Looking at an Eclipse: A Braided Essay About Braided Essays

By Lilly Dancyger

The first time I wrote a braided essay, I had no idea that was what I was doing. I’m not sure if I’d even heard the term “braided essay” in 2017, when I started writing about my cousin Sabina’s murder for the first time. She was killed in 2010, three weeks before her twenty-first birthday. For seven years, I didn’t write a word about her, or what had happened to her. I wrote about just about everything else in my life—this was the height of the “it happened to me” era of internet writing—but I was afraid to look directly at a grief and horror so huge.

If you look directly at a solar eclipse, the brightness of the sun can damage your retina, leading to a condition called solar retinopathy, or “eclipse blindness.”

Often, peripheral vision is spared in cases of eclipse blindness, with the damage concentrated in the center of the field of vision. A permanent imprint of the eclipse, seared into your retina forever. This was what I feared would happen if I looked straight at the story of what happened to Sabina—it would be imprinted on my mind’s eye forever, superimposed over every other thought I had from then on.

* * *

In 2017, seven years after Sabina’s murder, journalist Kim Wall was killed by a source she was interviewing. Her body was found, and then her picture was all over the internet, like Sabina’s had been. Without quite realizing what I was doing, I started writing about Kim Wall—but of course, I was really writing about Sabina. I was used to churning out short news write-ups and opinion pieces in a few hours back then, but this essay took me two years. Two years of writing about Kim Wall’s murder, and letting that slowly, repeatedly open up into a story about Sabina. I thought of this piece I was working on as an “indirect personal essay” before I learned what a braided essay was, and that I was writing one.

The only safe way to look straight at a partial solar eclipse is through the protective film of eclipse glasses—made from black polymer or mylar—that transmit only about one one-millionth of the sun’s light. They let in just enough that you can see the ring of rays around the dark center of the moon’s shadow—you can see the general shape of the thing, but with drastically reduced potency. Shielded from the intensity that would burn itself into your retinas forever if you looked at it directly.

A braided essay is typically defined by its strands—two or more topics or narratives, woven together. But when I think about braided essays now, what defines them for me most clearly is not the shape and rhythm of the weave, but the kinds of stories that the shape and rhythm make possible.

* * *

Since that first essay (which was published by Longreads, and appears in revised form in my forthcoming essay collection, First Love), I’ve used the braided form to write about all kinds of big, fraught personal things I didn’t know how to approach head on: A friend’s suicide, my ambivalence about motherhood, my feelings about true crime. In each of these cases, like in the first one, I wrote into the too-bright thing by writing away from it, into something else.

If eclipse glasses are not available, you can also safely view an eclipse indirectly using a pinhole projector. All you need for a pinhole projector is a sheet of paper with a small hole in the center—or, as you’ll notice if you look at the dappled shadows of leaves during an eclipse, anything that casts a shadow with small spaces for light to pass through.

Facing away from the eclipse, hold up the piece of paper, allowing the sun’s rays to pass through the pinhole and project the shape of the eclipse onto whatever surface you’re facing. Each tree or fence or screen door casting hundreds of tiny, partially-eclipsed suns onto the ground.

* * *

The magic of a braided essay is in the points where one thread drops and another comes in: sometimes these moments of transition are just white space, leaving room for the unsayable.

And sometimes the transition points bring the disparate threads more directly into contact with each other, the writer saying, “See? This thing that I can’t describe is reflected in this other thing, which I can.” That shadow, there on the wall, a dark circle with a curve of light carved into it—that is the sun.

That story in the news, a dark circle with a curve of light carved into it—that is my grief.

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Lilly offers an independent study course on writing braided essays, and a four-week braided essay seminar beginning March 2 ($275).

Lilly Dancyger is the author of First Love: Essays on Friendship (The Dial Press, 2024), and Negative Space (SFWP, 2021). She lives in New York City, and is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has been published by Guernica, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Longreads, Off Assignment, The Washington Post, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more.

Hitherto, the Amazingly Flexible Essay

By Dinty W. Moore

Memoir, despite its occasional detractors, remains a popular, powerful genre of nonfiction, and thanks to the creativity and inventiveness of contemporary writers, the form isn’t losing any steam. But there is another genre in our field, an older one, sometimes called the personal essay, occasionally called the ruminative essay (“we chew things over”), sporadically called the reflective essay, and any writer interested in expanding their range would do well to consider the rich possibilities here as well.

