Year of Plenty: A Family’s Season of Grief

In his latest memoir, Year of Plenty: A Family’s Season of Grief, B.J. Hollars chronicles a year that brought the cancer diagnosis of his father-in-law, the intense uncertainty of covid, and the struggles he and his wife Meredith faced raising three young children in the midst of all this. Hollars writes in diary style, but with sharply rendered scenes, and accompanies the narrative with photographs and family interviews. Author Tessa Fontaine describes this small gem of a book as “one of the most tender, big-hearted accounts of grief and love I’ve ever read.”

Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore interviewed Hollars recently about the book, the choices he made in structure, and the importance of awareness.
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DINTY: Structuring a memoir as a diary, or series of journal entries, is a narrative choice I regularly warn my writing students against. The structure is restrictive, on one hand, and on the other hand requires regularly sequenced entries, some of which may actually be superfluous to the story. Yet you pull it off, rather brilliantly, in Year of Plenty. Any advice on how you did that? Was it the structure you intended all along?

B.J.: Well, thanks for the kind words! I’m so close to the material, I’ve had a terribly difficult time determining if I’ve pulled off anything or not. That’s been one of the greater challenges throughout. But certainly, I agree with your advice, and I offer the same warning to my own students. The danger, I often share, is that the diary/journal form can sometimes “excuse” the writer from having to craft anything. And if it’s an actual diary, it can become too “precious.”

I think Beth Kephart said that memoir is a “made thing” and that it requires “shaping.” I’ve been thinking about that a lot while writing this book. I’ve also been thinking of some advice from a friend who remarked that the more emotional the subject matter, the less dramatic the language ought to be. Both pieces of advice have served me well throughout the book.

As to the last part of your question on whether this was the structure I intended, I think it was. In the beginning, it wasn’t a book, just a series of voice memos, emails to me, photographs, and notes on the backs of receipts. But when I gathered all these up, I was able to piece back the days. And while the scenes are accompanied by dates, that’s mostly a technique to create some immediacy. I wanted readers to sort of relive the experience alongside me in “real-time.”

DINTY: The other unexpected choice you make is to include family interviews. The interview chapters are very brief, and often not directly focused on your father-in-law Steve’s cancer or death, but instead just revisiting memories. You even interview your very youngest children. I wouldn’t have thought to do that, but it creates a lovely intimacy.

B.J.: The interviews were a way for the rest of my family to speak directly without my “shaping” the prose. There were limits to my experiences, but by providing them some “unshaped” space, I was trying to make room for the myriad of experiences we shared but also lived independently. I will never fully understand what they felt, though I was there for most of it. These interviews were a way for me to see what I missed and to honor their own place in the story.

I also included some photographs. This was a way to give it a “family scrapbook” vibe without too much purposeful curation. The photos are nothing special on their own, but when I paired them with the vignettes, I noticed some strange juxtapositions emerging.

“Intimacy” is exactly the word for it. I suppose I was always looking for ways to invite readers into these moments in the hopes that they might reflect on their own experiences. The interviews and photographs were two ways in.

DINTY: Part of what fascinates me so much about your book is that it serves as a remarkable eulogy of your father-in-law, but it is much about you and your family, the joys of course, but also an honest examination of the challenges of parenting, of marriage, and an inquiry into how we spend our days and weeks and months. How can we make the most of our time, when time feels so short?

B.J. Just yesterday, I read an article in The Washington Post that noted how when we lose someone close to us, we have a neurological drive to “go out and look” for them. Writing this book was my attempt to go out and look for my father-in-law after his death. But it also prompted some introspection, of course. 

I haven’t reached any definitive conclusions. I’m the same person I was before I wrote this book and before my father-in-law died, but I am a little more aware of the minutes, the hours, and the days. I suppose our awareness is about the only factor within our full control. We can’t necessarily “extend” our time on this earth, but we can choose to live in the present and hold tight to the seconds as they tick past. It’s easy to “kill” time; it’s harder to savor it.

DINTY: Of course, what you describe just above is the definition of a writer. The poet Mary Oliver writes,

Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

What is astonishing you now? Do you have a new project already underway?

B.J.: Last summer, my daughter and I completed the Montana Dinosaur Trail, a 14-stop road trip of all things dinosaurs. We talked with paleontologists, commercial fossil hunters, and any number of strangers in small Montana towns who quickly became friends. We camped in state parks and KOAs and literally dug up a hadrosaur bone. It was one of the most astonishing adventures of my lifetime. I’ve been writing about it ever since.
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B.J. Hollars is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Year of Plenty. (You can view the book trailer here.)The founder and executive director of the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild, he is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire.

