We’ve been fans of Gary Presley’s writing for quite some time here at Brevity, including his essay from Brevity 25 and his insightful guest blogger posts found here, so we were indeed pleased to see his contribution to the New York Times‘ Modern Love column this morning. The essay is clear, honest, smart, and well worth your time.
An excerpt:
And so it was that the man in a wheelchair, sardonic and standoffish, and the vibrant young woman who loved science and worried over how she would support her sons, developed an odd connection, a link to a place where hands might touch, but thoughts and feelings and emotions began to flicker like lightning beyond the horizon.
I was past 40, my anger and frustration over being paralyzed mostly burned away. But it never occurred to me that the friendship, the connection, between Belinda and me might also be the bridge between caution and passion, between isolation and connection.
“I really don’t see the chair,” Belinda said a few months after we met. “I see you.”
You can imagine our excitement when Brenda Miller, author of so many beautiful Brevity essays and craft pieces (see here and here and here and here) dropped by the Brevity corporate offices last week as part of her visit to Ohio University’s BA, MA, and PhD in Creative Writing Program. Brenda gave a wonderful reading from her newest collection, Blessing of the Animals.
Just today, we ran across a fine interview with Brenda in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Q: How much distance do you need from a topic to write elegantly and clearly about it?
A: It depends. For certain things, I still don’t have enough distance, even though the events may have happened thirty years ago. For others, I write about them as they’re happening. In either case, I don’t think it’s the literal time, but the mind’s perspective on the topic or event that creates enough breathing room for something literary to happen on the page. Also: form. If you find the right form, or voice, for a piece, it can provide just the “container” you need for whatever the topic might be. And some of my essays span quite a bit of time; so I might start off by writing about an image from my childhood, which leads me to something quite close in the present day; once I’m on that train I’m not going to jump off.
Announcing the 2009 New Delta Review Creative Nonfiction Contest, judged by Peggy Shinner. NDR seeks pieces that activate the compelling bits of “real” life. We welcome hybrid essays, ones that expose the insides of things to risk making language do new things. Personal essays are welcome, too. Use a slice of memoir, but use also a dose of self-awareness. Autobiographical moments which are digested and used to engage the reader, not prove something to the reader, delight us. Prize: $150 and publication in New Delta Review. Finalists will be considered for publication. $10 submission fee includes option to purchase discounted two-issue subscription to NDR for an additional $10.
The new brevity has many virtues … It may seem as if we have entered a nightmarish attention-deficit culture, but the situation is not nearly as gloomy as you have been told. Our culture of the short bit is making human minds more rather than less powerful. The arrival of virtually every new cultural medium has been greeted with the charge that it truncates attention spans and represents the beginning of cultural collapse—the novel (in the 18th century), the comic book, rock ‘n’ roll, television, and now the Web. In fact, there has never been a golden age of all-wise, all-attentive readers. But that’s not to say that nothing has changed. The mass migration of intellectual activity from print to the Web has brought one important development: We have begun paying more attention to information.
He likes to talk about his writing as a responsibility and admits that it can, at times, feel like a burden. He recalled that in 1992, when The New York Times Book Review assessed the state of American Indian literature and declared his debut, “The Business of Fancydancing,” “one of the major lyric voices of our times,” he promptly went into the bathroom and vomited.
“I’ll write whatever’s going well for a few months at a time and move around from poetry to stories to the novel to a movie script,” he said. “I’ll write 150 pages in three or four days, and maybe I’ll scrap it all because it’s terrible, or it’ll become four lines of a poem.”
The broad portfolio is another thing Mr. Alexie sees as part of his mission. “I can’t think of any younger Indian writers who are multi-genre like I am,” he said. “In fact, it seems like most of them are poets. And besides Louise Erdrich, I feel like the only one who’s not a college professor. Where are the Indian mystery writers and romance novelists?”
I had written a book of poems about being “married to the military.” When I finished, I realized that I wasn’t finished with the Navy, that there were stories left which didn’t work in rhyming couplets or as Elizabethan sonnets. They were prose. There was a story about our worst wedding gift, a plastic plaque that read “Home Is Where the Navy Sends You.” And another about my husband’s billet on a minesweeper in the Arabian Gulf. And one about my first time visiting the Captain’s house, an evening of what’s known as “mandatory fun.”
I’m not sure that I love the Navy, but I do love the slang of that strange, sharpened world: blue water, brown water, haze gray and underway, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. It is a vernacular made heavy with image and allegory. My husband’s work in “surface warfare” becomes a poem about the arguments we have, which “move / across the surfaces / of things.” I hear phrases like “secure for sea” or “wooden ships, iron men,” and I know that there is autobiography to be found in those words. Navy slang is bravado, all cocks and dicks and ass. Bluster to hide the fear. It is nothing like the please-and-thank-you language of my tenure-track job or the words I say when buying a pound of tomatoes at the farmer’s market.
Bluster to hide the fear. In my milspouse essays, I begin with the posturing of NAVSpeak and write toward the objects that frighten me: how much I am alone, how a marriage may be cracked by distance or absence, the possibility of drownings and bombings. I don’t understand my husband’s job. His work scares me. But at least I know that Vitamin M means Motrin, the Navy cure-all. In drafting my essay, I learn that Vitamin M also means those catastrophes I can’t foresee, no matter how comprehensive my to-do lists, no matter that my contact lenses give me better than 20/20 vision.
Amy Lee Scott discusses the impulse behind her Brevity 31 essay, “This is Not To Say”:
I wrote this essay in response to a prompt my writing group assigned. Though I cannot fully recall the specifics of the prompt, I remember that it was on a topic situated somewhere between Lost Things and Nostalgia.
For a long time I had wanted to write an essay for the things that I never write about, the things that are lost by merit of being unsaid. This seemed like the perfect time to think it out. I also wanted to practice writing a sharp turn, something that would wield the essay from one emotional state to another by stitching memories together in an associative manner. This is surprisingly difficult to do in a short space, so I thought I would tackle the space issue by using a catalog.
Catalogs work hard, especially in small spaces. They can collate, categorize, and narrate in a way that other forms cannot. They can pinball from here to there, create an evocation of an emotion with few strokes, and hypnotize. The rich layers they accumulate can stun and delight and send a body reeling. On the flip side, they can seem shtick-y. Lazy. A bit too hip. Worse, they can feel pointless.
But for me, I had to take the risk. Sure, it wasn’t the kind of risk that saved lives from despicable ends, but it still had me mooning about with a big ol’ grin.
Rebecca Frost discusses the genesis of her brief essay “In Case of Emergency,” in the new Brevity issue:
I’m studying rhetoric and technical communication, so a creative non-fiction class was something out of the ordinary. It was offered in Fall 2008, taught by Matt Seigel, and I thought it would be a fun (and relatively easy) class to balance out my course load. I’d taken two creative writing classes in college and basically expected this to be an extension of those. Ah, sweet ignorance.
On the first day of class Matt told us we’d be picking a single topic and working on it for the whole semester, fourteen weeks’ worth. We would share two rough drafts for workshops, and then have a final reading. The topic that kept coming to mind was my ex-fiance and the breakup, since I’d just passed the one year anniversary of the cursed event. But I didn’t want to spend the next fourteen weeks dwelling on him, not when I’d spent the past twelve months getting over him!
I tried writing about my cats and writing about my writing, but everything kept circling back to the ex. It was all very cause and effect: he did what he did, so then afterwards I reacted by doing this other thing. When I complained about this to Matt, he pointed out that I should write about my ex, since I couldn’t get away from it. I made a face, but I wrote.
I went through twenty-four distinct drafts over the next fourteen weeks. My classmates got to see three of them. The first was a choose-your-own adventure story that manipulated you into making all the decisions I made (false advertising, I know). The second was composed entirely of sentence fragments and had the word “FaceBook” in there at least a dozen times more than they wanted to see. And the third one is the draft that ended up in Brevity.
By the time the semester was drawing to a close I was sick to death of my subject. On top of it all I’d started dating one of the guys in the class, so that old “never mention your ex to your new boyfriend” was thrown out the window. I wanted to get away from the essay and get away from that stage of my life, so I didn’t even edit my essay before submitting it. That was the final step needed to get a grade in the class: submit your essay somewhere, and show Matt that you did actually send it in.
I had to laugh the other day when I saw the email saying that Brevity only publishes previously published authors. When I got my acceptance notice on April 3 (I remember the date so exactly because, earlier in the evening, I’d found out that my mom had breast cancer – we were all grateful to the timing of Dinty’s email so that we could end the night with something positive to think about) I was completely taken by surprise. I’ve had my share of rejection letters and was expecting another one, but here was an acceptance letter – and I’d clearly stated in my bio that this would be my first publication.
Yes, the email was dated 2007, but I just wanted to make this clear: Brevity publishes unpublished authors. My resume was blank as far as publication credits were concerned, and now I’ve got something to put there, all because Matt forced me to write about something I wanted to avoid, and then forced me to send it in.
Our Fall 2009 Issue is ready for your inspection, kind reader.
Brevity 31 offers work from Sherman Alexie, Lee Martin, Brenda Miller, Ron Arias, Amy Lee Scott, Rebecca Frost, Ann Claycomb, Jehanne Dubrow, Scott Moncrieff, and April Monroe. Some of these folks you’ve no doubt read elsewhere, others have graced our pages in the past, and at least one is publishing for her first time. That’s the sort of mix that makes us happy here in the Brevity corporate towers.