Like memoir, a personal essay may originate with a writer’s own experiences, and usually does, but it soon expands to become explicitly about something more: a concept, a movement, a question, an issue.

Here is a simple example:

My roses are parched and thirsty, and I worry this is evidence of climate change. The essay I might write would discuss my garden, of course, but with added context on what extreme heat does to roses, a brief exploration of how plants breathe, some background maybe on domestic roses versus their wild cousins, and perhaps a reflection on the seeming futility of one gardener resisting a global transformation. 

“I prefer it when the essay takes a small, very particular subject and, through the force of the essayist’s artistically controlled meanderings touches on unpredictably large general matters,” Joseph Epstein wrote in his introduction to the 1993 Best American Essays. Moreover, he notes, these “controlled meanderings” need to make “hitherto unexpected connections” and tell “me things I hadn’t hitherto known.”

That may sound complicated, or stuffy—funny how the word “hitherto” can seem so off-putting here in 2024—but it’s not complicated at all. (I could also write an essay about my kneejerk reaction to Epstein’s use of “hitherto,” and expand on other instances of how language has changed, perhaps point out that thitherto and whitherto are also technically English words, though seen as archaic now, and maybe I’d explore other odd words that have lost favor. That’s a personal essay: it starts with me, but goes on to something larger.)

In my actual writing,  I’ve taken a nasal surgery I underwent about ten years ago and expanded it into an essay about why humans have sinus cavities in the first place (possibly because apes were once aquatic?), and I’ve taken a visit to Scotland (“who cares about your vacation?”) and enlarged it into a longer meditation on zebras and the meaning of the word “exotic.”

One of my literary heroes, James Baldwin, famously took memories of his father’s funeral and expanded into a stunning exploration of America’s deep racial divide, ultimately offering a provocative examination of injustice and the dangers of complacency.

Baldwin is in a class of his own, of course, but if I can write about aquatic apes, zebras, and sinus surgery, you can too. All it takes is curiosity, expansive thinking, “artistically controlled meanderings,” and “hitherto unexpected connections.”

And here’s the thing: these sorts of essays are fun. You learn new things. You feel that adrenaline rush when the essays shoots off in a new direction.  There is no end to where it might take you.
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Dinty W. Moore is the founding editor of Brevity and The Brevity Blog.

Want to learn more about the possibilities of controlled meanderings? Join Dinty for The Pleasures of the Personal Essay, an online course with Jane Friedman, Wednesday, March 13, 1:00–2:00 p.m. Eastern. Fee: $25

Flash Essays as Fireworks

In our May issue of Brevity, fresh this week, Leslie Jill Patterson uses examples from Brenda Miller, Jenny Boully, Erin Murphy and other flash writers to explore how micro-essays are like “a single bloom that bursts then swells into meaning, unfolding while we read.”

Extending on her fireworks metaphor, Patterson writes:

Lately… I’m attracted to flash essays that act like ghosts—firework shells that contain multiple peonies that burst in layers, each subsequent flare seeming to appear from nowhere. How, I ask myself, do writers generate ghost narratives—a turn we didn’t see coming, an unexpected destination?

You can read more of Patterson’s analysis of essay endings that burst and swell and see examples of the effect here: Ghost: The Flash Ending That Appears from Nowhere

Brevity’s Latest Craft Essays

Brevity’s Fall 2023 issue launched yesterday, and with it three fascinating new craft essays. Rather than simply describing them, here’s a brief excerpt from each. We encourage you to read further, and to explore both our full Craft Section and our Teaching Resources as well.

The excerpts:

Carol Dunbar explores how and when we know a book is done:

The one question I get asked at every reading is: How do you know when it’s done? Maybe people ask me this because they know it took me twelve years to finish my first novel. Maybe it’s because they are also trying to finish a book, and they understand the cycle of improving and progressing while at the same time realizing how much further you have to go.… [But] you can’t rush a book any more than you can rush a plant.

Gail Folkins reveals how writing a triptych, an essay in three parts, allows writers to explore a topic in a layered form:

Crafting the triptych gives writers an opportunity to practice a nontraditional, segmented structure… The connections and symmetry in these works of three, even at an early stage, are often evident and surprising; in many cases, a larger meaning surfaces. Writers can coax and refine emerging themes or occasions in later drafts.

