms: the physical arrangement of text (white space, punctuation and paragraph breaks) and time dilation. In Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, he uses both in an intense moment:

The time, while pruning a basket of green beans over the sink, you said, out of nowhere, “I’m not a monster. I’m a mother.”

What do we mean when we say survivor? Maybe a survivor is the last one to come home, the final monarch that lands on a branch already waited with ghosts.

The morning closed in around us.

I put down the book. The heads of the green beans went on snapping. They thunked in the steel sink like fingers. “You’re not a monster,” I said.

But I lied.

The text is arranged on the page in short paragraphs, each one a self-contained unit of meaning within the whole scene:

• Setting and mom’s dialogue that initiates the scene
• Reflection from the overall story of the book, that in this moment contrasts the narrator as survivor, with the mother who is dead at the time of writing the memoir
• Setting and emotional weight
• Action, and a sound that emphasizes the emotional weight while reincorporating the setting, and the narrator’s dialogue in the moment
• The internal contradiction, weightier on its own line

The short paragraphs create silences between them as the eye moves down the page. During these moments of silence, readers feel what the narrator (or POV character) is feeling; they experience tension about what’s coming next; and their eagerness grows to find out. They are anthropologists, watching the animal behave.

Use juxtaposition.

Here’s an invented example, a festive riot of showing, telling, and over-explaining:

I picked up my phone and texted my boyfriend:

Mike rhutho wywugeybk ajboaubuo huhis ihi abidvyts

Although the only thing I spelled correctly was his name, when I sent him the text I thought it was very clear.

Pare it down:

I texted my boyfriend:

Mike rhutho wywugeybk ajboaubuo huhis ihi abidvyts

I thought it was very clear.

“Texted” shows the phone is in the narrator’s hand. Juxtaposing the garbled text and “I thought it was very clear” creates comedy.

Juxtaposition and silence created through text arrangement are subtle, but they both immerse the reader more inside the narrator’s POV, solving the puzzle with us, learning, feeling, and making their own sense. When readers have to work for it—when they must lean in and pay attention to find the meaning—they are by definition more engaged.

As essayists and memoirists, our writing is a form of public solitude. We are inviting the reader to both observe and participate in our formative moments of pain, cringe, triumph, joy. As we gain inspiration, wisdom or insight, they gain it with us, cringing as we cringe, enjoying the same joy. The “fun” of reading, whether pure entertainment or deep catharsis, comes from engagement. From wanting to know what happens next, from the a-ha moments of no wonder they turned out like that or ohhhh that’s why they did that.

Bring readers on your journey by mapping your text on the page—and writing less of it.

________

Allison K Williams is Managing Editor of The Brevity Blog, and has edited writers to deals with Big Five, literary and university presses, and the NYT and USA Today Bestseller lists. Join her for the CRAFT TALKS webinar Mind The Gaps: Writing Less While Saying More, an in-depth session of learning, writing, and live-editing of volunteer pages, 3-5PM May 20 ($40). Find out more/register now.

By Andrea A. Firth

The letters are brief. Handwritten in pencil on a half-sheet of lined notebook paper folded inside a stamped envelope. One person asks for a dictionary. Another asks for a book on woodworking. Many request fiction; romance, thrillers, horror, and dystopian novels are popular. They ask for books about animals, mythology, and history. They request books on how to cook, how to draw, and how to speak Japanese. Some ask for classics or books by specific authors, like Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, or Stephen King. Others ask for comic books, coloring books, planners, and journals. Their letters often say thank you—this means so much to me—before their requests are even fulfilled.

Once a month, I spend a Saturday morning at the Prison Literature Project (PLP) headquarters in Berkeley, CA responding to book requests from incarcerated people across the country. Five or six other volunteers and I, plus two coordinators (also volunteers who oversee the work), meet for three hours in a room crammed with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves stocked with new and gently used books.

We each take one letter at a time and do our best to find books in the PLP library that best meet the sender’s request. That’s the challenge. Sometimes they ask for a specific book title, which we often don’t have on hand, but we try to find a book in the same genre and writing style as an alternative. I don’t read much genre fiction, so I spend a lot of time reading the back covers of paperbacks and searching unfamiliar authors and titles online. But sometimes they ask for poetry or contemporary fiction, even memoir, and I get a tiny thrill from choosing one of my favorite reads to send. There’s a satisfaction to finding the book that fits the ask, a match—it’s like solving a puzzle.

