Elizabeth Westmark discusses her essay “Tenderness,” found in the latest issue of Brevity:
I played the piano in college to earn money, accompanying future opera singers by the hour in closet-like wooden studios at the University of Florida’s music school. My favorite was Oonaugh, a young contralto from Scotland. She told me once that she always requested me as her accompanist because I “breathed with her.” She said that most of the other pianists played the music precisely, but didn’t allow for her to creatively deviate from the score or even seem to care that she was there. They were being paid to play the accompaniment. Period.
Unbelievably, that was almost forty years ago. These days, my husband and I live in a hundred-acre wood in the panhandle of Florida that we are restoring back into the longleaf pine forest it used to be.
One of my best sources for stories is a good friend named Harold. He told me once that I am the “onliest fancy woman” that has ever been nice to him. In Harold’s vernacular, “fancy” means educated. It’s close kin to “citified,” but is friendlier and has special connotations that Harold applies only to women. “Nice” means he knows he is welcome in my kitchen any morning of the week to pull up a stool, drink strong coffee and share a story or two.
Everybody’s got a story, whether they are in the country, the city or somewhere in-between. Finding the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary is like the squirt of juice from a cherry hidden in the middle of a chocolate.
Writing “Tenderness” was like that. When I heard Ronnie Thomley talking about living at the end of the power line with his little girls and rescuing the orphaned baby doe, I recognized another unsung storyteller, and sidled up so I could listen hard.
I tried to accompany the music of his words. I tried to breathe with him.
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.
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.
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.
The challenge of brief nonfiction seized me first out of necessity, then out of delight.
A few years ago, in a tiny terracotta room, I wrote a book for new mothers. I set my alarm for five-thirty every day and wrote until my children woke up, usually at seven. Just enough time to sketch a 500 word essay, write a draft, or revise one. Fifty-two short essays later, a book small enough to fit in a diaper bag was born.
When your audience (and author) works all day with small children, when overtime and sleeplessness are de rigueur, brevity works. A book daunts. A single essay enchants.
Still, the challenge of brief nonfiction is the compression. Everything extraneous must fall away. Like a poet, the short nonfiction writer must distill an idea, story, or memory to reveal its peak moment. Short nonfiction that succeeds carries an epiphany or emotional punch. Like Debra S. Levy’s piece entitled “Jackpot,” when she reveals in her very last sentence the truth about her mother. Or in John Calderazzo’s “Lost on Colfax Avenue,” when he recounts his own disorientation while watching a blind man struggle to find his way.
In my lyric essay “Soundtrack,” I navigated briefer territory than usual. A lyric essay is a nonfiction subgenre between essay and poetry. It’s mosaic in form and attempts to reveal an emotional truth beyond constructed narrative. No segues or transitions. Just as songs on the radio rouse specific memories, I leap from one shard of my life to another, ending close to where I started—a memory of my father.
I began writing short nonfiction out of necessity. And now, though my children sleep through the night and go to school all day, the flexibility and creativity of the form still delight me.
I played the piano in college to earn money, accompanying future opera singers by the hour in closet-like wooden studios at the University of Florida’s music school. My favorite was Oonaugh, a young contralto from Scotland. She told me once that she always requested me as her accompanist because I “breathed with her.” She said that most of the other pianists played the music precisely, but didn’t allow for her to creatively deviate from the score or even seem to care that she was there. They were being paid to play the accompaniment. Period.
Brevity editor 
As part of of Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2008 Web-Wide Shout Out yesterday, Brevity contributor Robin Behn blogged on her piece, 
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