And A. M. Palmer details how we might allow the writing process itself to “calculate” the direction of our work:

Nonfiction, in the tradition of the personal essay, is a wandering expression of ideas, a memory here and a dreamscape there. But how do you begin the composition process? [One strategy is to embark] on the writing process immediately, concurrent with starting our research. This generative/improvisational technique—think jazz ensemble performance— allows the writing process itself to “calculate” the direction of our work and to generate momentum. In short, the very act of writing reveals our subject, little by little.

Please visit our new issue, and enjoy.

Discovering the Why of Your Essay Collection

by Patrice Gopo

In the early days of the pandemic, words fell from my fingers, returning to me after a time of absence. Several years before, in the aftermath of the publication of my first book of essays, I had found myself unable to create. How strange that this time of lockdown existed side by side with my emergence from a creative wilderness.

I didn’t ponder this oddity, though. Instead, I wrote and wrote and wrote. And later as the headlines filled with George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing protests for racial justice, I continued to write. Observations became ideas. Ideas transformed into fledgling essays. Fledgling essays found completion.

By the autumn of 2020, I was ready to return to a place I’d been before: the place of organizing a collection. The wonder of what I might discover in this process. The excitement at the possibility of a new book. I believed this group of essays—a combination of new and old work—belonged together. But I knew I needed to find the reason why these essays should be a book. What golden thread might connect these distinct pieces? Or said another way, what was the beating heart of this collected work?

What I knew to be true is that the foggy dream of this second book of essays would not find completion without knowing this reason why. This reason could serve as my guide, creating needed borders, boundaries, and constraints for this book possibility. This reason could help me make sense of order and structure. This reason could yield answers to other practical, logistical questions that might arise.

With my first book of essays, I formulated a process for turning this abstract notion of “connectedness” into a concrete summary statement, an explanation of the why. Along the way, I recognized that to organize a book of personal essays is to search for—and ultimately find—a deeper knowing about yourself, the world around you, your own work. Writing an essay is a journey toward discovery. As it turns out, organizing an essay collection can be a journey toward discovery as well.

With my second book of essays, I was prepared to embark on this journey of discovery. Perhaps that concrete statement might readily appear for some. For me, though, finding this summary statement required that I first examine my material from different angles, considering the themes I knew existed in my writing and finding the themes hidden within the words. As a once-upon-a-time engineer transformed into a writer, I had previously created a methodical system for dissecting the themes of my essays, naming each theme and tracking which themes were universal across all the work. Imagine, for a moment, a Venn Diagram. The space of overlap might just offer the possibility of finding the reason a group of essays belongs in one book.

So, amid that first pandemic autumn, I proceeded down a somewhat technical path when set alongside words like “journey” and “discovery.” I created spreadsheets. I used formulas. I wrote specific items on index cards and shifted them around as I sat cross-legged on my bedroom floor. There was precision in how I worked as I tapped into portions of my brain that appreciate definitive answers. I asked myself what is the why of this new collection. Finding the answer involved a literary sleuthing that brought joy.

As with my first book of essays, I utilized resources found right here at Brevity: Rebecca McClanahan’s wonderful craft essay, Forest in the Trees: The Challenges of Shaping a Book (not a Collection) of Essays*; and Allison K Williams’ helpful blog essay, In a World…

Resources won’t necessarily solve a situation, but they can point you in a good, solid direction. Sometimes that might be all you need.

Of course, there are many ways you can determine the reason for an essay collection’s existence. Similarly, there are many methods you can use to organize a book of your collected writing. What mattered is I had a system that worked for me. I think that’s what matters for any person choosing to engage with the act of organizing a collection, finding a system that works for you.

By January 2021, as life continued to feel bloated with illness and suffering, and the intense public conversation about addressing racial injustice had predictably moved from shout to whisper, I emerged with a new manuscript. Even more, I emerged with the reason for this collection’s existence. Autumn Song, I titled this work, followed by the subtitle, Essays on Absence. Within the pages, these essays together, ordered in a particular sequence, told a story. A story much greater than what I could have imagined.

* Rebecca McClanahan makes a beautiful distinction between a book of essays and a collection of essays. While I agree with what she shares, I still find that I use “book of essays” and “essay collection” interchangeably.

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For practical tools and ideas to help you transform a group of essays into a book, join Patrice’s upcoming CRAFT TALKS webinar: Greater Than the Sum of the Parts: Transforming Personal Essays into a Book. Find out more/register now.