We can send a maximum of three books to an individual, and the package must be under three pounds to control the mailing costs. Next comes the note. On a quarter sheet of paper, we list the recipient’s details and the book titles on one side. On the other side, the volunteer writes a brief note addressed to the individual by name. There isn’t much space: a greeting, a sentence or two about the books enclosed, maybe an explanation for a substitution, and a short sign-off. Wishing you a good week. Peace. Best. Cheers! It’s a small thing—that note.

Last week we ran a post on the Blog by Andrew Miller about volunteering inside a prison as a mentor or writing coach. An interesting volunteer activity that connects to the incarcerated community, which also puts your writing and editing skills to work.

PLP offers a way to connect with this community through reading—it’s a quiet volunteer gig. Unless you have a question for the coordinator, there isn’t much talking. We all get focused on searching for the right books and writing short notes. I can usually respond to about 10 requests in a session. PLP, an all-volunteer, nonprofit organization, which has been active since the early 1980’s, hosts several volunteer sessions each week and ships out over 3,000 books to incarcerated individuals each month.

There are other nonprofit, volunteer organizations  that deliver books to the incarcerated based in Claremont and San Diego, CA; Seattle, WA; Portland, OR; Minneapolis, MN; Chicago, IL, Washington, DC, and elsewhere. You don’t need to be a writer to volunteer for PLP or any of these organizations, but being a reader helps, and writers are usually good readers.

The correspondence ends once the books are packaged and mailed. I don’t know what happens when the books are received or how the person responds, but that’s ok. I believe in the value of books and in reading, and the impact of small things, like a brief note with a few kind words. For me, the response acknowledges that they’ve been heard, that their request matters, and that they matter too.

Interested in participating in prison literature activities, or donating? Click any of the links naming locations above to find out how to donate books or cash, or volunteer your time.

Incarcerated, or wish to help someone who is? Here are the Prison Literature Project’s guidelines for book requests, including a printable PDF to share with facilities.

———-

Andrea A. Firth is an editor for the Brevity Blog. You can read more of her writing on her Substack, Everything Essay!

Brevity magazine has launched its 82nd issue of vivid, innovative flash nonfiction, featuring brief prose exploring diehard fandom, self-discovery, rising tides, and surprise encounters, essays that linger on the margins of poetry and prose, of knowing and the unknown, of here and not.

Authors in the newest Brevity issue include Brenda Miller, Angela Edward, Hea-Ream Lee, Karissa Nevada, L.F. Khouri, Ann MacDonald, Emily W. Blacker, Erin Wood, Michael Singleton, Noel Thistle Tague, Sara Daniels, and T.C. Martin.

Accompanying each essay is the brilliant work of artist Sherry Shahan, whose passion for macrophotography is captured across 12 arresting images.

We would love for you to visit the newest issue of Brevity magazine. We promise you will find work that surprises you, compels you, and challenges you as readers and writers.

By Tiffany Yates Martin

When I tell people that I started my career as an actor, I almost always get the same question: “How did you memorize all those lines?”

What I never get asked about is the truly hard part of acting: how to convey depth and nuance and emotion without words. Actors like Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, or Jon Hamm draw viewers in and make audiences feel what they’re feeling, give a scene its impact and meaning because we see how it affects them. They can quirk an eyebrow or twitch a lip and audiences know exactly what they’re thinking, their faces an open map of their inner life.

One of the most affecting scenes I’ve ever watched was the inner struggle of Liev Schreiber’s character Marty in A Walk on the Moon before he thanks his wife’s lover for tending to his son’s wasp stings. In nearly ten solid seconds of silence, pain, worry, fury, gratitude, and innate decency battle in his eyes and demeanor—a master class in showing inner life.

But authors have only our words to show what’s going on inside a character. And we must—character is the reader’s vehicle into experiencing a story directly and viscerally, the avatar through which they feel and understand it. Even when the character is ourselves, in a memoir or essay, authors must find ways to allow readers deeply into their minds, their hearts, their skin.

That doesn’t mean glopping big swaths of inner dialogue on the page. Endless navel-gazing stalls momentum and grows tiresome to readers—just as when you’re subjected to someone endlessly dumping their inner monologue on you.

Rich characterization also doesn’t mean creating a DSM of physiological tics: a litany of grins and tears and clenching stomachs and bile-filled throats that describe the manifestation of emotion and reaction, rather than the source of them, keeping readers on the outside looking in instead of experiencing firsthand what’s causing the characters’ reactions.

And of course it doesn’t mean simply labeling emotion: I felt real sad. Creating inner life on the page makes the difference between eliciting distant sympathy for a character and immediate visceral, affecting empathy. It allows readers into the characters’ internal landscape so that we understand how something impacts them, how they react, what they feel, what they’re thinking, what they make of events or interactions, how it motivates what they do next.

