Writing As Therapy: True or Cliché?

By Lisa McCarty

It’s true, writing can be a therapeutic tool to improve symptoms of anxiety and depression, as well as an effective form of expressing emotion. But “writing as therapy” is also a cliché. Writing certainly shouldn’t be a replacement for traditional methods of treatment, like therapy with a trained medical provider—but writing mindfully can contribute to healing.

When my father died five years ago, I couldn’t fathom talking about my grief, much less writing about it. But after a while, my therapist suggested I start writing down how I felt. The first time I opened a Google document, I stared at the blank page, tightness pervading my chest. I wasn’t sure where to begin. Then, a vivid picture flashed: holding my father’s hand the day before he died. I described the coarse texture and warmth of his hand and his last, gentle smile.

It was as if someone put me back in the room next to him, offering a gift of connection through my words on a page. The more I wrote, the more visceral the image became and the calmer I felt. After an hour, I surprised myself with over 1000 words. I saved it, thinking I’d never look at it again, much less share those words with anyone. But I had a sense of relief, like after sitting on the black leather couch across from my therapist every other week.

I continued writing a few days a week and noticed a significant decrease in stress and improvement in my mood. Instead of holding things in between appointments, I was letting them out.

Writing can be a powerful tool, creating a safe space to elaborate on our thoughts and feelings. The blank page allows us to share (or express) our most vulnerable thoughts more freely, without fear of judgment. Writing about a difficult, emotionally-charged subject, dealing with anger, resentment or sadness, we are less likely to filter our words than when speaking aloud. Recent studies of Written Exposure Therapy, have proven the mental health benefits of writing things down.

During several years of therapy, one of the approaches my therapist used was for me to try writing for a few minutes anytime the “fight or flight” feeling kicked in. I was initially resistant, but my doctor encouraged me to push through the discomfort; not to worry if the words weren’t perfect. Freewriting in a Google document felt like a conversation, an inner dialogue with myself.

But writing-as-therapy is also seen as a contradiction and cliché. Of course writing cannot be a 1:1 replacement for being seen by a medical expert for “talk therapy” in person. Writing something down does not fix all our problems; in many cases, writing our feelings is used as a supplement to other forms of therapy.

Writing to publish work in commercial outlets or in a book is a different practice than writing for our own benefit and keeping it private. Public writing should not be a source for retaliation, shaming or hurting another individual (though we cannot control others’ feelings, only our own motivations). When evaluating if a story should be published, I often take account of the “what’s in it for me?” What’s the value for the reader? Am I “trauma dumping” with no purpose, or is my story an illustration of a story that will resonate and connect with readers?

I examined the piece I wrote about my dad and talked with my dear friend, commercial essayist Rebecca Morrison. I decided it was a poignant piece that would resonate with others. After the essay was published at Today.com, I heard from both friends and strangers that they also had similar experiences in losing a parent. My words spoke to them. I gained catharsis not only from writing my story, but sharing it, too.

Here are a few things I learned that could help your process:

1. Start small. Write freely for 10 minutes. Try not to think about the perfect words, or the coherence of your thoughts.

2. Gradually feel your feelings. Whatever emotions come up in the moment, allow them to happen without judgment.

3. Make “purpose” a separate conversation with yourself or a trusted writing friend. Question your intent, be honest about your “why” and determine if what you’ve written is purely process, or could be an external-facing piece.If you need to just write to clear your head, do that. Don’t feel pressured to share your words with anyone.

4. Take a walk. If you aren’t ready to start writing, taking a short walk can help to break loose your thoughts. When I come back I always feel refreshed and more ready to write.

5. Recognize progress. Expressing your thoughts and recalling triggering personal experiences can be hard work. Honor your process and be patient with yourself.

—-

Lisa McCarty is a writer, a women’s health advocate and is training to be a grief educator. Her writing has been featured on HuffPost, TODAY, Newsweek, Popsugar, Wondermind and more. She is working on a self-help book. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

A New Brevity Issue: Astonishment, Atrocities, The Treaty of Versailles, and Much More

Our May 2024 issue has launched, with stunning new essays on astonishment, atrocities, aging, weirdness, the facts of life, the ritual of chemo, and “what certain men are like when they have too much of everything or perhaps not enough.”

New work from Aram Mrjoian, Diane Zinna, Ira Sukrungruang, Jim Daniels, Joey Franklin, Heather Cook Mihalik, Felicia Zamora, Rachel Zimmerman, Aram Mrjoian, Diane Zinna, Ira Sukrungruang, Jim Daniels, Joey Franklin, Heather Cook Mihalik, Felicia Zamora, Rachel Zimmerman, Shubha Venugopal, Diana Ruzova, Mary Ann McGuigan, Andrea Rinard, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, and Jiadai Lin.

With haunting artwork from Marvin Liberman.

Please have a look.