Patrice Gopo is an award-winning essayist who writes stories steeped in themes of place, belonging, and home. She is the author of two essay collections: the newly released Autumn Song: Essays on Absence (University of Nebraska Press American Lives Series) and All the Colors We Will See (a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection). Her debut picture book is All the Places We Call Home.

A different version of this essay originally appeared in Litmosphere—the Charlotte Center for the Literary Arts blog.

Five Ways to Start Making Graphic Essays

The relationship between Graphic Literature and Flash Nonfiction

By Kelcey Ervick

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Kelcey Ervick is the author and illustrator of the graphic memoir, The Keeper: Soccer, Me, and the Law That Changed Women’s Lives, winner of a 2023 Ohioana Book Award. She is co-editor, with Tom Hart, of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Graphic Literature. Kelcey is the author of three previous award-winning books, and her comics have appeared in The Rumpus, The Believer, Washington Post, and Lit Hub. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati and is a professor of English and creative writing at Indiana University South Bend. She writes and draws about the ups, downs, and loop-de-loops of the creative life at The Habit of Art.  

What Columbo Taught Me About Writing Essays

By Andrea A. Firth

I’ve been watching reruns of Columbo lately. Why? At a young age, I was fascinated by the quirky detective from the 1970’s TV series—Columbo the rumpled, cigar-chomping, trench coat-wearing detective who investigates and solves a high-profile murder case each week. And now, I’ve come to see what the show and the character have taught me about writing essay. Yes, Columbo is a fictional character, but much of the craft we employ in creative nonfiction, like personal essay, stems from the techniques of fiction. And, I’ve found studying another medium, a television drama, provides a new lens, a new way to look at storytelling. I’ve picked up a few good writing tips from the show’s screenwriters. Plus, this detective’s dogged determination to find the truth, not just whodunit, but how and why things connect—that’s what resonates with essay writing.

Each episode of Columbo starts with a pivotal scene, the murderer committing the crime. Next Lieutenant Columbo meets the perpetrator, who he follows and badgers throughout the episode repeating his catchphrase “just one more thing” raising question after question until he cracks the case. Columbo’s approach is formulaic—and it works every time.

Asking questions, digging for answers, finding connections—this is what an essayist does. It’s fundamental to the essay’s DNA. We start with a personal experience, identify the themes at work, and write to uncover the deeper meaning—like Columbo, we connect the dots.

So what did Columbo teach me about personal essay exactly? Let me show you with an example and a few of the lessons that I’ve learned from the show.

[Spoiler AIert]

In the episode, “Negative Reaction” (Season 4, episode 2), the actor Dick Van Dyke plays a prominent photographer who murders both his wife and the ex-con he frames for her murder. All this happens before Columbo arrives on the scene.

Lesson 1: Embrace the Counterintuitive

Dick Van Dyke—the singing and dancing chimney sweep in Mary Poppins; the indulgent father who invents a flying car in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; the husband who comically stumbles over the ottoman at the start of each episode of his eponymous sitcom with Mary Tyler Moore—he’s a double murderer? Well, I didn’t expect that.

Columbo shows us who the villain is at the start, but there’s always something surprising and unanticipated in the opening. In this episode, simply the idea that this affable actor could play a double murderer is unexpected. Allison K Williams describes this as employing “the counterintuitive,” and the technique is especially effective with openings and titles in personal essay. What your reader doesn’t expect, draws them in.

Lesson 2: Irony Has Impact

Back to the episode, as Columbo arrives on the scene of the second murder, at a used car lot, he drives by a sign that reads “We Buy Junk Cars” in his aging, dirt covered Peugot 403 convertible. As he pulls up, his car sputters and stalls. The car is as frumpy as Columbo. Simply ironic. Setting and details can provide humor and characterization in essay too. Look for it.

Lesson 3: Consider an Alternative Perspective

Columbo visits a homeless shelter to interview a witness for the case. “That coat. That coat. That coat,” says the nun who runs the shelter when he walks in. “I’ve had this coat for seven years. I’m very fond of it,” says Columbo defensively. He goes on to explain that he’s a detective working a case. The nun concludes he’s working under cover, his shabby coat a disguise. She sees Columbo in a different way.

Again, the screenwriters insert humor, and the repetition of “That coat” three times is good dialogue technique. But this situation also reminds us to consider alternative perspectives. How might the other people in your essay view you or the experience that you are exploring? How might that support what the essay is about?