“When I was a boy I thought that if I could turn a screw in my father’s head just a sixteenth of an inch one way or the other, it might help him to tell the difference between right and wrong,” Norman Lear begins his memoir, Even This I Get to Experience, and right away he lays open to readers the complicated feelings he bears his father.

In his nonfiction book about cheese, The Telling Room, Michael Paterniti says of new fatherhood, “Gazing upon his progeny, he touches his own mortality. Then a couple of springs pop permanently loose in his head,” and readers instantly understand his overwhelm and awe.

In her essay “The Myth of the Blonde Beyoncé,” writer Victoria Malone walks out of a salon where a white stylist has refused to work on her hair: “Suddenly, the warm, early Fall air felt too hot on my skin. The sun was too bright, its presence incongruous with the darkness I had just glimpsed,” and readers can understand her bewilderment and shame whether we’ve directly experienced discrimination or not.

Allowing readers into the characters’ minds draws us directly into their experience, letting us share it, feel it along with them. It makes us part of their story.

Even in the silences—perhaps especially in the silences—your characters’ internal terrain is a rich, complex place. Here’s an experiment I love doing when I teach inner life: Stop for fifteen seconds at any silent moment of your day and observe what’s going on inside you. Even if all you’re doing is taking a relaxing bath or reading or driving, there’s a Technicolor world within you made up of your impressions and assessments and reactions and feelings and thoughts about what you’re doing, along with all your other ideas and worries and distractions (and that endlessly repeating song loop), the ticker tape always running in the background.

This works in both fiction and memoir:

“Thurwar drank the sweet, rich silence of absolute awe. She screamed a roar, and in that moment she was the only sound,” offers Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah in Chain-Gang All-Stars, and in that moment of reverent silence we too are the warrior, feeling our own power and presence in the arena.

“When I sit with this memory, there is no sound in the moment,” says George M. Johnson in his memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue, recalling a violent beating by bullies from his childhood. “I can see it. When I write about it now, my body can feel it. But as I close my eyes to think about it, the situation was instant chaos.” The silence isn’t empty—it contains the legacy of trauma that even now physically affects him.

The author’s job is to plunge into that wide, deep river and bring to the surface what’s most relevant and revealing from the flotsam—and then take the reader by the hand and lead them in for a swim.

________

Editor Tiffany Yates Martin works with major publishers and New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling and award-winning authors as well as indie and newer writers. She is the founder of FoxPrint Editorial (named one of Writer’s Digest’s Best Websites for Authors) and author of Intuitive Editing: A Creative and Practical Guide to Revising Your Writing.

Join Tiffany and The Brevity Blog’s Managing Editor, Allison K Williams, for a week of craft, writing time, shared insights and exploration in the French Pyrenees, for Sentence, Scene & Story at Chateau Clos Mirabel, August 2-8. Learn more at a live-on-Zoom Open House, Saturday May 16 at 3pm EST/12pm PST. Register here.

By Micaela Edelson

In the era of globalization, travel is more accessible than ever and with it has come a boom in travel influencers and bloggers eager to highlight the next best off-the-radar destination. But how do we communicate a travel experience—whether across the country, county, or globe—as a literary essay or longer narrative? How do we immerse readers, and reflect on the significance of experience? 

I’ve visited forty countries, my travel essays have been published across various literary journals, and I have a travel memoir in the late stages of refinement. By no means is my perspective complete or authoritative, but I continue to reckon with approaches to craft as a travel writer and educator. 

We can write about a place, the sites seen, the food eaten, the history, art, and culture consumed. But how do we embrace the narrative? How do we turn the trip from a slideshow to a story with its ups, downs, tensions, and reliefs—captivating the reader like any good book or movie?

The key is you. The observer, the writer. 

The travel narrative has three important components:

Description. What sounds, smells, sights are different than what the author is used to? Paint the picture of intersecting powerlines and multi-colored concrete buildings, the smell of car exhaust and a waving sea to show the reader Guatemala without telling them, “Guatemala is this… and Guatemala is that.” 

Narrative. What happened? What is the rising action, climax, conclusion? Travel writing, like all prose, needs a clear evolution. Classic narrative structures such as the human vs. human, human vs. nature, and human vs. self are absolutely applicable here. Yes, there’s a clear external journeying through place, but what about internal journey as the narrator pushes past their comfort zone, reckons with hard truths, or learns something about themselves? In her travel memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert not only wrote about her travels in Italy, India, and Indonesia, but also shared what she learned about self-compassion and how to balance, pleasure, spirituality, and love.