Character Development: Lessons from Amy Tan

By Beth Kephart

In the early pages of Amy Tan’s debut novel, The Joy Luck Club, we meet Jing-Mei Woo shortly after her mother’s death. In taking her mother’s place at a mah-jong table, Jing-Mei learns that her mother’s friends have raised $1200 so that Jing-Mei might go to China and meet the half sisters her mother was forced, by war, to leave behind as infant twins so many years ago. “You must tell them about her life,” these friends insist, but Jing-Mei asserts that she doesn’t know a thing. “She was my mother,” Jing-Mei says. As if that one word—mother—is all this grieving daughter knows.

“‘Tell them stories of your family here. How she became success,’ offers Auntie Lin.”

“‘Tell them stories she told you, lessons she taught, what you know about her mind that has become your mind,’ says Auntie Ying.”

In re-reading The Joy Luck Club in preparation for my late-April conversation with Tan on the Free Library of Philadelphia stage, I pressed a bookmark right there, against this page, closed the novel, and wondered. What if we began our own character development work with this mandate in mind: Tell the stories they told, the lessons they taught, and the mind that has become our own.

We could spreadsheet this if we were really stuck—one column for stories told, one column for lessons taught, one column for the ways in which the Other in our lives has become part and parcel of the way we love, fear, or yield to the world.

I could, for example, choose my father, who might not have been the world’s most prodigious storyteller, but the few stories he did tell organized themselves into reliable categories—adventures with a few childhood and college friends; the long wait for my mother to say yes to his (two) proposals; late-night combustions at an oil refinery and mid-winter turmoil in an executive suite; later-in-life travels with new friends. My father had a way of telling—few adjectives, few adverbs, as few words, indeed, as possible—and I can only remember a handful of times when he was the star of his own story.

What, then, were the lessons that he taught? Humility, I’d log into my spreadsheet. The long reach of his arch-enemy, anxiety. The importance of hard work. The necessity and satisfaction of putting family first. The power of quiet over shout. (There’s more.)

And finally (and of course this is the hardest part of this assignment): How has my father’s mind become my own? Well: His legacy of anxiety is certainly right here, everywhere, so terribly constant. His sense that our greatest value comes from what we can do for others has hovered over my own heart, dictated the choices I have made (for better, for worse). His abject disinterest in stealing any show. (I see myself on too many literary panels, speaking last or not at all.)

How about you? Who is your Other? (Who are your Others?) How would you fill the columns on your character spreadsheet? And couldn’t it be true that it would be so much easier now, this assembled information in hand, to write toward that person, with truthful and intriguing depth?

But would you be you done? Would your character development be complete? In her new book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, Tan’s characters are avian. They’re the hummingbird that feeds from her hand. The Pine Siskins that toss more seeds than they swallow. The baby Scrub Jay learning to master the feeder. These birds have arrived in Tan’s world without a known history, without a reliable list of stories told. And yet, Tan uses her great powers of observation to develop the birds’ characters. She beckons them with a whistle, with suet, seeds, and mealworms. She draws the curves of their beaks, the length of their feathers, the tuck of their tails. She watches them watching her, and it is in this way—the Other observing the Writer, the Writer observing the Other—that Tan begins to differentiate these birds, to make them not part of a broad feathery flock, but a there-is-no-other-bird-quite-precisely-like-this-one-bird singularity.

Are there lessons in this for us, as writers? Might we wait, as Tan so patiently waits, until a greater understanding comes to us? (As opposed, say, to simply writing down what we already know, what has become almost the caricature cliche.) Might we draw our Others, collage them, return to old photographs to see them newly? (As opposed, say, to simply applying the well-known descriptors—brown hair, green eyes, hooked nose.) Might we see ourselves through the eyes of our Others—or do our best to imagine such a thing?

Tan has produced, among many other things, novels, memoir, now this illustrated bird journal. Genre does not matter here. Whether we are writing fiction, memoir, poetry, opera, or a screenplay, whether the characters are people or crayons or bugs, there are lessons in Tan’s work for all of us. There are Others to whom and which we owe our very finest work.

________

Beth Kephart is the author of some 40 books in multiple genres. Her new books are My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera (Temple University Press) and You Are Not Vanished Here (coming in early June from Juncture Workshops). More at bethkephartbooks.com

Learn to tell a story of yourself that in some way contains the stories of others. Join Beth Kephart for her CRAFT TALKS Masterclass, Character Development: Writing the Other, part of a new series of longer writing workshops for in-depth learning and moments of creation within the class. June 1, 11AM-3:30PM Eastern ($175 Early Bird). More Info/Register Now.

Examining Authenticity in Memoir

By Amy Mackin

Authenticity has been at the forefront of my mind over the last year, and I’m clearly not alone. According to Merriam-Webster, “authentic” was one of the most looked-up terms in 2023, leading the company to designate it as their “word of the year.”