Lesson 4: Write About What You Don’t Know

As the episode draws to its conclusion, Van Dyke (the photographer/murderer) is exasperated with Columbo’s constant questioning. He describes Columbo as a shaggy haired terrier who has an incessant grip on his pant leg. Like Columbo, this is what the essayist needs to embody as they search for what their story is about and what it means.

This is my biggest take away from Columbo/Columbo.

In the same way that the detective spends each episode working to uncover what he doesn’t know, in order to make the connections and solve his case, you as an essayist do the same. “Write what you know” is common writing advice, and it’s about half right. What you don’t know is the place to explore with personal essay—expansive, unchartered, revelatory territory.

Dinty W. Moore says, “what you don’t know will save your writing.”

Think about it.

Unlike Columbo, I don’t think writing personal essay has a set formula, that’s one of the wonderful things about the form, there are myriad ways to do it. But, like the scrappy detective, Columbo, the essayist needs the tenacity to uncover what the story is about and what it means.

And, I believe there’s more to learn from Columbo and Columbo, so I plan to keep watching.

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Andrea A. Firth is an editor at Brevity Blog. Andrea is teaching Finding Your Essay’s Heartbeat on Substack in April.

Connecting the Threads—A Memoir in Essays

AN INTERVIEW WITH KELLY MCMASTERS

By Brianna Avenia-Tapper

Kelly McMasters

Best-selling author Kelly McMasters’s fourth book, The Leaving Season (W. W. Norton, 2023) is a memoir-in-essays about marriage, divorce, moving, and loss. McMasters’s prose is evocative and thoughtful, studded with images that will haunt you long after reading. The Leaving Season is also a masterclass in how to create satisfying narrative coherence from disparate essayistic threads. Literary Mama editor Brianna Avenia-Tapper spoke with Kelly about revision strategies and the form-content connection.

Brianna Avenia-Tapper: Why did you choose to share this story in a collection of essays?

Kelly McMasters: Leaving, divorce, grief, longing—those topics are not linear. One of the most important books in my reading life is Joan Wickersham’s, The Suicide Index. She’s a novelist, but this is a nonfiction book about her father’s suicide. The structure of the bookis literally an index, and it’s wild. For example, one chapter is titled “Suicide: numbness and — duration” and the chapter is a single word: “Years.”

It was a really important craft moment for me as a writer to understand that some topics simply can’t be bound in traditional ways.

BAT: Why did your topics in The Leaving Season need to be bound in essay collection form?

KM: What is beautiful—and also sometimes constrictive—in the essay form is that you’ve got the double layer of the narrator and the writer. But the writer changes. Even as I wrote this book, I was changing. In so many ways, identity is layered. I am a mother right now, but I wasn’t a mother in the first part of the book. I felt like I could only return truthfully to a time before I knew what it was like to be a mother through essay. I am moving into the same or similar questions with each essay, but the prism of an essay collection allowed me the freedom to see those questions through different lenses—different experiences, different selves.

BAT: How did you bring those different selves, times and places into a coherent whole? I noticed your repeated images.

KM: When I had all the essays that I knew were going to be in the book, I could pull some threads out and make them cohere so that it would build. It was intentional, but also, because many of the essays were written in the same time period, images just recur, they arrive naturally. “Home Fires” is the first essay in the book, but the last essay that I wrote. I realized writing it how much fire is present throughout the book.

BAT:  You wrote the first essay last? When you began working on it, what did you want to be sure that the essay did to set up the book?

KM: Characters. It had to be the three of us [McMasters and her two sons]. For a little while I wanted to start with “The Intrepid” [the earliest essay chronologically], but I didn’t want anyone to think that they would have to spend the whole book with that narrator, that young version of me. I wanted to tell the reader: “Don’t worry! She gets wiser and deeper. There is a mostly fully-formed adult who will take you through the rest of it.”

I wanted the first essay to start when the main conflict is not fully understood or grappled with, to highlight the importance of my relationship with my sons, and to have the reader feel the heavy absence of my ex-husband. The idea of safety was important to me to include as well, and nostalgia, obviously. That essay started at about 60 pages and then I whittled it down to about four. A real reduction process.

BAT: How did you decide what to take out?