Reflection. Why write about this travel experience for a wider audience? What significance did you glean from the travel that you want to convey? When I participated in a month-long Muay Thai kickboxing excursion in Northern Thailand after my father’s cancer diagnosis, I was able to reflect on how punching and violence helped me with processing big feelings.

With these components in mind, here’s a prompt that can help you develop a travel experience (a weekend trip to a nearby Tulip festival or a six-month stint in India) into an engaging narrative:

Write about the place.

Landscape, flora, fauna, weather—the sensory details can really bloom here. Bill Bryson expertly recounts the surrounding ecology as he attempts to hike the Appalachian Trail in his travel memoir, A Walk in the Woods, foregrounding the place and physically connecting the reader to his failed venture.

Write about the people.

Who are the inhabitants? What about other visitors? Who are you travelling with? Character development in travel writing adds dimension to the narrative and ensures that the people of a place are not just background but humans who have lives. In his spiritual travelogue, The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen journeys to the Himalayas following his wife’s death. Not only does he describe the high-altitude landscape as he searches for the elusive cat, his accompanying sherpas and porters become an intimate part of his experience. Readers get attached to these well-developed characters and learn about Nepali culture at the same time. 

Write about the politics.

What’s the socio-cultural history of the place? Here is where you integrate research to portray a community in its complexity, educating the reader, and educating yourself. Heinrich Harrer’s autobiographical travel book, Seven Years in Tibet, was crucial in communicating the persecution and resulting isolation of Tibetan people that led to the exile of the Dalai Lama. Research not only helps you become a more conscious traveler (to actually learn about the place you visit), but it is important to integrate the history, so the place isn’t flattened into background for your travel.

Write about you.

Why did you travel to this place? What were you hoping to get from the experience? What did you get? This is where the internal narrative can be explored. Cheryl Strayed impulsively decides to hike the Pacific Crest Trail following her mother’s death and her experimentation with hard drugs. Her journey, chronicled in her memoir Wild, would not have been the same without the context to shape her personal reckoning, develop resilience, and process her grief.

Connect the place, people, or politics to you.

Focusing on one element at a time can allow you to go into depth and give the place, people, and politics the proper attention, building a foundation for the narrative journeying (whether internal or external) to occur. Bryson, Matthiessen, Harrer, and Strayed are the foci of their travel journeys, because travel writing requires the experience, narration, and reflection to be done by someone: the observer.

By adding the observer, you elevate the experience from travel blog to travel narrative. You make meaning of the experience for the reader. The people, place, and politics are active characters in the journey, but the observer/writer/you drive the travel narrative.

__________

Originally from Salem, Oregon, Micaela Edelson is currently finishing up her MFA in Creative Writing and the Environment from Iowa State University. She is a reader for Terrain.org, a copyeditor for The Trumpeter Journal of Ecosophy, and has served as co-managing editor for Flyway Journal of Writing & Environment. Find her on Instagram.

How Our Telling Shapes What the Past Becomes

By Jen Gippel

My son lives in Colorado and I live in Australia, so visits are rare and cherished. On my last trip to see him, we hiked a demanding three-day route through the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness near Aspen. Looking back, I still recall the toll on my aging body from the altitude and steep terrain; grief at the thought this might be my last hike with my son; and the joy and awe of the scenery.

But these images and emotions—aging, love and loss, natural beauty—are familiar, common reactions to such an experience. On their own, they don’t create complexity or surprise.

Writers often rely on reflection and returning metaphors to structure thought and make sense of the past; for instance, ‘journeying through time,’ ‘weaving a tapestry of broken threads,’ or ‘mining the past.’ Writing the personal certainly is these things. But do these metaphors fully capture the complexity of the work required when writing about what has come before? Do they limit how we explore our lived experience?

Returning to and reflecting on the past suggests we’re searching for a truth—something fixed, waiting to be recovered. It suggests we are collecting the existing threads or refining the memories into a cohesive story.

But truth isn’t simply there to be uncovered or recalled. Truth is produced through the memoirist’s engagement with the past and present. There is no innocent return, no tracing back to an origin that stands outside interpretation. Our telling shapes what the past becomes.

Two metaphors that shift this frame are re-turning and diffraction.

Re-turning is not going back. It is turning over—again and again—generating new patterns, meanings, and temporalities. It treats the past not as something stable to retrieve, but as something active, still in motion.

It is like the work of earthworms, endlessly turning soil. They ingest it, tunnel through it, excrete it, and aerate it. Sometimes they let in light; then the soil collapses again before being turned once more. Through this labour, the soil is nourished and made new.