Writing memoir demands constant interrogation of authenticity, and it’s within this frame that I continued to re-read and tweak my manuscript even as I pitched this “final” draft to literary agents and editors. The book, which explores my unorthodox approach to ensuring the best education for my neurodivergent child, who is named Henry in the narrative, is 10 years in the making and has gone through several iterations and genres—a traditional memoir, an essay collection, and its current form of a hybrid memoir that incorporates academic research and historical analysis—all in search of its most authentic form. The experiences documented in the book felt isolating and unique at the time, that’s my personal story, but adding an investigative approach to the narrative allowed me to reveal a larger history of ineffective educational and social systems that have failed millions of neurodivergent children across America. My story is now an authentic representation of and response to those failures as much as it is a personal memoir.

Still, authenticity is not easily defined, as evidenced by the sheer volume of dictionary searches on the word last year, and the differing motivations of various stakeholders involved in bringing a work of memoir to fruition can further complicate this process. The commercial literary market is driven by one question—how will this memoir sell? Literary critics may ask another—does the work offer a new perspective on the human condition and effectively express its ideas through skillful use of structure, themes, and language? However, the memoir writer asks a different question—is this art authentic to my individual experience and does it accurately reflect the larger circumstances that shaped it?

I don’t want to condemn others’ behavior, but it seems unavoidable if I’m to authentically describe how their conduct shaped my parenting and decision-making. Throughout many early versions of my manuscript, I routinely gave the family and friends who populate my memoir an “out” by utilizing their back stories as possible explanations for their actions or inactions—referencing my parents’ working-class upbringings as reasons for not encouraging my education, for example, or excusing my mother-in-law’s dismissive comments on my parenting style as her reaction to feeling that her own position as matriarch was somehow being threatened. I wanted the reader to assume that the people in my story had the best of intentions in mind even when their behavior seemed contrary to the mission of ensuring the best possible outcome for my son. This exculpatory approach may be appropriate in the process of building more tolerant and equitable relationships off the page, but I’m not sure it generates the most authentic creative writing on it, so I’ve removed some of the excuses I gave the other people in my memoir. In truth, I don’t believe they always had the best of intentions at heart. Nor was I always operating within this level of beneficence myself.

I feel certain some readers will view my depictions of certain family members, friends, educators, and medical professionals as hurtful or unnecessary, even in the book’s current form that incorporates research supporting the universality of my experiences. But authenticity isn’t achieved by portraying people, including those who we deeply care about, in a consistently positive light. As nonfiction writers, all we can do is show compassion to ourselves and others as we confront a vivid reflection that necessarily includes all our inherent ugliness and character flaws. I’ve come to believe that true authenticity comes from being brave enough to look in that mirror. And only then can we make something beautiful, and better, out of what we see.

__________

Amy Mackin writes at the intersection of media, science, cultural history, and social equity. Her criticism and creative nonfiction have appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, The Writer’s Chronicle, Witness, Chalkboard, and elsewhere. Her memoir, Henry’s Classroom, is forthcoming in early 2025 from Apprentice House Press. When she’s not engaged in her own creative writing, Amy manages communications and outreach for an academic research center and mentors college students in writing across the curriculum. You can find her on Twitter/X and at her website.

A Village Approach To Removing Roadblocks

By Ann Kathryn Kelly

I thought I had written a gripping memoir. (Don’t we all?)

My story is about the mysterious and ongoing neurological issues I’d experienced from childhood into adulthood. A limp. Crossed eye. Severe headaches. Smaller and weaker muscles on my left side. An ice-cold foot.

After decades without answers, punctuated by doctors’ theories and workarounds, all I could do was adapt—until my symptoms worsened. Nonstop hiccupping for weeks. Dry-heaving every morning. Tingling in my left foot, ankle, and calf.

When I finally found out what had been behind my long history of pain, I faced a frightening choice that would either save my life or put me in a nursing home at age 40.

An irresistible story, right?

I started writing my memoir eight years ago, finished what I thought was a solid draft two years ago, and began querying a year and a half ago. But I got zero interest—though, admittedly, I’d queried only 50 agents.

I set my sights on the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference, held in Kansas City in February of this year, hoping it would reignite my passion to begin querying again. Shifting my focus to small and university presses, I reasoned, might be my answer. Several were scheduled to give panel presentations and others had booths in the Book Fair exhibition center.

Invite Insights From Others

I was finishing breakfast on the first day of the conference when another attendee took a seat across from me. We discovered we both wrote memoir. I shared my dismal agent querying stats and said I was at AWP to learn more about opportunities with smaller presses. Sofia agreed that broadening my targets was worthwhile. 

Sofia’s memoir had been published through a Big Five a few years earlier. I asked how she had piqued the interest of her agent and such a sought-after publisher. What she told me made me shake my head. Of course! Why hadn’t I realized this up to now?

Sofia had researched and braided in themes with universal relevance—immigration, discrimination, social justice. She had turned her personal story into something bigger.

We’ve all heard how we need to strive for universality in our writing. But, how many of us take the time to research—in depth—the impacts of a universal theme, and how it can be specifically braided throughout our memoirs? Research is often woven into personal essays, but in memoir? Not so much.