KM: It’s like putting the essay through a colander and letting all the extra stuff fall out. I’m pretty good about not being precious with cutting because you just tuck it into a different Word document, and it’s still there. Having a word, an image, a color, or some sensory detail for each essay that I could hold each sentence against acted as a litmus test for whether it should stay or go. In the essay “The Stone Boat” that north star image was simply a stone—heavy, mute, like an unerasable fact. That essay deals with the most difficult material in the book for me, like a stone I’ll wear around my neck for the rest of my life. My goal was that everything, every metaphor, every sensory detail, every description, underscore that unbearable weight.

BAT: Take me through your process of revising the part where you watch one of the Twin Towers fall from the window of your ex-husband’s studio.

KM: That section started as a poem I wrote in one of my first grad school classes about the Twin Towers falling. Five years later, my professor mailed me the poem and said, “I found this in my desk, thought you should have it.” With that distance, I re-read it and thought about it, and I wound up expanding it into an essay that got published. Being able to hand the essay over to the editor allowed me additional critical distance from the experience. It wasn’t until later that I saw how important that moment was to the marriage, why we got married, why I stayed. After 20 years of trying to get closer to the moment captured in that essay, bit by bit, it was the lens of the marriage that allowed me to see that moment.

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Kelly McMasters is an essayist, professor, mother, and former bookshop owner. She is the author of the Zibby Book Club pick The Leaving Season: A Memoir-in-Essays (WW Norton, 2023) and co-editor of the ABA national bestseller Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult, 2023). Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The American Scholar, The Common, River Teeth and more. She is Director of Publishing Studies and an Associate Professor of English at Hofstra University in New York.

Brianna Avenia-Tapper is a Profiles Editor at Literary Mama and mom to two. Her essays and reviews have been published in Barrelhouse, Riverteeth Blog, Pigeon Pages, Tahoma Literary Review and elsewhere. She is working on a memoir about birth. Find more of her work at her website.

Mapping New Essay Terrain

An Interview with Sarah Fawn Montgomery

By Erin Vachon

Sarah Fawn Montgomery

I am considering relocation to another part of the country while reading Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s new essay collection Halfway From Home, a lyrical search for home across geographical landscapes. The serendipity astounds me and sets my pen curving red topographical lines around paragraphs on each page. “Everyone can be a cartographer,” she writes. “Roaming makes coming home richer, for when we explore places beyond our understanding and experience, we see connections between places we never imagined.” The essays in Halfway from Home roam across California, Nebraska, and Massachusetts, deftly unpacking violence, grief, and nostalgia through their diverse habitats. In an interview wandering through the rich terrain of her writing, Montgomery and I explored the purpose of making your own map when uprooting your personal history.

Erin Vachon: On Dirt: In Halfway From Home, the ground unearths surprising truths through artifacts, graves, and time capsules. How has the passage of time changed the way you write about long buried events?

Sarah Fawn Montgomery I’ve always been interested in digging up what has been buried. As a child I dug for treasures — rocks, pennies, old trinkets. As an adult I dig for histories — familial, political, environmental. Lately I’ve become less interested in the artifacts and more interested in the acts of burial and unearthing, in the transformation of stories and selves over time. I’m interested in refocusing the work on this evolution, on the reasons we bury or uncover, on what happens to us through the act of concealing or revealing.

EV: On Sea: Overall, this collection examines unseen violence from family, partners, and strangers through lyricism. In particular, “Carve” is a tidal wave against bone-rigid gender violence: “How to hide in the sea with your bones on display, your hurt exposed and inviting. How to survive when your weapon is a wanting.” How does lyricism’s heightened beauty function when reclaiming violence?

SFM: We often ignore brutality because it is too painful, too pervasive. We recognize certain narrative structures and styles and stop reading in order to save ourselves from personal pain and collective responsibility. Lyricism is a way to command a reader’s interest and compel them to engage. This isn’t to say that I use lyricism to soften or distract from violence. Instead, beauty becomes a way to present violence more viscerally. I use lyricism when writing about brutality — domestic violence, social and political violence, gun violence, environmental violence —because it is the only way I know how to make a world inundated with grief take notice.

EV: On Grass: “To me, the Plains are neither cruel nor kind. They are indifferent.” You write lovingly about the unpredictable Midwest landscape, a place existing to “remind us of our impermanence.” How is writing about the character of a place different than writing about a person?