As a metaphor for the work of memoir, re-turning names an ongoing inquiry into what was not noticed or, at the time, could not emerge. It does not change or erase the past. It works it over, adding light, making meaning. It is slow, physical work.

Diffraction, a concept from physics, offers another way of thinking. When waves—light or water—meet an obstacle, they bend, spread, and interfere, folding back on themselves to create unexpected, intricate patterns. Picture pebbles dropped into a rock pool: ripples expand, strike the edge, rebound, and disrupt one another.

A diffractive approach to memoir resists simply reflecting on experience or fitting it into a familiar frame. Instead, it reads ideas, emotions, and sensations through one another, allowing interference to generate something surprising. It is not about switching between lenses, but about what happens when multiple lenses collide—when the ideas fold back on each other to produce something novel, rather than just being observed.

This approach unsettles assumptions about time, space, and narrative order. It resists closure, embraces contradiction, and allows objects, places, and relations to speak. It moves non-linearly. A diffractive memoir asks not “What happened to me?” but “How did relations—with material, social, and temporal forces—shape what I call ‘me’?”

The memoir is not a mirror reflecting experience. It is a field of interference patterns.

I return to the hike this way—again and again—reading it diffractively, looking for richer meanings. How was our relationship reshaped by the effort of the walk, by distance, by weather, by the climb? How were the sedimented boundaries between parent and child, youth and age, unsettled? How did my gear make the walk possible? Were we in the landscape, or part of it?

These questions do not uncover something already there. They produce it.

This work is demanding. Each pass feels like climbing another mountain, pushing beyond familiar versions of the self. The “I” and “we” of the story are not fixed but becoming, as the narrative unfolds. The story is alive, not a finished object waiting to be described.

The task for the memoirist, then, is to notice where things don’t quite align—where experience resists the expected shape. These moments are not problems to resolve or ignore, but openings and opportunities. In their friction, new patterns—and new meanings—emerge.
____

Jen Gippel holds a PhD in Finance and formerly taught and mentored graduate students in research writing. Her published research includes narrative approaches of autoethnography and ethnography. She now brings these qualitative lenses to the textures of everyday life, exploring how meaning—and moments of surprise—emerge from the ordinary.

By Joy Imboden Overstreet

It’s difficult being an aspiring writer, who knows “I have a book in me,” and who also struggles with ADHD. At home, endless shiny objects distract me from the work. OMG—the news! Cat videos! What should I fix for dinner?! The toilet needs cleaning! Each more compelling than drafting the next chapter in my book.

So, back in 2007, I took myself for a short getaway to the literary-themed Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, Oregon. No TVs, no internet, but a big living room with comfy chairs with a view of the Pacific Ocean below, and themed rooms named for famous authors with shelves of their books.

The enterprising hotel owner, Goody Cable, had hosted regular literary salons at her Portland home, but setting up and cleaning up grew tiresome. Still, she yearned for meaningful conversations that lasted longer than an hour. Why not open a hotel for the bookish people she loved, she thought, free of modern distractions, and amenable to human connection? In 1987 she and a partner converted an old rooming house overlooking the ocean, and named it after Sylvia Beach, whose Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company was a sanctuary for expat writers like Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.

During my visit, I came upon Goody seated at a table in the library, poring over a giant unabridged dictionary, taking notes in a spiral-bound notebook. I’d heard she loved conversation, so I asked what she was doing.

“Ahh,” she said, stretching her arms and flexing her fingers. “I love words, but compared to what’s in here…” she pointed at the dictionary, “I know very few. So, this is the year I’m ‘Living the Alphabet’.” 

Noting my widened eyes, she leaned forward to explain. “See, the alphabet has 26 letters, and the year has 52 weeks. Since January 1st, I’ve focused on one letter every two weeks. First, I study all the dictionary entries for a particular letter and make notes about ones that tickle my fancy.”

She pointed at her notebook. “This is for my notes on the letter S. The notebooks for A to R are on the shelf behind me.”

“And that’s it?”

“Oh, no. It’s just the beginning. I want to get the full vibe of each letter. For example, with B, I immersed myself in the music of Bach, Beethoven, the Beatles. I ate beets and baba ganoush in a bowl, wore a blue bonnet, read Ray Bradbury, watched a Balanchine ballet, blew bubbles…you get the idea. My favorite letter so far is E.”

Something about her project tickled me so profoundly I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Did I have a favorite letter? 

Oh yeah. P. 

Procrastination, perfectionism, practice, perseverance, productivity, prevaricating politicians…. all my persistent problems. 