The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting

Lee Gutkind, founder of Creative Nonfiction magazine, began promoting the genre in the early 1990s, pushing for acceptance in both the academic and publishing worlds. Along the way, Gutkind witnessed the resistance, the battles, and the victories that led to the vibrant genre (and multiple sub-genres) that thrive today. Dinty W. Moore, founding editor of Brevity, interviewed Lee recently about his latest book, an engaging, surprising, fast-paced, and enthusiastic blend of critical history, memoir, and journalistic chronicle:

DINTY: I was struck, reading The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting, that nearly everything has been contentious about what we now call creative nonfiction, from the name itself, to the validity of the form, to what the form encompasses, and who we should count as the pioneers of the genre. You catch that idea clearly in your title, of course. I was wondering, though, do you have some thoughts as to why nonfiction that strives to be literary has raised so many fights over the years?

LEE: Many parts to this question. But, just as a start, we’ve got to go back time—long before creative nonfiction became creative nonfiction–to understand the resistance and animosity. It began in the early 1960s with journalists. These guys (and a few women) had their rules and formula—news reported in the 5Ws, the claim of objectivity, avoiding the first person and writing, as Tom Wolfe noted, in a “beige” tone. Then some journalists—“new journalists—led by Wolfebegan to break those rules, using many techniques of fiction in what they were calling nonfiction. This really pissed some people off—not just other journalists who adhered to the old way of reporting, but many critics who resented the liberties new journalists were taking. The controversy then had little to do with, as you say, “nonfiction that strives to be literary.” It was very much a resistance to change and to the loss of turf.

DINTY: One of the ironies of this resistance newspaper and magazine journalists directed at Wolfe and those who followed is that anyone reading today’s version of a newspaper feature story or magazine piece can’t help but notice that journalists now strive for exactly what creative nonfiction made possible: storytelling, metaphor, subjectivity, intimate detail. Resistance to change is often so fruitless. You saw this all play out as well in the academic arena, of course; resistance from not just English professors but at times other creative writers. That was equally fruitless as well?

LEE: People tend to resist change when they feel threatened or when they can’t or refuse to understand what the change is all about. In the middle 1960s there were fewer than a dozen creative writing programs; most were very small. But they began to grow year after year in response to increasing student enrollment. What didn’t grow were the resources necessary to accommodate the growth, and English departments took the hit. Fewer new positions for literature scholars, support for conferences, etc. — not that English departments then or now had a lot of money to play with in the first place. English faculty faced what often seemed like an invasion of outliers who did not belong in their sphere—no advanced degrees, no interest in publishing in academic journals, etc. So, they fought back by opposing tenure and promotion to these “goddam writers” who had not paid their academic dues. So yeah, looking back, it was fruitless.

Later, in the 1980s, when writing programs were now part and parcel in many English departments, resistance often came from all corners, writers and professors, related to nonfiction because nonfiction was not really “literary.” We were writing for money, or on assignment (people telling us what to write about) thereby spoiling and commercializing the purity of the literary experience. But that was fruitless, too, as we all know. I don’t think that genres make a hell of a lot of difference anymore.

DINTY: Even though you were often at the center of the controversies and “fistfights” mentioned above, I know you did a good amount of research, and conducted numerous interviews, to fill in the history of creative nonfiction genre, and celebrate the people who pushed it forward. What did you learn that surprised you?

LEE: The story I tell in my book begins with a surprise, at least to me. I discovered what we all call creative nonfiction today as a kid just out of the military, mainly by reading authors like Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Joan Didion. They were incredible, and I was excited to dig more deeply into how these writers did what they did when I began studying as a part-time night school student at Pitt. But I was surprised to learn that these writers weren’t being taught or studied by literature profs. And the few writing courses available were mostly designed for fiction writers and poets. It took me a while to realize that nonfiction or especially this “new” nonfiction just didn’t fit in an English department and that it really wasn’t, let us say, literary—or literary enough.

Maybe I was being naïve, but I simply could not understand why we were not talking about and getting excited about the amazing way these writers were innovating by using literary techniques to bring drama and intimacy into real-life stories. It was like the elephant in the room, I thought, as I learned and read further: Wolfe, Mailer, McPhee were seemingly revolutionizing the idea of nonfiction—not to mention classics from the past, writers who were doing the same thing—Defoe, Sinclair, Orwell, ad infinitum—writing new journalism or creative nonfiction or whatever you wanted to call it—and few people in the academy wanted to acknowledge or embrace it.

There were many—I don’t think I would call them surprises as time went on—but I always assumed that once writers and writing programs were established in English departments, we would have a community of writers—all of us working together fighting the good fight for writing. But that didn’t happen at Pitt or in many other writing programs. Nonfiction and creative nonfiction were accepted—grudgingly. But it was as if there was a caste system. Legitimate writers wrote fiction and poetry (and maybe an essay or two if they had the time) and even though we were no longer elephants in the room, we were sitting and stewing in the back of the room.

I should say that I was not all alone in my creative nonfiction quest—beginning in the 1990s. I started Creative Nonfiction in 1993 and not long after two other journals began publishing narrative or literary nonfiction. Michael Steinberg launched Fourth Genre and Joe Mackall and Dan Lehman started River Teeth. Other literary journals began welcoming creative nonfiction submissions. The acceptance of creative nonfiction came together quite rapidly over the next decade.