Also, strong new Craft Essays from Stephen Corey, Dinah Lenney, Jennifer Culkin, and Towles Kintz, and Book Reviews from J. Luise, Stephanie Susnjara, and Dinty W. Moore. And also, ten (count ‘em, ten) wonderful photographs from Tricia Louvar.
From Amanda Fields, whose essay appears in Brevity 30:
In “Cairo Tunnel,” I wrote about a positive experience on the Metro. Other things happened in the space of that event, so I had to make thematic decisions, removing details that still seem poignant. I had to whittle the piece even more when I decided to submit it to Brevity. This exercise helped me pinpoint what was most essential about the piece, and it is this sensation of chipping away toward the center of the piece that I enjoy most about writing nonfiction. For instance, I removed a man who harassed me that day. He had followed me to the Metro with polite, proprietary creepiness; when the doors slid shut and I looked out the window, I saw the man standing just outside. He blew me a tender kiss, as if we were sweethearts, and I got a hard feeling in my gut, and it slid up to my head, where I conjured a satisfying vision of knocking out that man’s teeth. This sort of behavior is something that women in Egypt endure daily. In the end, though, that man represented an element of Cairo beneath which the reality of women, and discussions about women, too often disappear. He had little to do with the warmth and the curiosity of those women on the Metro. The women on the Metro were what mattered in the end, and the details about sexual harassment would have overshadowed that moment. Brevity forced me to make this choice.
Christina Olson, author of Duck, North Carolina in Brevity 30, writes about her brief essay, and brevity, briefly:
“Duck, North Carolina” started as little vignettes—small impressions that I had jotted down. I was trying to arrange them in a framework, figure out what connected them all, establish a linear narrative. And as I was doing so, my boyfriend walked into the room, took a look at the table, and said simply, “What do you need more words for?”
When it was published, I sent the URL to my brother, who wrote back three lines: Surely you know there are no mountains off the coast of Carolina. What’s with the picture? But then: Like this essay. High praise, stated as succinctly as possible, from a mechanical engineer.
Sometimes fewer, not more, words are what you need.
Brevity had the great good fortune to publish Kate Petersen’s To All Those Who Say Write What You Know in our May 2008 issue, and now that essay has been reprinted in the great, good, growlin’ Best of the Web 2009 ** from the fine folks at Dzanc Books.
So here’s our shout out to Dzanc — everyone who loves web literature should order that book right now — and our ongoing appreciation to Kate Petersen, who blogs about her essay here:
When I began this piece, my river was the Avon, the part that wends through Bath on its way to the river Severn, and now it’s the Charles. (Neither of them made the list). I have known a river of two, whatever that meant, but it came first.
I like lists, a lot, so in one way, this piece was an easy exercise: Write a list of what you know. Lists within lists. Items gave way to memory which gave way to more items.
But in another way it was really hard. No matter what the proponents of write-what-you-know say, as writers of fiction, we claim for ourselves and our characters knowledge that surpasses our own. But in nonfiction, we can’t (or aren’t supposed to). I couldn’t create a scene, a landscape or experience I hadn’t had. Some of my characters have known war, but I haven’t, and so in a way, the essay became about windows – the unwatched TV, cruising altitude flying coach. How much I’ve seen and facing what direction has been, more often than not, accidental.
To that end, I suppose I was challenging those who say write what you know: Here it is. Two pages. A horse in a field. Some rivers. That’s what I can have? Which may also be a bit like a confession. Everything I know fits into less than 750 words, after editing, and when I read it now, I hear the unasked question, Is this enough?
But maybe it’s not a challenge or a confession. Perhaps I was just trying to write down the want — that gap between what we know (and therefore have), and all the rest of it, where the desire gets in.
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** Also in Best of the Web 2009, Brevity essays by Terese Svoboda and Kathrine Leone Wright
Brevity 30 contributor Maggie McKnight writes about her essay “Tonight” and her decision to extract the text from a graphic memoir (still in progress) to compose her brief essay:
I first wrote “Tonight” several years ago as a response to an assignment in grad school—the assignment, in Robin Hemley’s “Nonfiction and the Image” class, was to take self-portrait photographs and write an essay inspired by them. My partner and I photographed the part of myself that most occupied our thoughts—and our hearts—at the time. Later, in working on a graphic memoir based on the same events, I converted the essay to graphic format (using less than half of the original text), to use as a prologue for my book.
The existing draft of the graphic essay is here; it needs revision still. (Among other things, some of the images aren’t working yet—the one at the top right of page 4, for instance, is indecipherable to most people. And I feel uncomfortable with the lead-in to my mom’s dialog, class-based assumptions that I know don’t accurately represent either my opinion or hers.)
Meanwhile, I decided to extract the text from the graphic essay to turn back into a short prose essay, with further revisions to the text. So the piece went from a 1600-word prose essay to a five-page graphic essay, and back to a 540-word prose essay. Now I have to do the graphic version again.
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NOTE: You can see the draft version of Maggie McKnight’s graphic memoir here: Mcknight Tonight PDF. Your discussion of how the graphic version differs from the prose version invited.
Richard Gilbert gives us some thoughts on his Brevity 30 essay Kathy and on the narrative choices forced by the short form:
“Kathy” begins and ends with some moments in the first meeting between my father and my future wife. How to convey enough backstory in 750 words for readers to understand their significance? In the body of the essay I showed more of Kathy’s background than my father’s, since readers must know her better to appreciate those moments. I’d decided to focus on Kathy because I knew I wanted to write toward the inscrutable image of her that closes the story.
The events and flashbacks in “Kathy” may pack more wallop than they do in my memoir’s forty pages that cover the same material. For one thing, the opening and closing scenes—my father showing her his high school yearbooks and his meeting us at the airport—appear in different chapters. I used those two related events to frame the essay, one as a hook and one as the climax. The opening depicts my father doing something uncharacteristic, seeking my girlfriend’s approval. The ending flashes back to when he spotted Kathy at the Orlando airport and what he noticed that made him conclude she was like him. I might quibble with the label my father attached to himself and Kathy, but it would take many pages to show why and to probe all subtext in their encounter. The Brevity vignette shows Kathy’s and Dad’s essential natures emerge, catches his point of view, and preserves some of their encounter’s mystery.
The old lesson “Kathy” underscored is that we can’t stop thinking about the stories most worth telling because we can’t fully understand them. They resist reduction. Such stories surely intrigue readers and stir their imaginations, reminiscent of their own enigmatic memories.
I tend to explain things to death, and “Kathy” liberated me. It thrilled me how closely to its resonant core I could pare the narrative.
Around 1994, one of my friends told me about a guy she knew who dressed all in red to tell his girlfriend he loved her. Then five years later, while I was on a writing residency at Hedgebrook Farm, one of the chefs told me about a kid–I think it was her nephew–who dressed all in red in order to lure hummingbirds. I knew these two stories fit together somehow, but they didn’t feel complete–things have to happen in threes, don’t they? So after a ten-year-wait for another story about someone dressed all in red, it occurred to me that the someone could be me.
A friend of mine suggested I write short essays dealing with the drives I make to and from the Minneapolis airport in connection with my hosting the Good Thunder Reading Series. The Stafford piece was the first of these I tried. The fact is, I forget most of the conversations I have with visiting writers on that 80-mile journey, even though I remember much of the talk as animated and interesting.
The Stafford drive was unforgettable, though, for its harrowing aspects and for Stafford’s stubborn restriction of subject matter.
Brevity contributor and nonfiction heavyweight Robin Hemley has been collecting book tour disaster stories on his blog these past few weeks, and this week he features Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore:
“I admit to a measure of dismay when the manager met me in a dirty, ill-fitting, pilled sweater at the front of an empty store and then walked me up a flight of steps to a narrow, dingy second floor. It wasn’t the small number of cheap folding chairs that caught me up short, or the rickety podium. It was the vast array of “gently used” pornographic books and magazines that lined the walls. Though the main floor of this once-thriving bookshop contained the finest contemporary and classic literature, it seems the second-story skin books were paying the electric bills.”
Just a few days ago we tooted our own Brevity horn because two of our authors — Terese Svoboda and Kathrine Leone Wright — were anthologized in Dazanc Books’ The Best of the Web 2009.
Well, some of us can’t read tables of contents as well as might be desired, and we forgot to shout out a third Brevity Best of:
Our friends and heroes at Dzanc Books tell us that The Best of the Web 2009 is now available for pre-order (it will be in stores in late June) at the Dzanc website for $18.00.
The line-up for Best of the Web 2009 includes a kettle of fine stories, flashes, poems and essays, but from Brevity, we are proud to be represented by:
..has pulled into the station with a new collection of essays involving planes, trains, and cars, subways, airports, and bus stops. Maybe it’s that we’re right between spring and summer, or maybe it’s that we’re anxious for our impending vacations, but the work in this issue seems to put itself right between departure and arrival. This issue we welcome new and returning authors: Rigoberto González, Sierra Bellows, Maggie McKnight, Richard Robbins, Amanda Fields, Kianoosh Hashemzadeh, Christina Olson, Richard Gilbert, Robin Behn, A. Papatya Bucak, Jane Bernstein, and Shane Borrowman.
In our craft section this issue, author and editor Judith Kitchen offers “Ten (or Twenty) Points on Publishing, Plus a Few Playful Tidbits,” Kelli Russell examines how rejection can reduce us to feelings we thought we left behind in junior high, and Gretchen Clark contributes “An Interview with Kim Barnes on Short Nonfiction.”