Sofia’s approach landed her not just an agent and publisher, but more readers able to see themselves within the context of her story. Clearly, my memoir was lacking that “something bigger.” Trouble was, I’d been too close to see it.

I felt renewed excitement stirring. Sofia, a stranger minutes earlier, was helping me see that my story contained mostly personal information and not enough universal significance. But how, I pondered, could I thread a universal theme into my draft in a natural way that would complement my arc?

Sofia mentioned a friend whose memoir was also published with a Big Five a year ago. Her friend’s story, like mine, examines a personal health crisis made more devastating because doctors could not name what was causing years of pain and exhaustion.

She promised to introduce us. With that, it was time to head off to our respective sessions.

Back home again, I followed up with Sofia’s friend and learned that she had widened the lens on her personal “mystery illness” story to include research on environmental impacts on sickness, along with gender bias.

Jennifer Lunden’s memoir, American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life, now sits on my nightstand. I’m reading it for pleasure and to study how she handled braiding her personal story with universal relevance.

It took more pondering before I understood the larger frame I had to offer. I could braid my personal story with the tug of war between independence and dependence, and the vulnerability it introduces. In sharing the toll my illness took on my family and me, I could also bring in the national impact of caregiving. All of us fear losing our independence, yet it’s something many will encounter through illness or accident. And at some point, many of us will also be caretakers.

I was sitting on two powerfully universal themes with the capacity to entice more readers—and possibly an agent.  

Be Intentional About Networking

Though I went to AWP to attend panel sessions, it was the spontaneous conversations with other writers that proved the most valuable.

We writers can sometimes find networking difficult, but what worked for me was being intentional about what I wanted to learn (querying)—and having the curiosity and flexibility to pivot when introduced to something not on my radar.  

Next time, I’ll go further. I’ll prepare a “script” of issues I’m working through, perhaps my top three. I’ll rehearse, and when I find common ground with a fellow memoirist, whether walking down the hall or standing in line for coffee, I’ll ask about their roadblocks. That will open the door to discussing my own, where I may find yet more aha! moments.

Networking is an opportunity to turn strangers into allies on this shared writing path we travel. My experience at AWP added two people to my village, who helped me see that my memoir has a larger story to tell. After revising based on insights I uncovered through networking, I may just find a portal that leads to agent interest.

__________

Ann Kathryn Kelly writes from New Hampshire’s Seacoast region. She’s an editor with Barren Magazine and a columnist with WOW! Women on Writing. Ann leads writing workshops for a nonprofit that offers therapeutic arts programming to people living with brain injury. Her writing has appeared in a number of literary journals. Learn more at her website.

What You Don’t Know About Publishing (Could Ruin Your Book)

By Peter Mountford

The publishing business is vast and byzantine. What does it mean that your agent is “taking your book to Frankfurt,” or what do you know about the mysterious film/foreign scout network, or Goodreads giveaways, or regional sales reps?

Unfortunately, most aspiring authors don’t understand the publishing world. Flustered, people often choose to self-publish, then feel crushed when only their loved ones (and not many of them, for that matter) buy the book.

Big Takeaway #1: You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

For more than ten years, I’ve done an annual publishing intensive webinar or class, where I bring in top agents and acquiring editors from large and small presses. Attendees ask specific questions about what the pros look for in a manuscript and frequent red flags.

The main thing students tell me afterward: they didn’t know what they didn’t know.

For example: there are lots of publishing deals happening. That’s the good news. People often assume traditional publishing is inaccessible. But many new deals are listed daily on Publisher’s Marketplace, often for debut books, and the way these deals are described can tell you a lot about an agent (does a particular agent always lead their debut deal descriptions with the author’s fancy credentials? If so, that tells you what that agent cares about). 

Writers are often surprised by the importance of so-called platform, and that the idea of “platform” varies greatly by genre or individual (you don’t necessarily need a big social media following…but you might). Or the importance of good “comps”—comparison books—somewhat similar books released in the last few years. The search for comps can be fraught, but if a book has genuinely no comparisons in recent years, maybe there’s a reason no one has published anything like this recently.

Agents and editors might also tell you things you wish you’d been thinking about for a long time, like whether they want a “comp” from within the last 10 years, or the last 3 years; whether the comp needs to have sold well, and how to find that out.  

Big Takeaway #2: Publishing People Are Just People, But It’s Smart to Listen to Them

The publishing business is much less intimidating than it might seem. People who work in publishing are generally normal-ish book lovers with an unmistakable taste—a set of interests or a style that they’re passionate about.

Acquisition editors spend as much (if not more) time pitching your book as the agent who sold it to them. They have to “sell” a book they’re interested in to their bosses and sales and marketing departments—which is why it’s crucial to know their taste, which is generally an agent’s job, but you can help, too. Once you meet an editor or an agent and hear them talk, you’ll get a sense of how they explain the books they’re excited about—what characteristics of the book do they focus on when they describe it?

This will help you understand if this agent/editor would be a good match for you, and also how to explain your book in terms they will appreciate.