SFM: Both people and place invite intimacy, but we are often more accepting of place. When we accept the indifference of place, we also accept our unimportance. Place invites us to be insignificant, a process that encourages us to broaden our stories beyond ourselves. When we write about place, we decenter ourselves from the story, focusing instead of ecology, geology, natural history, community. It’s harder to do this when writing about people. When writing about the people in our lives we often become the center of the narrative and this can reopen old wounds, invite resentments and sorrows. Writing about place teaches me how to write about people. It invites me to set aside judgment in order to encourage compassion, empathy, in order to understand how a particular human stories fits within larger communities.

EV: On Forest: You write, “Trees hear one another because they listen.” Halfway From Home acknowledges the frustration of the ongoing pandemic as a single tree in a forest, emphasizing the need for community and resilience. Now that the collection is published, have these essays made the world feel larger or smaller by comparison?

SFM: Initially I hoped these essays would expand small portions of the world — the California grove of eucalyptus trees where most of the world’s monarchs spend each winter for warmth, a stretch of unbroken Nebraska prairie, the wetland woods that surround my Massachusetts home. I wrote much of this collection in the early days of the pandemic when my entire world was confined to my small home. By noticing the rich abundance of my small stretch of forest, I was able to expand my experience beyond the borders of my home. I learned trees, for example, are connected by a rich underground fungal network that allows them to share resources and take care of each other in order to ensure survival. During the pandemic this seemed — and seems still — a small lesson that we could invite in order to make a large difference. Now that the collection is published, it’s not so much that the world feels larger or smaller, but that we have rushed back to a “normal” where we don’t allow the small things — tide pools, prairie birds, moths — to be important, where we don’t learn what might be possible if we were to simply take notice.

EV: On Stone: In “Tumble,” you explore the relationship to your father alongside the meanings of crystals. What do you think Halfway From Home’s personal crystal might be?

SFM: I’ve long had a fascination with rocks. My father was a fence builder who taught me to dig in order to see what stories exist beneath the surface. At work sites, he pulled treasures out of the ground and taught me to use a rock polisher to make what was ordinary shine. If this collection were a rock, it would be obsidian, a stone associated with truth. Obsidian is formed when molten lava cools, when what erupted with violence cools to gloss. It is not actually a rock, instead glass, meaning the story is not what it first appears. Obsidian can be sharpened as a knife. It teaches us that what is beautiful can also wound. It is not showy like quartz or amethyst, does not boast colors like fluoride or citrine. It is dark and opaque, black like nothing. But look closely and you will notice how it reflects your own image.

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Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press), Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press), and three poetry chapbooks. She is an Assistant Professor at Bridgewater State University. You can follow her on Twitter at @SF_Montgomery

Erin Vachon has been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, Brevity, and more. They are Hybrid Editor for Longleaf Review and an alum of the Tin House Summer workshop. You can find more of their writing at www.erinvachon.com or Twitter @erinjvachon.

Brevity Craft Merges with the Brevity Blog

Brevity has grown in size and scope over the past two decades and our flagship magazine of concise nonfiction exists now side-by-side with an active daily discussion of craft and the writing life on The Brevity Blog.

As we grew, we began to note that the Craft Essays we published with each new issue of Brevity often overlapped with the Blog content, and our submissions for Brevity Craft began to taper off as well. At the same time, Julie Riddle, our Craft Editor, stepped aside after decades of brilliant volunteer service to pursue more time for her own writing and editing activities. Her skilled editorial feedback, which served us so well for so long, is now available through her own editing service.

For these reasons, we have begun to fold our Craft Essays into the Blog itself.  The Brevity Blog has a large readership and active discussion, and we think this change will provide both clarity and energy to the Brevity enterprise. (We use that term “enterprise” loosely, of course, since we are a volunteer organization with no institutional support.)

The Brevity Blog reaches thousands of readers each month, with the aim of publishing quality essays that include the arc and movement found in all good essays. Appropriate topics for the Blog include the craft of writing nonfiction, issues in editing and publishing, writing conference and creative writing classroom experiences, interviews with writers or editors, prompts, close readings of essays or essayists, or specific issues that challenge us as we attempt to capture true experiences on the page.

If you are not familiar with our daily Blog, we encourage you to of course read our full Blog guidelines as well as this discussion of the sorts of essays that work best for us.

Our extensive resource of previous Craft Essays will remain available here along with this useful guide to Searching Brevity Essays by Craft Element .

Thanks, as always, for your understanding and for trusting us with your work.