And new book reviews of Jay Griffiths’ Wild: An Elemental Journey; of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto; of Patricia Klindienst’s The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans, and of Tricia Tunstall’s Note by Note: A Celebration of the Piano Lesson.
Our visiting artist this issue is Sarah Truckey. We thank her for her fine photos.
“The credibility battle is being won in many ways, by pioneer online journals that have remained very selective in the work they publish, by somewhat newer ventures like McSweeney’s and Narrative and Blackbird that have the funding and staffing to act like “real” magazines and draw in the star power, and by conventional print magazines that are opening up more and more online content. I suppose there are some tenure committees that still turn up their collective egghead noses at online publications, but most writers I know, and especially if they are younger, don’t carry that prejudice any more.”
In the midst of reviewing Where Did I Leave My Glasses? for The Internet Review of Books, I stumbled upon a neurological star chart which might be useful for writers exploring the edge of the universe between truth and reality. Here is a sample:
” … computer remembers all or nothing. No in-between. Whereas the brain is filled with in-between. Think of it this way: What you put into the computer is an abstraction of your experience. Retrieve it, and it’s unchanged. What you remember is an abstraction of that experience, then a reconstruction of the abstraction, then a reconstruction of the reconstruction of the abstraction, and so on and on and on—every time you retrieve it. And of course, the more time that passes, the truer this becomes.”
I think regularly about the muddy mixture of objective fact and subjective truth as it applies to the art of creative nonfiction, particularly memoir. While I know a writer has the obligation to quote correctly and describe accurately, I also know that when we set out to explore the swamp of self, we often get tangled up in the jungle of emotions.
Ignore the book’s light-hearted title. Lear tackled the subject of memory by consulting psychologists and neuro-scientists of every stripe. It was especially fascinating to follow her as she explored the idea that our writing comes from the place where memory lives, which in Lear’s description is “palimpsest,” a tablet of layered text, each preceding layer imperfectly erased.
I love the art of memoir, in book form and in personal essay, but even pre-Frey, I approached the such works believing that the writer was telling only a truth rather than the truth. Lear’s work reinforces both my skepticism and my faith.
As a reader, I am forgiving, although not quite so cynical as Ambrose Bierce, who said truth is “an ingenious compound of desirability and appearance.”
But after reading Where Did I Leave My Glasses? I think I have moved away from the idea of “truths” to the point where I believe that “truths” are merely opinions about truths, but that doesn’t mean I will easily forgive you if you choose to lie to me.
“… the short form, when done well, offers a compression of experience, a distillation of the moment, that is more like the haiku or poem than it is like the longer, thoughtful memoir or essay. I think certain experiments, with language, point-of-view, structure, work better in the short form. Very brief essays are like a petri dish for innovation.”
We have completed reading for our two remaining 2009 issues and will suspend reading (or accepting submissions) on May 1, 2009. We will resume again in September, 2009.
Once we resume reading, all of the usual rules will apply.
Our friend and past Brevity contributor Robin Hemley is blogging in anticipation of the release of his (we certainly anticipate, and expect) sharp and funny new memoir Do-Over! [In which a forty-eight-year-old father of three returns to kindergarten, summer camp, the prom, and other embarrassments], and to Robin’s great credit, instead of just blogging the usual “buy my book, please, or I’ll kill this puppy,” he’s offering some useful commentary on the process and context of his immersion book:
“To me, in “Immersion Memoir,” a writer creates a kind of framework to actively engage in experience and memory…
“I suppose someone could conceivably consider my book [and some similar immersion memoirs] as ‘gimmicky,’ but I would say that they’re simply structured around a theme and that they are no less ‘Authentic’ than any work in which the writer imposes a structure – which would pretty much include all novels and all memoirs. There’s certainly artifice in all art and as writers know, writing is not simply a matter of recording life but shaping it in a kind of ‘return the favor’ way.”
Brevity has seen the number of submissions double over the last two years — around on hundreds per month, or up to 400 per 12-essay issue. This means we are turning away lots of fine work.
Well, it isn’t easy, and we don’t enjoy it, this turning people down. There is no joy in saying “no.”
So to all of the writers who we have had to say “no thank you” to lately, our regrets.
We are grateful for Luna Park’s thoughtful and provocative review of Brevity’s flash nonfiction concept and two essays from our most recent issue. Read it here:
The selections of Brevity, past and present, satiate a need for resonance that flash fiction is unable to achieve. They also reveal a point of contention about the creative nonfiction form: at what level of origination, revision, or, “compression” does creative nonfiction simply become fiction? The recently released Brevity 29 offers several examples of brief narratives of both blurred genre and earned resonance.
“Suspended” is the latest installment of a failed book-length memoir that I hope will one day become a no-longer-failed book-length memoir. Two other pieces have been previously published: “You Shall Go Out with Joy and Be Led Forth with Peace,” in Random House’s Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers, and “This Is Not That,” in the online journal Waccamaw.
The still formless book is about a hard-to-articulate something at the core of my being, where worry attaches to such matters as religion, doubt, the problem of evil, a bully I knew in middle school, my abortive attempt to be a preacher (and, more generally, an evangelical Christian), the death of a friend from leukemia, an adult acquaintance with two pedophiles, a brief sojourn in the backrooms of American grassroots right-wing political power, a girl I loved who was also my best friend’s little sister, my high school principal who died of brain cancer waiting fruitlessly for his “wayward” wife to return to him, the taste and shape of the starfruit, the trace amounts of neurotoxin in the starfruit, the cutting down of a hundred Australian pines, and the story of my fifth grade teacher, a Cold War hero who escaped East Berlin by swimming a river with elderly relatives on her back so she could make her way to West Palm Beach, Florida, and ruin the lives of fifth grade boys.
The scary thing about these riches is that they tempt me. I want to gather them together into a single memoir, but already I’ve started to peel them off, fictionalize them, turn them into short stories and novellas, publish some of them that way. I worry that process will further distort my memories until I will no longer be able to write them as memories, and they will be available to me only as myth. I wrote “Suspended” out of this fear, and sent it to be published to give it permanence. After I forget, I want to be able to remember.
Jill Kandel wrote about her late Uncle Ray in Brevity 27, and now she weighs in on an unexpected development:
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I’m calling it a reverse Kitchen— kind of like a reverse Nelson—in honor of the memorable Judith Kitchen, who pulls story out of photograph. I sat under Judith’s teaching this past summer, spending a week diligently wrestling with and writing around pictures dredged up from childhood.
It is sepia blotted with age. I gaze at it and see what I did not write:
A dark crop of hair sticks out the top of the bandage.
He’s propped up by a corner of a wall and tilted.
His hard working farmer hands lie white in his lap.
The vulnerability in his earnest face takes my breath away.
He’s wearing slippers.
Finding Ray’s photo struck something inside of me. I knew the accident had really happened, yet holding the picture I kept thinking over and over, “Oh. So it is true.” The picture and the story deepen each other. They add truth upon truth.
I cannot get the look of his face out of my mind. We sit and stare at each other. There’s things I will never know the depths of.
So yes, that makes us fans, and we are of course happy to hear the news that Brenda’s newest book, Blessing of the Animals, has just been released.
Says author Kim Barnes: “Brenda Miller writes with such extraordinary grace and intimacy that, despite our weariness and fears, we find ourselves falling in love with the world all over again…”
Congratulations to Brenda, and to anyone lucky enough to read her work.
Just a few weeks after I submitted“The Crab in the Stars”to Brevity and a few weeks before I received the editor’s response accepting it for inclusion in Issue 29, I got a call from my mother to tell me that my grandmother, about whom I had written in this essay, was dead.
I made my arrangements to attend the funeral, held in the same church where my grandfather’s had been held almost twenty years earlier. I sat in a pew while my cousin (the one who had been most wracked with hilarity at the minister’s misapplied lipstick, last time around) calmly delivered a eulogy extolling my grandmother’s selflessness and love of family, “practical” gifts (dickeys anyone?) and stocked cookie jars. It started out exactly the way a grandmother’s funeral should be. But when we got to the cemetery and crowded under a small tent over the open grave, while rain fell around us, a veritable plague of mosquitoes laid siege. I think my mother might have landed the first blow on my father’s head to kill one that had lighted upon his temple. Pretty soon we were all slapping them off each other and ourselves, swatting and scratching while the ceremony went on around us, trying to minimize profane utterances in light of the occasion. Not even the minister (a man, this time) could keep from smacking a mosquito on his forehead while intoning the bit about ashes and dust, leaving a smear of blood over his eye.
What struck me as troubling when I was twelve—the fact that life goes on, in all of its absurdity, even when something awful happens that ought to require us take a solemn and reflective pause—now seems like reason for delight.
I suppose there are two reasons why I wrote “The Crab in the Stars” in the first place: 1) A mystery: I was haunted for years by the image of the man in the bike helmet who came to our door, to the extent that I could not think of my grandfather’s death without thinking of this stranger as well, and it was curious to me that he should remain so persistently in my memory, even though I don’t now believe that his presence meant anything at all. 2) A regret: I did not stay with my grandmother to wait for the coroner and other family members (those more capable of consoling her, perhaps) instead of retreating into my own mind after learning of my grandfather’s death. I don’t entirely blame my twelve-year-old self, and I’m pretty sure my grandmother never held it against me either, but I do regret it all the same. Writing a vaguely self-implicating essay seemed like the only way to atone.