Big Takeaway #3: Learning to Pitch Your Book is Very Important

Your excellent query letter will contain a pitch (a description of your book that makes it sound appealing)—which will determine whether an agent wants to read your manuscript or not.  

Your agent passes the same pitch, maybe slightly edited, to your editor, who uses it to explain the book to their sales and marketing departments. Those departments use this very same pitch to explain your book to newspapers, magazines, book festivals, booksellers, book bloggers, and more. All of those people will use your query-letter pitch to explain your book to potential readers.

It’s a game of high-stakes telephone. So it pays dividends to develop a pitch that’s compelling, intriguing, and like nothing they’ve heard before.

Here’s the amazing pitch for Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See:

Marie-Laure, a blind Parisian girl, lives near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.

Both characters are vivid; their problems and their goals are clear.

Last Big Takeaway: Do Your Homework Early

People often don’t think about publishing until they’re done with their book. Then, they try to draft a query letter and realize that they should have been thinking about platform and pitch and more, long before.

You can’t slap together a platform in a couple of weeks. (Well, not usually.)

If your book has big difficulties in its pitch, that’s a concern. What if the solution to that concern involves rethinking the structure of your book?

That said, everyone who sold a debut book today (I count four of them on Publisher’s Marketplace) started where you are. It’s going to be okay.

_______

Join Peter Mountford and CRAFT TALKS for the 2024 Publishing Intensive on May 18 from noon to 6pm Eastern Time. It features literary agent Michelle Brower; VP and senior editor at Penguin Random House Lisa Lucas; and Masie Cochran, editorial director of Tin House Books. We will help writers understand the publishing business, develop a query letter, and learn how to research which agents are a good fit. Find out more/register now.

Peter Mountford is a popular writing coach and teacher with twenty years of experience. The author of the novels A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism (Washington State Book Award), and The Dismal Science (NYT editor’s choice), as well as the forthcoming collection of short stories, Detonator. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the New York Times (Modern Love), Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Atlantic, Guernica, The Sun, Granta, and Missouri Review.

What I Learned About Essay Writing by Reading for a Literary Magazine

By Jillian Barnet

After Under the Sun published one of my essays, the editors, Martha Highers and Nomi Isenberg, invited me to read for an upcoming issue. My first thought was that I couldn’t possibly find the time. I already struggled to cobble together minutes in my writing chair. However, Martha and Nomi had nurtured my little essay, generously sharing written responses from themselves and eight other readers. Studying their feedback helped me tremendously in the revision process, not only making that essay better, but also assisting me in successfully revising other essays. Their generosity made me want to give back. So, even though I wasn’t sure where I’d find the time, I accepted the invitation to read and comment on roughly 160 submissions over a four-month period, or about ten essays per week, without compensation.

In the spirit of continuing to give back, I’d like to share with you what I learned about writing and submitting essays by being a volunteer reader.

First, I had the opportunity to absorb essays I would not normally have read. The task reminded me of getting a CSA (community-supported agriculture) delivery. When I lived in the city, I supported a local farm by paying a membership fee and in return received a weekly basket of fresh produce. Often, this produce was not what I would normally have selected at the grocery store, but I found ways to integrate the unfamiliar items, such as kohlrabi or purple sweet potatoes, into meals—and they were delicious. The essays functioned similarly: unfamiliar topics, styles, and themes became part of my mental landscape, finding their way into my own creative process. I now push myself to read outside my usual range of topics, styles, and even genres. Adding the unfamiliar to your reading is creatively powerful.

I had the pleasure of reading some very good writing, and the honor of working closely with writers to hone their submissions. For every essay, I was able to see the comments of all the other readers and to learn over time what craft elements were most commonly discussed and important. Often, I’d go back to the essay in question and reread it with those elements in mind. Seeing successes and failures of craft in someone else’s writing, where I could be objective, made it easier to see them in my own. Here are my consequent recommendations to you (and myself) about writing essays for submission to literary magazines:

• Hunt and destroy any cliches. Cliches are the telltale sign we’re reading an inexperienced writer whose prose is not well thought out. When we encounter a cliché, our eyes glaze over and we cease to take you seriously.
• The writing should be tight and focused. Lose extra words, throat clearing, and explanations. If a passage doesn’t serve a clear purpose that supports the essay as a whole, delete it, no matter how good the writing.
• Show, don’t tell. You’ve heard this before, yet we all do it. In essay, it’s much easier to relate the internal than to write the externality of scene. Easier but far less affective. No one wants to be told the Taylor Swift concert was amazing. We want to be there. Put the reader there. Think of yourself as a film producer, the writing as instructions for exactly what the viewer experiences on screen, down to the least detail. You can cut later.
• Essay, like story needs a clear narrative arc. Something, usually the narrator, should change as a result of the action. An inciting incident leads to a journey or discovery, sometimes a crisis, and that leads to some sort of change. These elements of narrative arc don’t have to be as dramatic as they sound. Sometimes they’re quite subtle, but if there’s no arc, there’s no story, just description that reads like an unfinished journal entry.
• It helps if the subject of your essay is unusual. Readers routinely set aside pieces about loved ones dying from cancer, pet death, or grieving a parent. But give us the mysterious murder of a popular high school girl and we’re all in. Bonus points if the topic is one we’ve never seen before, like trepanation.
• There should be something at stake. As in every good story, something important should be at risk. Just because you’re writing a shorter piece doesn’t mean you can do away with the element that makes the reader care and keeps them turning the pages.
• Your essay should make a point. This is what Jeannine Ouellette calls “aboutness.” Aboutness is neither theme nor plot, but something in between. Aboutness is grounded in the stakes of the piece. Does your essay stay on the surface or have deeper meaning at its core? For more on aboutness, read Ouellette’s essay here.
• The narrator should exhibit self-awareness and/or introspection. This includes being as critical of oneself as of other characters, but goes beyond that. Self-awareness—our separateness from others and our acknowledgement of what we bring to the topic at hand—is vital for critical thinking, and critical thinking is the lifeblood of essay.