A cartoon lightbulb blinked over my head. To keep me writing every day, what I needed was structure, as well as accountability. But it had to be fun, and must scratch a bit of my “Oh, shiny” ADHD itch for novelty. If I riffed on one P word per day—could I keep at it for a year? As for accountability, I could make it public—like on a blog.

I was off and running. I created a free blog on WordPress and named it 365 Words Beginning with P, where I would write about a P-word every day.

I picked up an old unabridged dictionary at Goodwill, ripped out the P pages and stapled them into a manageable packet, then tossed the rest. (I already had a complete, newer one.) I found such a plethora of plummy words in those pages, I needed to narrow my options: only words that began with what linguists call a plosive P (a P that PoPs) would qualify. That ruled out PH words like PHony and PHhotos. No PTeradactyls, no PFennigs, and no diseases like PNeumonia or PSoriasis. 

To pick the word of the day, I perused my packet of Ps until I pounced on one with potential. Or, if a particular topic piqued a passion, I reversed the process and pursued a P-word that would properly pair. Occasionally I went with a suggestion from my blog’s followers.

For 365 consecutive days I wrote about whatever was shiny at the moment. My posts could be playful, prosaic, provocative, preachy, political—or a potpourri.

Sustaining this daily practice, I proved to myself I could stick to a writing project, and create a more workable writing process. In the nineteen years since, I’ve posted something at least weekly to a blog or newsletter. However, none have been as much fun as 365 Words Beginning with P.

After forty years of procrastination, I finally published my first book, based on the Thin Within workshops I’d created in 1975. My ponderous first draft lacked the light spirit I intended, so I attempted a rewrite that launched each chapter with a P-word—but it was a bridge too far.  Sometimes a writer just needs a good gimmick to grease the wheels—a little propulsion to plunge in.

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Joy Imboden Overstreet’s first book, The Cherry Pie Paradox: The Surprising Path to Diet Freedom and Lasting Weight Loss was published in 2021. She started taking improv classes after turning 80, and is currently working on a memoir about improv’s healing powers. Follow her on Substack at “Alive! with Joy.” She lives in Portland with her pet plant Penelope.

By Andrew Miller

One afternoon a few years back, I stood in the warden’s office at the Madison Correctional Institution in Madison, Florida. I volunteered for a Toastmasters Club that met in prisons, and one of the inmates had asked me to mentor him in creative writing. His request was not unreasonable; for years PEN America and PEN International have sponsored prison writing programs.

I readily agreed, but wanted to speak with the warden first. The MCI warden had a difficult and dangerous job; she was responsible for over 1,000 male inmates, several hundred correctional officers, and a large administrative staff.

“Only one man—” She motioned me to a chair. “How would you like to mentor fifty?”

Fifty? That was many more than I had expected. She explained that the prison was beginning an art program, and creative writing was one component. Would I like to teach that class?

Several weeks later, the Arts Program Director led me from the front gate to the Wellness Center, a gymnasium-sized building near the center of the compound. The Program had five components: Creative Writing, Drama, Animation and Sculpting, Music Appreciation and Theory, and Art History. Besides teaching innovation, teamwork, empathy, and critical thinking, prison personnel hoped this experience would awaken the inmates’ creative potential.

Once inside, we passed a guard room with tinted windows and a large, fully open bathroom complete with fixtures but no stalls or doors. The students, over 50 men wearing blue jumpsuits, sat behind long tables at the front of the room. Their ages ranged from early thirties to their seventies or eighties.

For the next six months, I taught creative writing once a week to these men. I started each class by reading an excerpt from an essay or short story that illustrated an important topic such as dialogue, setting, point of view, conflict, or characterization. Next, I asked the men to write several paragraphs based on our discussion and the reading. After about 30 minutes, I asked volunteers to read what they had written.

In one class, I read several examples of micro fiction from a collection by Jerome Stern. I asked the men to write their own 100-word stories, knowing that would be challenging without a computer. Here is what one of those men, Paul, wrote:

The Versatile Little Stem Cell

The versatile little stem cell was made with the potential to become anything. He was fresh and new, beaming with pride. He was ready, like a young soldier right out of boot camp, awaiting to receive his post orders. As he patiently waited, his anticipation grew as he fantasized about what he would become. Would the Epigenetic Organization make him smart like a neuron? Strong like muscle fiber or bone? Fast and efficient as a red blood cell? Or would he be recruited into the immune system? The big moment finally arrived. His DNA methylation tag read: Rectal Wall Tissue.