I wonder what she would have said if I could have showed her the essay—whether she would have been able to affirm or contradict my recollections of these events, and how she would have felt about it now. In the end, she outlived the habits of gentleness and propriety that had characterized her for most of her life; she spent her final days in nursing homes where she occasionally made inappropriate references to sex and dumped glasses of orange juice on other old ladies. Her memory had been failing for years. Part of me just wants to feel bad about it, but another part of me thinks that being able to see all of this as an interesting (and, frankly, hilarious) story is a better way to get by.
The end of this story takes place in 1988 when my oldest son was
three-years-old. I’ve been telling this story for ages now, but only
to other addicts and alcoholics, usually at some type of 12-step
meeting. I only recently started telling it to civilians, which is
difficult because people never know what to say when I get to the end.
For the longest time my family never knew this story. They just knew that I had gone to NYC and then a few years later I surfaced again on
long weekend trips into Pennsylvania. There were bridges that needed
building, and we all kept busy saying the things that needed to be
said, but everyone was careful about discussing the past.
This story just never came up.
First I told my oldest son, not long after he graduated high school.
He had never been to NYC, so I took him (and my new wife and kids) on a summer trip. One evening I took my oldest boy down to Saint Mark’s Place in the East Village. It was summertime and he was craning his head to see all the girls and I had him by the elbow and was dashing up and down the block, but the Electric Circus was long gone by then, so I just told him straight out. “For a little while,” I said, “I lived in a homeless shelter that used to stand just over there.” In those years, he had a teenage sensibility where he allowed nothing to faze him, but still this news raised his brows and he said something
like, You were in a homeless shelter?, before dropping back into that
hard teenage posture. I have always felt terrible that we lived in
different towns his entire life, and I wanted most of all for him to
understand the stakes. He took it like a trouper. I told him more of
my stories and he told me some of his. We really bonded on that trip
to NYC.
About two years ago, I told this story to my youngest brother who is
now a police officer with a grizzled heart and a few good stories of
his own. We were on his patio in the middle of the night, just the two
of us. He has heard it all before, but when I got to the end he just
said, “Jesus.”
Sometimes a story can seem one way to one person, but another person
can take it the wrong way. Not long ago I posted an excerpt from my
childhood memoir on my blog. It was a story about a small rebellion I
waged against my mother when I was about twelve. Later when she and I
spoke on the phone, she let me know she read the excerpt by saying,
“Jesus, Timmy. Can’t you write about anything nice?”
I think I may have annoyed her.
“Why don’t you write about that time you were up there in that
homeless shelter in NYC,” she said. “If you want to write about stuff,
write about that.”
I didn’t even know Mom knew the story about me being in the shelter,
but apparently she had heard. These kinds of stories have a way of
traveling. I think about that and I wonder if I want everyone at my
work to know this story. I have a house, a career, and two elementary
school kids. I live on the other side of the country. I have a whole
new life now.
I think like that and I remember a time right after the kids were
born, when I stopped going to meetings. When the kids turned about
five, I started back again. Most 12-step meetings place a premium on
complete abstinence and continuous sobriety. I hadn’t used, but I felt
guilty. I approached a guy who has been around for some time, but who
I didn’t know all that well. I felt like I needed to explain my
absence. He listened politely, sipped his coffee and nodded his head.
I wanted to make sure he understood that I hadn’t even felt an urge.
Eventually he held up his hand to interrupt me.
He said, “It’s not all about you, Tim.”
I laughed. He had a good point. Our stories are probably the most
powerful things we own. The challenge is finding the courage to tell
them honestly.
So I guess if there is a moral, it’s probably this: Always listen to
your mamma. She won’t steer you wrong.
BREVITY, the journal of concise nonfiction, launches the 29th issue today, bringing youthe Big Bad Wolf, a glass eyeball, Parisian lingerie, a pair of stolen sneakers, an orphaned doe, and, possibly, a visitor from another planet. Maybe it’s just the snow playing tricks on our eyes, but each of these pieces seems to ask the same thing: “Did I see what I think I saw?” Bundle up and get warm by the intense fire of such talents as Lance Larsen, David Bradley, Tim Elhajj, John Bresland, Diane Seuss, Joe Bonomo, Kyle Minor, Laura Sewell Matter, Elizabeth Westmark, and Bryan Fry. Also, new Craft Essays from Brenda Miller and Lisa Knopp, and Book Reviews from Mary Richert, Richard Gilbert, and Stephanie Susnjara.
One of our favorite writers, Brian Doyle, is briefly interviewed on the Paper Cut blog today.
Just finished a lean little novel about a guy who goes looking for his foot, which was blown off in a war a while ago. It was glorious fun to write a novel. I was always terrified of fiction — I mean, I am an essayist, and proud of it, the Ancient Clan of Essayists, we are all descended from Plutarch and Montaigne, and Orwell’s our king, and it’s hard enough to grapple with this muddled confusing wild world — but it was very freeing to commit a novel like a venial sin.
AMG: Brevity accepts CNF submissions of 750 words or less. Why stop at 750 words?
DM: It started because I didn’t want to read long pieces on a computer screen. Since then, I’ve learned all sorts of wonderful things about brief writing, flash nonfiction, micro-essays, and what I’ve learned makes the short form all the more intriguing. But the real first impulse was to save our eyesight.
AMG: When it comes to Brevity’s submissions, do you have a preference to certain styles and/or topics?
DM: As soon as I say that I’m tired of a topic – love of grandparents, for instance – someone submits an essay on that topic that blows my head open. So we are open to anything, but try to be fresh, not familiar and safe, and edit ruthlessly.
AMG: What really makes a submission stand out?
DM: Tight prose, from the first sentence to the end, and surprise. Take the reader somewhere she didn’t realize the piece was going.
Harper’s Magazine’s Weekend Read Blog gives Brevity a nice shout out for the recent, wonderful mini-essay from Donovan Hohn, Snail Picking.
Here is what Harper’s had to say:
Donovan Hohn, an erstwhile editor at this magazine (and current contributing editor), has been writing terrific essays for Harper’s and others for a number of years. He has a lyrical way with line and a rigorous way with theme. He is attentive to the appearances of things, to the natural and its perversion by man. A little essay of Hohn’s that appeared in the journal of little essays, Brevity, begins:
I was, at age nine, a god of snails. On the quiet San Francisco cul-de-sac where my family lived, Helix aspera, the brown garden snail, was by far the most plentiful and least evasive wildlife around. Snails plied the long green fins of our neighbor’s agapanthus like barges transiting green canals. I’d unglue them from their shiny trails, hold them in mid-air, and poke their sensitive horns. They’d ripple and recoil.
From Kathrine Leone Wright, author of “Why” in Brevity 28:
Sometimes thoughts don’t take linear form. Sometimes words are an explosion. They come to me in a rush of color, busting with their own force.
So an assignment to decipher the why in “why I write” from my thesis advisor couldn’t be completed in linear fashion.
The reason I write can’t be summoned in narrative form. The reason I write crosses genres. And because words amaze me, the density of poetry excites me. Calculating cost per word, tossing out cheap articles and overused flowers. That’s what I’m talking about.
And because I’m not all that great with authority, even though I did strive to be a good student. And I wasn’t a traditional student, having taken on graduate school at 39 as a “decade crises” in which I assessed what I meant to do versus what I had DONE. I thought I had already examined the linear why.
And because the best possible answer for why I write – have to – wouldn’t meet the guidelines for the assignment. And because writing is a joyous, laborious, insane process that slips away when you reach for it.
From John Griswold, author of “Three Graces” in Brevity 28
I’ve long been interested in the concept sabi from Asian art. The meaning has shifted over time, and it’s now usually joined with wabi:
“Wabi-sabi is an intuitive appreciation of a transient beauty in the physical world that reflects the irreversible flow of life in the spiritual world. It is an understated beauty that exists in the modest, rustic, imperfect, or even decayed, an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things.” (Andrew Juniper, Wabi-Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence, Tuttle, 2003)
The poet and translator John Balaban once described sabi as the feeling you’d get watching a very old man dressed like a young hip hop artist while waiting together on a train platform—you might want to laugh and cry at the same time. As I think of it sabi doesn’t contain the anger of black comedy but rather leads to empathy and even compassion. This viewpoint doesn’t seem all that common in Western literature, but Chekhov is a master. My piece in Brevity is an attempt to see with that view.
My father was 89 and in good health until two months before he died. He and his wife had the curious, engaged, witty minds that I have often wished for in acquaintances my own age. But he left us when I was six or seven months old, and I knew him only because I had tracked him down and only ever as a friend and only for ten years. It was strange and beautiful and frightening being at his bedside in hospice. All I could do was run little errands, be calm, and tell him more about his grandsons. Being there was important, not because I could share much more in my father’s life, but because I wanted to show him I loved him enough to witness his dying.
There weren’t many left to bear witness. Most of his friends and colleagues from various universities and from his time in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and elsewhere had been dead for years. A few more lived far away. I was a little afraid for him, with his failing breath, and his wife, who couldn’t hear well, and it had something to do with loneliness. Maybe that’s silly, since the dying often begin to distance themselves long before they die, but I was thankful when the others came.
First there were neighbors from their retirement community then the waitresses came from a Greek restaurant where my dad and his wife had breakfast every morning. Life and time had made the waitresses a little hard and tired in a way you don’t recover from, and it was easy enough to imagine the rest of their unchanging lives. But they were comical as well, full of gossip, cussing and the need for more drinks. And it was they who had the strength and vitality to flirt and kiss my father’s hands goodbye as a kind of last rites. I was so moved and found them so beautiful that I saw them instantly as sabi figures, the three saving graces.