I thought reading for a literary magazine would be an altruistic chore, but it turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve made in a while. It improved my writing and editing skills and introduced me to a new segment of the writing community. In the case of Under the Sun, readers learned from one another, cheered each other’s publishing successes, and shared information about magazines where we might want to submit. Building community with other writers is part of good literary citizenship, fosters valuable connections, and creates good karma. I look forward to doing it again, perhaps for a different publication.

Next time you have a piece accepted, think about offering to be a reader. The editors will likely be thrilled, and you’ll benefit too. 
___
Jillian Barnet’s writing explores family, the fallout of closed adoption, and transplantation to a rural farming community. Her essays and poems have appeared in Best American Essays, North American Review, New Letters, Nimrod, and Image, among others. She holds an MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts, is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the author of the poetry chapbook, Falling Bodies. Links to some of her work can be found at www.jillianbarnetwrites.com. Jillian lives on a tiny farm in the Finger Lakes where she is at work on a memoir.

Micro Memoir Recipe Box

By Heather Sellers

Micro memoirs are true stories told in tight packages—from a deft paragraph to a page or two. They are delicious to read, but devilishly difficult to write.  Micro memoir requires strong story-telling skills (plot! character! turns! depth!) alongside careful attention to metaphor, compression, and evocative language. And you have to do this all in about a minute. 

As a writer and as a teacher, I am wild about micros. Because so many crucial writing skills come into play, and you can work on micros in short bursts of time, they are the perfect form for the classroom at every level, and for writers in any genre who want to hone their technique.

Some micros lean more poetic, with rich language and less plot focus. Others blend story and poem. At the other end of the spectrum is a story rendered completely in dialogue and action—a full-blown scene.

There’s a wide range of “normal” in this form, and I encourage writers to try various kinds of micros, along the spectrum, to see the most growth. (Brevity’s “Resources for Teaching” presents a terrific set of prompts and well-organized archives of great micro reading alongside craft essays.)

Here are two recipes for beginning and developing a micro, so you can experiment across the continuum.

1.  POETIC LYRIC MICRO RECIPE

The poetic micro uses an image to create emotion in the reader. The poem-micro shifts in time, using surprising syntax, leaps, and extreme close observation to achieve its effects.

Read “Counting Bats” by Thao Thai. Notice the compelling use of description (“claws gripping the fine, flossy strands that wind protectively around my head”). Notice the alliteration (“fine” and “flossy”; “Four are points on a pirate-compass, ready to plunder”) and the arresting syntax: “I tell you we’ve got bats.”  “Count with me now.” “What comes before one?”

This writer removes connective tissue in order to create poetic rhythm—we leap from crisp observation to haunting question (“What drives a woman out of hiding?”) to supposition (“Nowhere, I tell you. Nowhere comes before one.”) These poetic moves make the micro vibrant, memorable, and evocative.

To write your poetic micro, start with an arresting image: an animal, or some specific object or person in your home that provokes you.

1. Observe your subject carefully and write three lines of description.
2. Ask four questions about the subject, your life, what troubles you.
3. Describe yourself, in tension with your subject matter.
4. Address the reader directly, with one or two lines about what you need help with.
5. Leap to something your ancestors have told you, or that you have heard from someone elder, or someone else in the home or neighborhood.
6. Write this line: “Let’s start again.”
7. Describe the image you began with again, in a new way.
8. Ask another question.
9. With your non-dominant hand, write the answer.

As you work on the micro, choose words that connect to each other sonically, threading alliteration, assonance, and consonance throughout your piece. Allow the piece to turn and jump—trust that the reader will be able to follow as you examine this object, and your own interior.

• MICRO IN SCENE RECIPE

To write a micro in scene, choose a place and time with you and another person engaged in a difficult or complex moment of tension. It doesn’t have to be bad tension—just intense or weighted in some significant way.