In 30 minutes, Paul* wrote a story with a sympathetic main character, escalating tension, humor, and a surprise ending. It was exactly 100 words, written in pen with no obvious deletions or additions. I was curious about his background and had him pegged as a university professor or research scientist with expertise in genetics. But before I could ask, prison officials moved him to another prison. He could not produce a urine sample for an unannounced drug screening, which was grounds for immediate transfer.

I contacted Paul and learned that he is highly functioning person with autism. After high school, he started his own flooring business, lost it during the housing crisis, then went to work as a prep cook. He learned about DNA and genetics by downloading and studying college-level material. He added, “I’m weak at communicating and interacting with people. Creative writing has helped me more than anything else. It enables me to develop empathy by experiencing multiple character’s perspectives, interacting with others, and engaging in dialogue on paper where I can later analyze it.”

I taught two more classes at Madison, then two at Jefferson Correctional Institution. Students either wrote their assignments in longhand or on their tablets and sent them to me via the prison email system. Many of the men were remarkably prolific and regularly sent stories, poems, and nonfiction pieces I had not assigned.

If you want to volunteer in a prison, it’s necessary to take several hours of training and have your background checked. You can apply online or approach someone directly in the prison like I did. It’s also possible to mentor using snail mail or the prison email system. Contact PEN America or Look2Justice for more information.

The Madison Art Program touched many inmates, and I’m sorry that Paul could not finish. I still think about him and wonder if prison personnel knew of his abilities and made any effort to keep him intellectually stimulated. Incarcerated men and women who take advantage of these enrichment opportunities are not being coddled or given special treatment. They are learning valuable communication and personal skills that will ensure their success when released.

Want to make a difference and have interesting experiences? Volunteer in a prison!

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* Not his real name. His story is used with permission.

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Andrew Miller’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Blue Lake Review, The Brevity Blog, Northern New England Review, Pithead Chapel, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, The Evergreen Review, and Toastmasters Magazine. He lives in north-central Florida, volunteers in prisons, restores antique stained-glass windows, and writes. He is the Creative Nonfiction Editor of Mud Season Review. Read more about his work at his author website.

By Tamara Jong

“I don’t know if you want to hear this, but that’s another book.”

Maybe I winced, just slightly, but I knew it was the truth.

I had been working on my soon-to-be-published memoir-in-essays Worldly Girls for four months, tweaking, removing, clarifying, sifting, and digging deeper with the help of my editor Stacey May Fowles, and now we were deep into revisions. Deadlines were speeding up. I had been a fan of Stacey May’s ever since I subscribed to her weekly newsletter, Baseball Life Advice and read her book, and couldn’t believe my luck when my publisher told me she was my editor. Her comments, suggestions, and edits were already helping make my work better.

Worldly Girls is a coming of age story about growing up as a person of mixed Chinese and European ancestry, and the slow unravelling of my faith after my mother’s tragic death. I was writing about our family’s reckoning with the Jehovah’s Witness faith, Ma’s alcoholism and mental health issues, and learning of my father’s other secret family, but after my parents divorced, my relationship with my father fell apart. I had forgotten about him for awhile as he had been replaced by God and for a time, I had no interest in his odyssey and why he had come. The questions that I now needed to have answered, as a writer and daughter who would one day possibly forgive him, could not be answered or rushed.

One of the essays was a letter to my father, challenging his story of his journey to Canada from China. Another essay unfolded a partial answer. The last essay that “didn’t belong” examined my reluctance to finish his obituary, and the revelation that he was a “paper son,” whose documents claimed he was a son or relative of a Canadian citizen or permanent resident. In 1960 in Canada, there had been a forgiveness program for any paper sons/daughters, but I imagine there would be great fear in coming clean. Now that my father had died, his obituary written almost a year later, the answers I wanted to find would be harder.

For these essays to be included with my book, I would have to do some deep diving. I had been thinking of hiring an expert who knew about “paper sons,” which was a secret of my father’s and it would require money and time to go to the places my father had been—Hong Kong, Indiana—trips that would have to wait, words that would not be written in time for Worldly Girls. I couldn’t meet the challenge, I realized, and in the midst of all these edits, I didn’t have the data, time, research and energy required to pursue any of this; not yet, anyway.

Once I realized I could skip the essays, I felt a weight lifted. When the essays were removed, they weren’t missed, because they were part of another narrative, one deserving its own path.

The missing essays are floating around aimlessly, unresolved. They need a different writer than the one I was for Worldly Girls. They were not part of the religious journey I’d lived in and through, since my father had been absent or missing for that part of my life. The knowledge I unearthed about him later could not fit into what my memoir had become. Those essays and that energy would need to be a different book than the writer I had become at the end of Worldly Girls.     