From Brian Oliu, author of “Virus 1″ in Brevity 28:
This essay came as a result of an “end-user error” on my part; I had originally written an essay reflecting on my birth and what I had ascertained to be the truth around the medical complexity of the situation. Upon hearing a reading of the piece, my mother explained that this is not how it happened at all; there was no C-section. I felt terrible about getting the story wrong all of these years, and especially relaying something that is considered to be non-fiction whereas it turned out I had gotten perhaps the most important fact incorrect. As a result of this, I began to question all of these “made-up” memories about my childhood that had been passed down to me.
Naturally, I don’t remember being born or getting injured as a small child, but through stories and recounted information it is as if I created that memory, and therefore it was as valid as the experience itself. I equated this idea to the computer virus; how these viruses fill in gaps left by human error in order to create new things and make programs do specific actions or simply overload the file with too much information. These installed concepts “infect” us, causing our ideas to become more erratic, finally spitting out an amalgamation of truth, ideal, and excess coding.
What do you do? If you’re a plumber or a life insurance salesman or a retail sales clerk, sometimes folks will ask where you work and if you like it, depending on whether they care to get to know you or are just making small talk. If you answer that you’re a writer, though, you seem to be scrutinized. “A writer, eh? Well, what have you written?”
It’s not glamorous enough to write newsletters and ad copy. “Oh, that kind of writer.” And just watch their noses turn up, as if accosted by a foul odor, when you tell them you’re a poet. And if you write essays for literary magazines, forget about it. Brevity? You might as well be speaking dog. A writer can sometimes gain respect claiming to have written for local papers and glossies, but even then, people want to know the subject, whether they’ve read something you’ve written. Are writers more fascinating? Or do we have more to prove?
Until last year, that was my experience. Now I’ve written a book! So when people ask, I say, “I just finished a book about cake for Simon & Schuster that will be out April 14th. It’s already on Amazon.com!” With sound effects, you’d hear a bowling ball striking all ten pins with ferocity, the pins falling loudly and slowly.
Now, in their eyes, I’m even better than a writer. I’m a writer who bakes cake. I’m not going to challenge anyone’s political leanings, nor will I bore them with historical meanderings. I will simply make their mouths water. And in the months that follow, those people will send me emails asking me to recommend a bakery or if I have a recipe for something. I can. I do. And they will often ask me to bake—for their husband’s birthday, their parents’ anniversary. A literary acquaintance who knows me as a poet invited me to be a featured reader in her series. The theme is: writers whose day jobs conflict with their writing lives. When she asked me, later, if I would bake a cake for the final reading of the series, I realized she must think that I’m a baker. But I’m a writer. That is my day job.
All of the people I have told about the cake book—every one of them—must be under the impression that a nonfiction book about cake is a recipe book. What else could it possibly be? And when I turn down their offer of money to bake their fortieth birthday cakes because I kind of suck at baking for other people (my cakes taste good, but they are ugly), I see an awakening. “Well, if it’s not about baking cake,” they say slowly, thinking, thinking. “Then what is it about?”
Slowly, their lips turn upward, as if a whole new and delightful world has opened up to them. The best reaction of all came from an exchange in Desmond’s, an Irish pub on Park Avenue in Manhattan.
“About cake?” a London native with a cockney accent asked me, his head tilted like a dog who recognized “dinner.”
Yes, cake.
“C-A-K-E cake?”
Yes. C-A-K-E cake.
“About making it?”
No, about eating it.
There was a brief pause while this new fact underwent rumination. “Well, all right then!” he said, even more pleased, and he bought me a Smithwick’s. (I like beer just a tad better than cake.)
My book began with a long essay. Its potential grew and took on many disparate layers, but eventually, with filling and frosting, it held together.
My Brevity essay is a couple of small slices, reshaped and whipped into a petit four, a taste of what’s to come.
For the next week or so, we’ll be featuring blog entries from authors found in our newest issue, Brevity 28. The first comes from Terese Svoboda, author of How Catholic:
For maybe twenty years I have been trying to write a short story about the effect of finding two moons of green eye shadow on a towel in my youth. I have also written three poems twisting the memory around, alluding to its larger context. But what was that larger context? Was it only a “family story,” an anecdote worth repeating only once to another relative just to make sure I didn’t imagine it?
I feared nonfiction telling: that would be me. I went into poetry originally to throw the velvet cloak around that persona, or to flaunt the “I” voice in peekaboo. Publishing my memoir last year–Black Glasses Like Clark Kent–where I could skulk around as a detective and refer to myself in relation to my relatives—wasn’t too bad. But only under the duress of my uncle’s suicide and the horrific revelations of his tapes would I have attempted its writing. Yet something about the form felt familiar. Cannibal, my first novel, was called a roman a clef by Vogue. According to Wikipedia, that’s the opportunity to portray personal, autobiographical experiences without having to expose the author as the subject. Think “thinly disguised.” The entry suggests that any material based on personal experience is a roman a clef, and used Heart of Darkness as an example. Huh?
What I do know is that all material needs the fuzziness of time until what’s important remains. Time completed How Catholic, enough to gain perspective on what those two green moons meant, and to find a voice to say what I understood about them in a larger context. To find a formal solution for this narrative in creative nonfiction worked. I’m happy.
Next week, BREVITY 28 will fall to earth like an acorn from a truth-telling oak tree. Where else can you find intergalactic dust, two peach-colored poodles, one upturned car, notes on the art of fencing, cake erotica, failed Caesarian sections, missing toddlers, cameos by Tiresias and Oedipus, and the brightest red dress you’ve ever seen? All of it nonfiction, and brought to you by the incomparable likes of Terese Svoboda, J.T. Bushnell, John Calderazzo, K.L. Cook, Brian Doyle, Kate Flaherty, John Griswold, Pat Madden, Leslie F. Miller, Brian Oliu, Rita Rubin, Phil Terman, and Kathrine Leone Wright. Plus new Book Reviews from Debbie Hagan, Joey Franklin, and Liz Stephens and stellar Craft Essays from Barrie Jean Borich and Sherry Simpson.
Those of you who read Ann Bauer’s powerful Modern Love essay in the New York Times this past Sunday may also want to read Ann Bauer’s Brevity essay “The Nowhere Place.”
This is the second time in recent months that a Brevity veteran has landed in the Modern Love column, and that makes us smile. If you missed Lori Jakiela’s essay on sex chairs (among other things) you missed a good one.
Both Jakiela and Bauer are veterans of the same issue — Brevity 11. A fine vintage, it seems.
As part of of Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2008 Web-Wide Shout Out yesterday, Brevity contributor Robin Behn blogged on her piece, Childbirth in Alabama, for Syntax of Things. Below is an excerpt where Robin says nice things about us (blush), but the full post is well worth the reading for insight into her writing process.
Here’s the nice stuff:
I sent this piece to Brevity because I admire the on-line journal very much. I’m intrigued by how a non-fiction piece can be accomplished in 750 or fewer words. In fact, it was reading Brevity that prompted me to write this piece. I had been reading the journal the very night I wrote the piece, thinking to myself, “I wonder if I could do something like that.” I usually write poetry, so I decided to approach this piece like a giant poem. I like the leaps that happen from one paragraph to the next, the way poems often leap from one line or stanza to the next, and I like the way images do a lot of the talking.
Yes, we arranged this just for you. Honestly, it was darned expensive and time-consuming to fly Brevity’s complete editorial staff, including our new ice skating intern, all the way to Beijing, but Brevity readers are worth the expense:
Fully one-third of our editorial staff are south of the border for a few weeks, investigating the state of memoir en Mexico. No report yet, but for now, this:
If you read the excellent Modern Love essay in the New York Times this past weekend (Father’s Day), you know about Tim Elhajj’s life as a father trying to buy a Yankees cap for his 10-year-old son.
Well, Brevity is pleased to present a companion piece — Tim Elhajj writing about his own father, and his name, and many other things.
Here’s the start. Just click the link at the end to read the entire essay:
I Am By Tim Elhajj
Until I was well into my thirties, I didn’t realize this simple fact: Elhajj is an Arabic word that means pilgrim.
I blame Dad. He rarely said anything about our name; never talked about his father, or what it means to be an Arab.
In Islam, a pilgrimage is the sacred duty of every Muslim. If you make the trip, you earn the title, Elhajj. When Malcolm X did it, he took the name, El Hajj Malik Shabazz.
When I was a boy, I always wondered if Dad were black. No one in our small town looked like Dad. He had the thick features of an Arab. If he let his hair grow, it piled up in messy loafs on his head. Of course, I never asked Dad about any of this. I wasn’t sure how to present it.
“In a time of glut and waste on every front, compression and economy have undeniable appeal. And if a great work of art is one that is essential in all its parts, that has nothing superfluous or that can be subtracted, working small may improve the odds.”
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To be honest, though, they are talking about painting, not writing.
We’re happy to throw up a big huzzah for Brevity contributor Lori Jakiela (Brevity 11) who pretty much stole the show in Sunday’s New York Times with her Modern Love essay:
April 13, 2008
The Plain, Unmarked Box Arrived
By LORI JAKIELA
THE night we ordered the sex chair, we’d been drinking. Not a lot, but enough to make a sex chair seem like an investment, like junk bonds or an I.R.A.
Brevity has already filled the Summer 2008 and Fall 2008 issues, and we are reading for January 2009. We will close off submissions for the summer early this year, on April 15th to be exact.