In my micro, “In Graves with My Student Elizabeth,” I launched my piece in a classroom in a building on my campus named “Graves Hall.” Students often stay after class with questions, and on this particular Friday afternoon, right before Spring Break, one student lingered, weeping. I chose to simply shoot the movie of that moment, describing what she looked like, what she said and did, and what I said and did: action and dialogue and almost nothing else.  The only additional information I included was the fact that both of our mothers were gone.

I have discovered that if I hew closely to action and dialogue set in a highly charged moment, the micro will actually write itself.  For additional examples, check out Beth Ann Fennelly’s collection of micro memoir, Heating & Cooling.

Here’s the recipe I use:

1. Choose your place and time—where the micro movie will take place, and when.
2. Title the piece with the name of the location and the name of the person you are with, and who they are to you.
3. The first line simply states when this is happening.
4. Then, show us where the light is coming from in this scene.
5. Describe what you are doing. Describe what the other person is doing. Use close observation, and fresh details. Do not include emotions.
6. Where is everyone else?
7. Track the action and dialogue as it plays out over the next five, ten, fifteen minutes.
8. Include a leap to something surprising at the halfway mark: the history of a word, a reference to a dream, or a description of something you yearn for, unrelated to the moment.
9. Return to describing action and dialogue, beat by beat, alternating between you and the other person.
10. End on a line of dialogue.

______

Join Heather Sellers for her CRAFT TALKS webinar, Micro Memoir: Writing and Publishing Tiny True Stories. May 8th, 2PM Eastern Time – $25, replay sent to all registrants.

Heather Sellers is the author of, most recently, How to Make Poems, an e-textbook with embedded audio lectures, and Field Notes from the Flood Zone, a collection of prose poems, which won a State of Florida Book Award. She teaches privately in the MFA program at the University of South Florida, where she has won multiple teaching awards. Check out her website to learn about upcoming online and in person workshops.

Here’s the Thing

By Gary Reddin

You write the thing. Then you rewrite the thing. Then again and again until it’s done. That last part is key. Because you don’t decide when your writing is finished – it does. This, or some approximation of it, is the advice I give new writers when asked. And for the most part, I believe in it. But I’ve never been a planner, not when it comes to writing. Or, if I’m being honest – and the thing demands I be honest – that lack of planning extends to my life overall. The only plan I’ve ever made, ever truly been sure of from the get-go, was that I wanted to be a writer. But even my writing career is a heuristic one. I’m not quite a novelist, or poet, or a screenwriter, or journalist. Hell, even my MFA just says, “in writing.” Not in fiction, or nonfiction, or anything that could lend itself to the idea that I’ve ever mastered the thing. If a casual acquaintance asks what I write, I tell them I’m “genrefluid.” Which is fun, quirky, and just technical enough to keep them from asking for more specifics. What I want to say, of course, is “everything.” I write everything. And each piece is its own thing. A poem thing. A fiction thing. A craft essay thing.

But what do I know about anything? I went to college ten years ago on a government program for people who’d lost their jobs in the oil and gas industry. I became a journalist because it was the closest you could come to “being a writer” in Oklahoma. I went to graduate school during the pandemic. And now I’m somehow working with one of the most popular young adult novelists of the past decade. But the truth is, despite that meandering if semi-successful history: I can’t tell you how to write the thing. I don’t think anyone can. Which maybe invalidates this whole essay. And if that ends up being the case – after I’ve written the thing, then rewritten the thing, and then rewritten it again until it’s done – well, I’m sorry. But I hope that I’ve done enough to bring you to the end with me. Because I do think it has something to say. And we’re close now. Close to the heart of the thing. Because I have one more piece of advice. One I save for the people I trust, and something tells me I can trust you. So here it is: don’t edit yourself. Which is to say, rewrite the thing – again, and again, and again until it’s done. But don’t cut it open like some 8th-grade biology project. Don’t pin it to a board or press its wings under glass like a moth in your collection. You can’t piece it together like a puzzle. It’s a wild, wanting creature, this thing we call writing. It yearns for the reader. So let the thing live as it was born: ravenous.

__

Gary Reddin grew up in Southwest Oklahoma, where he mythologized Springsteen lyrics as gospel truth. These days, he writes from Southern California but still considers himself Oklahoma’s son. He is the author of An Abridged History of American Violence, and Quantum Entanglement. He can be found everywhere online as @reddinwrites, though it’s mostly pictures of his dog.

God Meets With His Editor

By Ali Solomon 

GOD: Did you get the new tablets I sent you?  

EDITOR: I did. All seventy-five of them.  

GOD: And? What do you think?  

EDITOR: Some good stuff in there—”Thou shalt not spit on the ground in public.” Solid. “Thou shalt not double-dip in thy neighbor’s honey.” Also gold. 

GOD: But? 

EDITOR: We’re trying to tighten this up, make it as relatable as possible.  

GOD: Spitting on the ground is gross.  

EDITOR: I agree. Totally gross. But do people hate it as much as, let’s say, the stealing thing you wrote about on Tablet #9? 

GOD: Spitting is literally the worst thing mankind can do. The world would be much better off without spitters. 