So, it was a gift to be told by Stacey May that some of these stories needed more context, processing, research, and soul searching—and we were out of time. Down deep, I knew that those essays weren’t ready, and I didn’t have it in me to write based on the limited information I had. As much as I grieved my mother and her death, I had had decades to work with that material and reflect. The essays about my father were telling a different story and going in a direction I wasn’t ready to face. He had been dead less than 3 years and parts of his story were still being revealed to me.

I still feel my father’s slight nudge towards these truths, a gentle prodding, to remind me not to forget. I know the stories will call me back so I can tell them properly, with the research and time needed, but for now I’ll let them marinate.

________

Tamara Jong is a Tiohtià:ke (Montréal) born writer of Chinese and European ancestry. She is a Writer’s Studio graduate (Simon Fraser University) and a former member of Room Magazine’s collective. She lives on Treaty 3 territory, (Guelph, ON). Worldly Girls is her first book. Find her @bokchoygurl on Instagram or at tamaraljong.com

By Kit Carlson

I have a new lease on my writing life, and I owe it all to Harriet the Spy.

I was just cleaning the guest room, organizing the shelves where we keep the huge collection of children’s books that no one reads anymore, but that we can’t quite give up on yet. And there she was, Harriet M. Welch, the titular character of Louise Fitzhugh’s classic children’s novel from 1964, as fresh and provoking and nosy and sassy as I remembered her. I idly opened to the first page, but then immediately fell right into Harriet’s world, just as I did when I read Fitzhugh’s book for the first time in fourth grade.

Harriet the Spy is the story of an eleven-year-old girl growing up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in the early 1960s. She wants to be a writer and a spy, so she has both a spy route to surveil her neighbors (sneaking into dumbwaiters and peeking in skylights), and a green composition notebook, in which she writes down everything she sees, everything she feels, and all her lofty, judgmental assessments of the adults and classmates around her.

The book captivated me as a girl growing up in the 1960s (I also had spy routes and kept notebooks), but what I missed then—even though I knew that I, too, wanted to be a WRITER someday—were some of the very specific skills, the tools of her craft, that Harriet was using, even at such a young age.

But this time as I read Harriet the Spy, I realized that Harriet has a lot to offer a struggling, depressed, semi-blocked, and frustrated writer. So I got out a notebook (!) and made a list of the ways I noticed Harriet practicing her craft:

1. Take notes. Lots of them. Observe the people around you in the tiniest detail, and if anyone asks you why you are scribbling in a notebook, answer like Harriet, “Because I’ve seen them, and I want to remember them.”

2. Practice writing close description. Miss Whitehead’s feet look larger this year. Miss Whitehead has buck teeth, thin hair, feet like skis, and a very long hanging stomach. Ole Golly (Harriet’s nanny) says description is good for the soul and clears the brain like a laxative. That should take care of Miss Whitehead.

3. Be playful. Harriet plays a game she calls Town. She makes a list of all the people in her imaginary town—their ages, relationships, occupations and motivations—then creates lurid dramas for them, full of crime, accidents, and vengeance. In another game, Harriet sits at a lunch counter, eavesdropping on people behind her. The trick is to imagine what each speaker looks like, then turn around to see how many she got right. Harriet is a child, and to her, the business of imagining and creating is fun, not drudgery. She shows me that playfulness shouldn’t stop just because I am an adult.

4. Be truthful, but not cruel. The heart of the book is the rift created when Harriet’s notebook, with all its painfully truthful commentary, falls into the hands of her sixth-grade classmates. She learns the hard way how to be judicious with her honest observations.

5. Write something, anything. Near the end of the book, Ole Golly writes Harriet a letter and gives her an order: If you are ever going to be a writer, it’s time you got cracking. You are eleven years old and haven’t written a thing but notes. I just put that first sentence on a giant Post-It note over my desk. It’s time to get cracking.

6. Practice unearned confidence. After pounding out her first story on her father’s typewriter, Harriet writes in her notebook: It is time to rise and shine. Wait till The New Yorker gets a load of that story. I am often discouraged and hypercritical about my own writing. Harriet’s outrageous self-assessment reminds me that I also should believe in my work, believe in it enough to keep at it, believe in it enough to know that I am capable of—well, capability, at least.

Maybe someday, even greatness.

___

Kit Carlson is an Episcopal priest and a lifelong writer with work recently published in River Teeth, EcoTheo Review, Beautiful Things, and Burningword Literary Journal, among others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was recently named a finalist in Orison Books’ Best Spiritual Writing contest for 2025. Kit lives in East Lansing, Michigan, with her husband Wendell, and Lola, a nervous rescue dog.