Our Friends of Brevity Facebook group has 488 members as of this morning (March 29), which means we need just an even dozen more of you fine folks to reach 500. And then what? Something like this:
It is always nice to hear news of past Brevity contributors, and we’re pretty pleased to learn that Michelle Richmond, author of Curvature, way back in BREVITY Five (Summer 1999), has a new novel, and it just showed up on the NY Times Trade Paperback Bestseller list:
THE YEAR OF FOG, by Michelle Richmond. (Bantam Discovery, $12.) After the child she was watching disappears on a San Francisco beach, a woman spends an agonizing year searching for answers.
Congratulations, Michelle!
And other previous BREVITY authors — send us your news.
I’ve been banging my head against a memoir for two or three years – a book that’s only now crossed the copy-editing stage at the University of Iowa Press on the track to Fall 2008 publication (Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio). As with most things written, the book went through more drafts than I wanted to make – from connected, related essays into a chronological narrative.
During the last state, I told a writer friend, unless you’re famous and can sell a gaggle of essays, a memoir writer may not think he is living a life with a rational, non-repetitive narrative arc, but he best find one if he wants to be published.
She replied with a question, “How would you explain narrative arc?”
She asked me that because I’ve never studied creative writing. I doubt I’ll ever be as famous as Grandma Moses – the famous folk artist painter – but I use her technique, which might be called primitive.
With that in mind, I told her I think a chronological narrative would have a “time arc.” When I wrote 100,000 words as a “memoir in essays,” I would pick a subject about disability, look at it from every direction, and write about it. I had essays about the disease; its treatment; the hospital environment; the rehabilitation environment; isolation upon my return home; about education and employment; and some discussing the nitty-gritty of disability.
The editor first said “Masterful essays, but there’s too much repetition. Try a chronological narrative arc.” I tried, but I felt too close to the material. Then the editor said “It’s lost some of its passion. Make the chapters more like the essays.”
There was the rub. It took me a long time to understand that if anger and frustration occurred when I was in the iron lung at age 17 that I did not need to re-state the origins of that anger and frustration when I brought up an anecdote later.
If I could put the effort in the Wayback Machine, I would outline anecdotes on index cards. Then before I began to write, and I would shuffle the cards around and play with their order – both in theme and in time.
Within the terminology of “narrative arc,” I think, is the idea that we build our lives around themes. My theme was living as a person with a disability in 20th USA, but the sub-themes are anger, and duality (the idea that a virus killed then-17-year-old-Gary and created crip-Gary, who is an entirely different bag of tricks) and a prosaic existentialism.
How that might translate in another writer’s life I cannot say, but I know this: we are different people to each individual we know, both because of their perceptions and because of the way we reveal ourselves to them. With that, there are an infinite number of stories to weave into any narrative arc.
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You are invited to create a “tasty” video based on any written piece published in Brevity (and many other journals — see here).
The Mad Hatter’s Review is sponsoring the contest, calling for a “video inspired by a poem, fiction, literary non-fiction, or experimental form, a written work that stimulates you to create a video in response. You may decide to creatively and dramatically interpret and thereby ‘collaborate’ with the author of the work in terms of mood, energy, theme, related imagery, words, ‘plot,”’ music, and/or sounds.
Anne Panning discusses the background to her essay, “Vietnam: Four Ways,” in the current issue of Brevity:
It’s hard to write about “exotic” places, and having lived in my fair share of them—Vietnam, The Philippines, Hawaii—I always go through a period where I try desperately to use these settings in my fiction. I’ve found, however, that creative nonfiction—in particular, brief creative nonfiction—may be the best vehicle for me. Why? Because it doesn’t allow me to include any “what to pack, where to stay, don’t drink the water” information but it forces me to choose a singular, off-kilter lens from which to view the place and to do it quickly. When I was writing there were originally “five ways,” but suddenly it seemed it could just as easily be “ten ways” or “twenty ways,” when in fact my goal was to capture the small fragmentary moments that defined the experience of the place for me. So instead of focusing on large scale noticings (the presence of Communist soldiers everywhere), I looked at the small.
What originally sparked this essay was a street vendor making my son a bird out of shaved ice one night when the temperature was around 95 degrees. There was so much drama in the simple act of getting the ice bird home without its melting. I was also deeply affected by the loneliness and severity of the military swimming pool where I swam laps, and knew I had to write about it in some way.
I’m currently finishing a nonfiction book about my experiences in Vietnam with my husband and two young kids called VIET*MOM, and find myself still struggling with the issue of the “exotic.”
This lyric essay began in an exercise I did with my undergraduate creative nonfiction students. The assignment focused on two separate objectives. The first asked them to experiment formally with the shape of their essay through segmentation. At a minimum they had to include three different kinds of segments and assemble them in an aesthetically pleasing and unifying way. I gave them suggestions: meditation on a color, targeting different senses, recreating overheard dialogue, memories of other places, a found poem. These suggestions were not intended to limit or prescribe what they might consider including in their essay. I talked about different modes as well—narrative, descriptive, meditative.
The second objective focused on observation and creating a mini-portrait of a nonfiction place. Here we talked about how to define our relationship to this specific place. Since the fountain area was located on campus near frequently used classroom buildings, the students were familiar with the place. We weren’t true outsiders, yet because the place was a public space, none of us lived there and most of us just passed through on our way to somewhere else.
Unfortunately it was the middle of March in Michigan when I did this assignment. The timing of the assignment came to play an unexpectedly large role in what the essay came to be about.
I tried this assignment with my students as a test drive since I had made it up and I didn’t know what its difficulties might be. Segmentation has not come easily for me; I’ve been working to get the hang of it. This essay was a breakthrough and gave me invaluable experience about the complicated layering and textual intersections that can be accomplished through even a brief segmented essay. The segmented approach drove my discovery of the emotional layers in my experience of this place at this specific point in time and surprised me.
We are about a week away from launching our 26th Issue, themed Hot and Cold. Stay tuned for brief essays fromA. Papatya Bucak, Aaron Teel, Marcia Aldrich, Mary Sojourner, Ashley Seitz Kramer, Patricia Twomey Ryan, Jill Christman, and Anne Panning, as well as a new craft essay from Philip Gerard and Bill Milligan’s review of Robert Root’s new book. We are pleased.
The conference schedule features one-on-one sessions with editors and agents and panel discussions offering concrete tips about the art, craft and business of writing creative nonfiction. Presenters and speakers include Samir Husni (University of Mississippi), Virginia Morell (National Geographic), Rebecca Skloot (The New York Times Magazine, University of Memphis), June Thomas (Slate.com), Michael Rosenwald, (The New Yorker, Esquire), Webster Younce (Houghton Mifflin), Dinty W. Moore (Brevity, Ohio University), Kristen Iversen (The Pinch, University of Memphis), Ted Moncreiff (Conde Nast Traveler), Charlie Conrad (Doubleday/Broadway), Keith Bellows (National Geographic Traveler), John T. Edge (Gourmet, University of Mississippi) and conference director Lee Gutkind, the award-winning editor and founder of Creative Nonfiction.
Intensive writing workshops will also be offered before the official start of the conference. Instructors include Rebecca Skloot, Michael Rosenwald, Dinty W. Moore and Kristen Iversen. Topics include “Structure,” “How to Begin Your Memoir,” “The Art and Craft of Characterization in Memoir,” “Scenes from a Notebook,” and “Writing Book Proposals and Query Letters.”
BREVITY never likes to find itself stuck in a rut, and to that end, we were entirely pleased to publish Janis Butler Holm’s provocative, some say “head-scratching,” essay entitled S_ _T. It is experimental, decidedly.
Marissa of Drake University took the time to write the author, on behalf of her class, seeking some insight into the work, and here is that exchange:
Professor Holm,
I am a sophomore undergraduate student at Drake University in Des Moines, IA. For my Reading/Writing Non-fiction class, we read your uniquely structured essay “S_ _T” that was posted on the Brevity site and were impressed. We all loved your essay because of its humor and for its clever lines.
However, the essay positively puzzled us and we are desperate to find out more–so I was assigned to contact you personally and to find out all you would tell us.
We are curious first about the title. What are the middle letters supposed to be? (Our class of 15 girls and a professor guessed slut, spot, shit, etc…) We also would love to hear more about it’s purpose, it’s source, and the reasoning behind the S and T format.
On behalf of the class, I would like to say thank you for writing a piece so mysterious and we would appreciate your time in helping us out.
Thanks Much,
Marissa
–
Marissa, Thanks again for letting me know that your class enjoyed the essay–always good news to a writer’s ears. Here’s what I can tell you about the piece:
1) It’s part of a collection of nonconversations whose “voices” are named for letters of the alphabet. Other titles on the Web include “C Said, D Said,” “X Plus Y,” and “O, P” (at <http://www.bigbridge.org/poetjholm.htm> and <http://www.locusnovus.com/lnprojects/op/>). Unlike most of the other pieces, “S _ _ T” is nonfiction memoir.
2) I’m interested in what the French theorist Roland Barthes has called the open, or “writerly,” text–writing that invites the reader to play a larger role in meaning-making than do more conventional works.
3) I’m also interested in poststructuralist theories of identity, which suggest that we aren’t the unified egos we pretend to be but collections of contradictions and discontinuities.
4) From my point of view, “S _ _ T” can stand for any or all the words your class has come up with, and even some you haven’t. (Are the blanks necessarily letters? Can they be words? Should “_” be pronounced “Blank”? Etc.)
5) One of my goals is to craft pieces that both engage and call attention to our strong desire to make meaning.
Thanks, Marissa, for taking the time to ask me about “S _ _ T.” It’s always fun to find out how readers respond. Please give my regards to your professor and to your colleagues.