EDITOR: Again, I’m getting that. But are you saying it’s worse than murdering? 

GOD: Spitters should be murdered. 

EDITOR: I don’t think that’s going to play well. Let’s strike it from the tablet.  

GOD: What? No! 

EDITOR: I’m sorry, I know this is hard, but we need to cut more than 80% of this. People have short attention spans—they aren’t going to read more than a handful of commandments. Like, ten or fifteen, tops.  

GOD: Can we keep the spitting thing, and cut, I don’t know, the adultery one? 

EDITOR: Are you sure? I kinda think that’s a good rule to live by. 

GOD: People are going to commit adultery anyway. It’s in their nature. In fact, having a commandment forbidding them from doing so is only going to make them want to commit even more adultery. 

Ali Solomon

EDITOR: I’m predicting a lot of messed up family dynamics if we lose that one. Speaking of messed up families—the commandment about honoring thy father, mother, siblings, grandparents, uncles, cousins, and stepchildren: any chance that we can trim it to “honoring thy father and mother?” 

GOD: Won’t all the other family members be pissed off?  

EDITOR: I think respecting the parents who raised you is the most important part. 

GOD: What about cousins? 

EDITOR: Most people’s cousins are assholes. I think it’s safe to leave them out of the commandment. 

GOD: O.K., I’ll make the change. 

EDITOR [heaving through the tablets]: Can we talk about your last eleven tablets? They seem a bit…targeted. 

GOD: What do you mean? 

EDITOR: Well, all these commandments seem directed at one person, some dude named “Lyle,” who may or may not have used your name in vain once. 

GOD: He stepped in gum and shouted “Goddamnit” at the top of his lungs. Everyone heard him.  

EDITOR: That’s pretty rough, but eleven tablets about Lyle?  

GOD: He took my name in vain, on the Sabbath no less! And when he couldn’t get the gum off the bottom of his sandal, he even said…he said…he didn’t believe in Me! 

EDITOR: Yikes. 

GOD: And none of this would’ve happened if someone hadn’t literally spit on the ground.  

EDITOR [sighing]: Lose the direct attacks on Lyle. Like, maybe we consolidate all that vitriol into “Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain?” Does that work? 

GOD: I guess.  

EDITOR: And maybe for future commandments, we leave out specific people’s names? Keep it vague: “Thou shalt keep the Sabbath and make it holy,” instead of “Lyle shalt keep the Sabbath.” You’ll use up less stones that way. 

GOD: I don’t mind if we use up lots of stones. If I don’t spell out detailed codes of conduct, people are going to morph into monsters. 

EDITOR: As I said before, no one is going to read seventy-five tablets. You basically have ten commandments to try and reel them in, otherwise they’ll check out and be off having orgies and worshipping golden calves and shit. Let’s reallllllly narrow this down.  

GOD: Keep the spitting one, obviously. 

EDITOR: We can circle back to that one later. What about these, on Tablet #16: “Thou shalt not wear socks with sandals.” Or, “Thou shalt not don tunics above the knee after age 40.” Are we really in the business of policing Your people’s wardrobes?  

GOD: Have you seen what folks these days are wearing? It’s a disgrace. 

EDITOR: I’m not sure we should be wasting tablets on dress codes. What about moral conduct? Can we home in on what makes someone a good human being? 

GOD: I honestly don’t know. I thought the double-dipping commandment, and the one about putting cute hats on donkeys took care of that! 

EDITOR: Let’s keep in the ones about not murdering or stealing. Or lying, especially when it’s lying about murdering and stealing. 

GOD: So no donkey hats? 

EDITOR: We have to kill some of your darlings. 

GOD: “Thou shalt not kill thy darlings!” 

EDITOR: Good one, God. 

GOD: While we’re on a roll, I guess we can lose the commandments about sending back food in taverns, and not paying back people in shekels. They’re important, but not more important than killing and stealing and spitting. 

EDITOR: Good, good! This is definitely punchier; it’ll read much better with the overseas market too if they have to translate fewer commandments. So let’s talk about the title. 

GOD: You don’t like “Things That Make God Angry?” 

EDITOR: No, it’s great, really. But we may want a more direct title, one that gets to the point, without sounding so…mad. 

GOD: “Do These Things Please.” 

EDITOR: Hmmm…better, but not quite there yet. 

GOD: But I said “please.” 

EDITOR: What about “The Ten Commandments”? It’s direct, concise, and even works if someday someone wants to buy the rights and turn Your masterpiece into a movie. 

GOD: That would be amazing—the royalties would sustain me for years. I’d never need to write anything else. 

EDITOR: I’m pretty sure The Ten Commandments will be public domain. 

GOD: GodDAMMIT. 

________

Ali Solomon is a writer/illustrator from New York. She regularly contributes to the New Yorker, and her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Believer, among other places. She was the illustrator for I Am “Why Do I Need Venmo” Years Old (Running Press, 2021), and the author/illustrator of I Love(ish) New York City: Tales of City Life (Chronicle, 2022).