Pressure. That’s how I found myself pushing, prodding, prevailing over the keyboard to arrive at “Proselegy and Coda,” my publication in Brevity’s Fall 2007 issue.
Since 2005, I’ve been digging up a memoir. That book is tentatively set for Fall 2008 publication through the University of Iowa Press. During the revision stage, the editor said “You’re not showing much emotion when you described the death of your parents, especially considering they occurred so close together.”
That communication arrived before I signed a contract. I understood I was being challenged to show that I can convey scene, character, and emotion with words – to do, in fact, what I thought I could not: evoke the visceral subconscious remembrance of the pain of my parents’ deaths.
I read through the original memoir chapter, that recitation of facts, that grave of memories, reluctant to exhume and reexamine what cannot be changed. Need I know more? Need I grieve more? And let people watch? The questions hissed, lightly, persistently in the background – like the sleep apnea respirator that feeds me air all night.
Air. That catalyst for the fuel we consume to live. Air. That creates words that mean nothing, that are fit only to cheapen the loss upon the death of the woman and the man who made you flesh. Such a thing nearly overwhelms words, causing even the glib to descend into inarticulate gloom, at least for a time, unless you’re Didion. The best that could be had from my psyche two decades post-loss was fragments, thoughts, broken images memory-seared and gathered up from pieces of all that was shattered by death.
Thus, a prose-poem, “Proselegy and Coda,” because I have no coherent thought about love and loss that might transcend all that I think I remember.
Every once in a while, a recent or past BREVITY author will weigh in on the origins of their brief essay. Here, Ira Sukrungruang launches this feature with a discussion of his essay “What If?” from Issue 24:
“What If?” started when I received an email from my Polish friend after five years without any communication. Yo, I’m in some shit and the cops are looking for me. I’m coming to stay at your crib for a couple of months. P.S. I love you. He didn’t sign his name, but his email address gave his identity away. I replied quickly—Don’t forget the guns!
In the first draft of the essay, I used my friend’s name. Instead of the direct-address “you,” my friend was a “he.” After I completed the piece, the essay did not sit well with me. I read it out loud over and over—this is part of my process—and at the end of every reading, the essay seemed wrong. In fact, the reading made it worse.
The remedy came a couple of days later when I was teaching one of my favorite essays, “Tracks and Ties” by Andre Dubus III, in my beginning creative nonfiction class. I’ve been teaching the essay for years, and an incredibly compelling aspect of the piece is how Dubus addresses his dead friend. This direct address immediately makes the piece more intimate—something students will readily point out—but it also allows a deeper exploration of time and friendship. I asked my class, as I often do, “Why does Dubus use the ‘you’?” And for the first time, a student offered this answer: “Well, if he used “he,” it would sound like a eulogy.”
There it was. The reason my essay seemed off—especially when read—was because it sounded like I was delivering a eulogy. I did not want to close the book on my friend, especially because he was alive and still wreaking havoc in Chicago. Although he is part of my past, he is part of the living and breathing past that I carry with me daily, a past that is alive with questions and complexities, a past that makes essay writing challenging and exciting. It was the simplest of fixes, the change of a pronoun, but the “he” presented a finality in the piece that was inauthentic to the relationship of these two Chicago boys, while the “you” seems to represent a continuity.
That was an interesting email you posted at the Brevity site from the reader who wanted to know if only published writers get published. While I agree with your assertion that there’s a reason we keep seeing certain writers published again and again in literary journals (they’re darn good writers), I also believe their success sometimes feeds on itself.
The problem with that is writers–even famous and the famously published ones– are a lot like songwriters: not everything they write is a great song. Yet, I’ve seen some good writers with name recognition get certain essays and stories published that were whiffs and misses (in my humble opinion). We recently studied an essay by a very well-known and established writer in one of my comp classes where I thought “if a student handed this in I’d suggest it needs some revision.” The essay, I felt, went off-topic in the middle, delayed the “what the hell is this about?” far too long, and hastily tied things up in an abrupt conclusion. Not only was this an essay that had been published once, but it got in that magical wheelhouse of the Society of Academic Gatekeepers where it had been printed and reprinted many times.
The bottomline is that I have far less precious time in front of an editor’s face with my piece than do writers whose reputations precede them. Whereas an editor might read through pages 4,5, and 6 to find the payoff from an established writer, I better sure as hell hook that editor in the first couple of paragraphs–and even then only if the story isn’t of the kind or sort the editor has a personal pet peeve about (re: “I don’t do coming-of-age stories. Next”).
And the famous writer isn’t going to have his/her submission crumpled and tossed in the recycle bin because he or she didn’t include an SASE or forgot to put the story title in bottom-left corner of every page.
That said, it would be unfair to paint all publications and all editing staffs with the same brush (as those good and sincere souls reading this who are feeling indignant because they know what I’m saying doesn’t apply to them or their publications). I’ve certainly received rejection letters that were fairly earned once I saw the issue come out saw all the strong writing in it (Brevity comes to mind). And I’ve certainly been surprised on occasion by a nice handwritten note from an editor. But I’ve more times than not in the submission game been made to feel like an unimportant number, someone burdening an already burdened staff who has been jaded and burnt out by the heavy load of submissions. I’ve certainly read more than my share of editorials and editor interviews in journals and magzines of the “if you want me to sniff your submission, you sure as hell better jump through these hoops correctly–because you wouldn’t believe the crap I have to put up with on a daily basis.”
Understood–and right back at you.
As a wise colleague of mine once said: “if you can’t handle the work load, don’t cash the check.” I realize many of these publications aren’t money-making enterprises, but I believe that if you can’t treat those who submit like human beings and remember EACH one of those submissions contains a naked part of the author’s soul, well, you should consider shutting the operation down and go do something you can handle with quality customer service–whether that be selling beads at a flea market or cutting meat at the local deli.
But the real question is why writers keep putting up with the abuse: a submission done right costs about $1 or more to send out. That adds up in a hurry–especially when the payoff is “two copies and a pat on the back” if that writer does miraculously get a bite. And especially when the rejection notes are more often than not robotic form letters stuffed in your SASE by college students or interns.
Editors sometimes think writers need to hear the hard truth about their writing. The truth is a lot of stuff that comes across their desks isn’t that good. Understood. But I also think editors need to hear the hard truth–like this–right back at them at times.
Best regards, Bill Milligan
–
Bill Milligan teaches composition, journalism, and creative nonfiction at Bay College in Escanaba, Michigan. As he has tenure and his dean doesn’t care if he ever publishes or not, he feels secure in sharing his feelings openly about the writing business. He can be reached at milligab39@yahoo.com Please feel free to use profanity when contacting him if it helps. He understands the therapeutic value of venting.
BREVITY received an interesting e-mail recently, and it got me to thinking about our purpose and our history. We’re about to launch Issue 25: the Silver Anniversary, so that’s as good a time as any to take stock.
Here’s an excerpt from the e-mail:
“I have enjoyed reading your journal (but) … honesty would go as far in your submission guidelines as it does in the essays themselves. Be honest upfront and say that every essay accepted is written by a published writer … Not everyone who reads your journal is a published writer. And not everyone who submits an essay is a published writer. But only those that are get published. Honesty is the best policy in all things … — Karen”
Everything schnell, schnell, my boots for wooden clogs, and Mother refuses to relieve herself in the open bucket sloshing in the corner. Now to the sauna, schnell, schnell, our names rinsed from our bodies until we are all Ruth, our private places checked for hidden diamonds. They say if you give up your things quietly, they will return to you.
Abby Frucht , Rebecca McClanahan, Ira Sukrungruang, Barbara Hurd, Bonnie J. Rough, Jennifer Sinor, Carrie Oeding, Suzanne LaFetra, Charles Cantalupo, and Chris Orlet.
Topics this time around include women’s work, Selective Service, cockle shells, mussels, life’s fragility, ruby-throated hummingbirds, Stevie Wonder, animal crackers, baby wipes, beach umbrellas, dusk, and Rural Route 1.
We are also pleased to feature new book reviews, of the late Deborah Tall’s A Family of Strangers and David Griffith’s A Good War is Hard to Find.
1. BREVITY, and the entire full-time editorial staff, will be moving to Ohio University next month. Look for us in Ellis Hall. Our e-mail address (brevitymag@gmail.com) remains the same.
2. We’ve suspended reading new submissions for the summer, but look forward to reading your work in September.
3. We’re pleased to note that work from Brevity has been anthologized in Judith Kitchen’s Short Takes anthology, the forthcoming Best Creative Nonfiction anthology from W.W. Norton, and three recent writing textbooks. Additionally, Robert Atwan’s Best American Essays 2006 cites Creative Nonfiction’s Best of Brevity issue as one of the five notable special issues of the year. Thanks to all of our contributors.
While the notices are nice, you really should probably spend your browsing time wisely and read Grace’s piece, if you missed it the first time:
My Father’s Noose
When my father was a boy, his mother hung him.
Enter Tondo, a Manila slum, and stand in the kitchen of his childhood home. Look up. The crusty knot is still there, tied around the light fixture.
I imagine my father, Totoy, at ten. He hasn’t graduated yet to long pants and shoes; his shorts and T-shirt are faded and soft from the wear of three older brothers….
“The shirt reminds me of a certain cigarette, just after I quit. I was walking along on a sidewalk. There the cigarette lay, untouched, where it had slipped from a pack. It was a test I wouldn’t pass. I knew that, the second I laid eyes on it. So I picked it up and hid it in my curled-up fingers and took it to a quiet spot and smoked it, obediently. “
an excerpt from “Blue Shirt,” Coming in the (early) summer issue of BREVITY, on or around May 5th.
Brevity contributor and Chicago-based writer, editor, teacher Sandi L. Wisenberg (Furniture, Rental Workers, Houston) is recovering from a masectomy, and blogging — with occasional humor, of course — about her cancer, her thoughts on health and wellness, the often bizarre world of modern medicine, and prestidigitation. We wish Sandi the fastest and easiest recovery possible, and highly recommend the blog:
We are off to the AWP Conference in Atlanta. Though Brevity has never quite seen the wisdom of ponying up for a table at the bookfair, since we have nothing to sell (and no revenue to pay for the table), we’ll be there nonetheless, wandering from table to table, admiring our well-funded competition, pocketing free pens.
If you are there too, look for the nametag — Dinty — and say hello.
You can visit the blog, as you are right now, or receive the occasdional post in your e-mail inbox. (We promise: No spam, your e-mail address will not be used for any other nefarious purpose.) Interested? Sign up here:
In contrast to Smokelong Quarterly (mentioned just below, though really, we appreciate any and all attention) the generous Emerging Writers Network site chose Kim Dana Kupperman’s intriguing I Just Lately Started Buying Wings (Brevity 21) as the work of the day for January 21st, and actually reviewed it: “It’s a great piece of very short non-fiction by Kupperman, who has seen much success in recent years publishing both fiction and essays … I love how Kupperman uses the various description of the body part – legs – and what they’ve done, where they’ve gone, etc., in order to shed light on her character for the reader. I cannot remember ever reading something like this and think in this case that it works great.” More here.
Or so says the Smokelong Quarterly, in a review of Lisa Kahn Schnell’s wonderful Brevity essay Circling. Well, the review seems to have more to do with the review author’s issues with childbirth and the differences between fiction and nonfiction, but it is fun all the same. And we quote:
“Being a chick, I like fiction written by and about chicks. Why? Because I get it—especially the crampy lower parts, the bleeding vaginas, the weepy nipples, the dry heaves. Men, really, have no business here. They know nothing.”
The Spring 2007 Global Warming issue of BREVITY, the journal of concise literary nonfiction, has poked through the ice. Brevity 23 features ten outstanding essayists — Robin Behn, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Sandi Wisenberg, Anne Panning, Patricia O’Hara, Grace Talusan , Christopher Cocca, Joy Beshears Hagy, Mary Akers, and Leslie Stainton — exploring childbirth, urban sprawl, catachresis, candy cigarettes, and beyond.
We are also proud to announce our new Book Review section, including review essays by Lee Martin, Patrick Madden, Kim Dana Kupperman, Porter Shreve and Todd Davis. Plus an adhesive new Craft Essay by Shane Borrowman.
In Brevity 22, Fall 2006, Lisa Kahn Schnell, Jillian Schedneck, Michele Valois, Sheyene Foster Heller, Fleda Brown, Rita Ciresi, Brian Arundel, Rachael Pridgeon, Patrick Rosal, and Rebecca Housel explore circles, confession, heat, sausage, cancer, hot baths, teaching errors, tangos, things that are lost, and the electrodynamics of loving older men.
Just opened to the public today. Please take a dip in our nonfiction waters.Succinct, but never shallow.And we promise there are no sharks.
The Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Summer Writers’ Conference, August 8-13, is now in its eleventh summer. Highlighting this year’s conference will be bestselling authors Kathryn Harrison (The Kiss) and Mary Karr (The Liars’ Club) and seven faculty including Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore (that’s me)! At Goucher College, just outside of Baltimore. More info here
I'm considering ways to offer the actual BREVITY magazine site as an RSS feed. If you have thoughts on whether this would be useful, or how it might be done with minimum effort, feel free to comment or write me directly. Thanks, Dinty
We've never spent much time counting 'hits' or worrying about how the number of hits translates into internet revenue, since our site generates no revenue (except for a few dollars per month from Amazon sales, used to pay our site fees.) But somewhere in the last week we surpassed the 200 thousand mark, which makes us feel pretty good.
A few thousand of you have signed up at some point to receive notices of our new issues, usually two or three a year, and we thank you for that. In no given year has anyone received more than four messages total from the BREVITY_l list. We are easy to join, and easy to quit. [mailto:brevity-l-unsubscribe-request@lists.psu.edu]
But SPAMCOP apparently has listed us on the blocked list, because we e-mail a lot of people at once. Duh!
In any case, if you have SPAMCOP as your spam blocker, you probably aren't getting our e-mails. Sorry,
The Creative Nonfiction podcast, devoted to news, interviews and commentary about literary life, features a March 2006 interview with Dinty W. Moore, founder and editor of Brevity.Visit the CNF podcast page at:
Brief Essays by Bob Cowser Jr., Kim Dana Cupperman, Tim Doody, Nicole Walton, Nance Van Winckel, Leslie Ann Salley, Kelle Groom, Katherine Jamieson, J.D. Schraffenberger, Jennifer Henderson, Don Morrill, and Candance L. Greene.
Greg Bottoms' essay, "Sam at the Gun Show," recently reprinted in Creative Nonfiction's BEST OF BREVITY issue, has been nominated for a Pushcart. Congratulations Greg.
Issue 20 includes essays by Sheryl St. Germain and Jimmy Chen responding to the Katrina tragedy, a pair of illuminating new craft essays, return visits from Jeff Gundy and Shane Borrowman, and crisp new writing about driver ants, Stop & Shop, snorkeling in the coral, good parties, and hometown boredom. James Frey may need to tell A Million Little Lies to get his point across, but here at Brevity we feel that the truth is powerful enough:
We’ve been fans of Gary Presley’s writing for quite some time here at Brevity, including his essay from Brevity 25 and his insightful guest blogger posts found here, so we were indeed pleased to see his contribution to the New York Times‘ Modern Love column this morning. The essay is clear, honest, smart, and well worth your time.
You can imagine our excitement when Brenda Miller, author of so many beautiful Brevity essays and craft pieces (see 
Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore is pleased to have published what he believes to be the shortest essay ever, in the new Mississippi Review.
Amy Lee Scott discusses the impulse behind her Brevity 31 essay, 
Our Fall 2009 Issue is ready for your inspection, kind reader.
Christina Olson, author of 
Richard Gilbert gives us some thoughts on his Brevity 30 essay 
A. Papatya Bucak discusses the notion of threes and her Brevity 30 essay 
Rick Robbins writes about the genesis of his Brevity 30 essay, 
Brevity contributor and nonfiction heavyweight Robin Hemley has been collecting book tour disaster stories on his blog these past few weeks, and this week he features Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore:
.. Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore is giving way too many interviews:
A brief interview with Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore, here:
A note for Brevity contributors past and future:
Our friend and past Brevity contributor Robin Hemley is blogging in anticipation of the release of his (we certainly anticipate, and expect) sharp and funny new memoir 
Hooray!
“Suspended”
I’m calling it a reverse Kitchen— kind of like a reverse Nelson—in honor of the memorable Judith Kitchen, who pulls story out of photograph. I sat under Judith’s teaching this past summer, spending a week diligently wrestling with and writing around pictures dredged up from childhood.
Essayist Brenda Miller has blessed Brevity with a number of contributions over the years, including 
Just a few weeks after I submitted
The end of this story takes place in 1988 when my oldest son was
BREVITY, 
Brevity editor 
Harper’s Magazine’s Weekend Read Blog gives Brevity a nice shout out for the recent, wonderful mini-essay from Donovan Hohn, 
From Kathrine Leone Wright, author of 
This essay came as a result of an “end-user error” on my part; I had originally written an essay reflecting on my birth and what I had ascertained to be the truth around the medical complexity of the situation. Upon hearing a reading of the piece, my mother explained that this is not how it happened at all; there was no C-section. I felt terrible about getting the story wrong all of these years, and especially relaying something that is considered to be non-fiction whereas it turned out I had gotten perhaps the most important fact incorrect. As a result of this, I began to question all of these “made-up” memories about my childhood that had been passed down to me.
Next week, 
As part of of Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2008 Web-Wide Shout Out yesterday, Brevity contributor Robin Behn blogged on her piece, 
..
Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2008 anthology is now available and can be ordered online, at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or from 
If you read the excellent 
From the New York Times:
The Plain, Unmarked Box Arrived
Brevity has already filled the Summer 2008 and Fall 2008 issues, and we are reading for January 2009. We will close off submissions for the summer early this year, on April 15th to be exact.
From Gary Presley, author of the Brevity essay 
You are invited to create a “tasty” video based on any written piece published in Brevity (and many other journals — 
We are about a week away from launching our 26th Issue, themed Hot and Cold. Stay tuned for brief essays from A. Papatya Bucak, Aaron Teel, Marcia Aldrich, Mary Sojourner, Ashley Seitz Kramer, Patricia Twomey Ryan, Jill Christman, and Anne Panning, as well as a new craft essay from Philip Gerard and Bill Milligan’s review of Robert Root’s new book. We are pleased.
BREVITY never likes to find itself stuck in a rut, and to that end, we were entirely pleased to publish Janis Butler Holm’s provocative, some say “head-scratching,” 
Brevity’s editor is profiled this week on 
BREVITY
In contrast to Smokelong Quarterly (mentioned just below, though really, we appreciate any and all attention) the generous Emerging Writers Network site chose Kim Dana Kupperman’s intriguing 
Or so says the 