I remember waking up one day, around 2005 or 2006, and realizing that all the fist-fighting, after all those years, was finally over. There were still many naysayers (there still are resisters today). But nonfiction, creative nonfiction, has found its rightful place in the literary ecosystem. Which was, suddenly, as I think back more than half a century, and as I detail in my book, the biggest surprise of all.

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Lee Gutkind is the author or editor of more than 30 books, and founder of Creative Nonfiction, the first literary magazine to publish narrative nonfiction exclusively. He has lectured to audiences around the world—from China to the Czech Republic, from Australia to Africa to Egypt and appeared on many national radio and televisions shows, including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Good Morning America, National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation and All Things Considered.

Dinty W. Moore is the founding editor of Brevity and the Brevity Blog.

Vulnerability When Writing Memoir: The Expected and the Unexpected

By Irene Stern Frielich

I was sure I had thought it through. And in fact, I had. The problem was, I hadn’t felt it through.

Five years ago, when I started writing my father’s story, I had no idea it would transform into a memoir. I wanted to document what I knew of my father’s life as a Jewish boy during the Nazi period in Germany and in the Netherlands. He had shared very little of his story with me in person and he died in 1994, when I was a young adult.

I was able to piece together much of my father’s story based on video testimony he had recorded before his death, as well as information from archival materials. After watching, and finally absorbing the video in 2017, I had a long list of questions. But it was too late to ask them.

So I set out to physically retrace my father’s footsteps with the hope of finding answers to at least some of the questions I only wished I had asked decades ago. I traveled from Bocholt—his German hometown—to the farm that straddles the German-Holland border that he and his family had escaped across on Kristallnacht in 1938. My father was twelve years old. I visited the homes where he lived in Enschede and attended services in the synagogue where he became a bar mitzvah. I even stood in the attic space outside the small nook where he and other family members were hidden for two-and-a-half years.

Some of what I learned about my father’s survival story helped me understand experiences and memories from my own childhood. For instance, as a girl, I somehow thought the back of my bedroom closet was the perfect hiding space “just in case.” Just in case of what? Now I get it. Or my lifelong fascination with cherry trees and car bench seats. I couldn’t have known they had a connection to my father’s own youth. The more I got to know these hidden aspects of my father, the more my father’s story became, in some ways, my own story, too.  

I was familiar with memoir. It is my favorite genre. Once I began writing my book as the memoir it was demanding to be, I worried it would be like painting my naked self on a canvas for the world to see, to examine, to analyze. Those who know me know that I’m a private person. Yet, because I felt compelled to share my father’s story publicly, that would mean sharing my own physical and emotional journey publicly as well. What would it be like to be “seen” and “known” in that way?

Last year, I talked with an anti-bias group facilitator who had reviewed my book before publication. At one point, she commented on things she felt she “knew” about me, about my childhood feelings of “otherness” and the sense of secrecy that surrounded me. I was taken aback. She was a total stranger, so I had never told her these things. I felt an unexpected wave of vulnerability.  I was “exposed” in a way that was both shocking and understandable.  Rationally, I knew what was happening. She had read my memoir. Of course she knew things about my inner self!   

Yet, that didn’t prepare me for what came next. Once my friends started reading the book, I was also shocked by their responses. About my childhood, one said: “I didn’t know your father never told you his stories.” Or, in reference to the section in the book where I describe standing in the attic outside the hiding nook, another said: “Did you know that your out-of-body experience in your father’s hiding place is how people experience trauma?” Or, from someone I’ve known for over twenty years, who is aware that I’m a breast cancer survivor: “I didn’t know that your mom died from breast cancer. That must have been extra hard on you going through your own treatments.”

Again, I knew intellectually that readers would learn about my innermost secrets. But now that the book is out, I realize that I had no idea how it would feel. I had spent hours upon hours imagining and dreaming about my father’s youth—trying to touch it, breathe it, feel it. But I hadn’t taken the time to try to touch, breathe, feel this new vulnerability I would experience after publication.

Was it all worth it? The exposure? The vulnerability? Absolutely! I often remind myself that I wrote my book for my family and for the families of the eighteen courageous people who protected my father, whom I describe in detail in the book. But I also wrote it for the world. By telling my father’s story, and my own, I want to encourage hope for self-healing, hope for reconciliation, and hope for mustering the courage to act, even—or perhaps especially—in the darkest and most difficult of times. If only a small number of readers ultimately fulfill my hopeful vision, then making myself vulnerable will have been worth it.
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Irene Stern Frielich‘s debut memoir, Shattered Stars, Healing Hearts: Unraveling My Father’s Holocaust Survival Story came out in October 2023. Irene carries forward the legacy of the courageous individuals who helped her family survive the Holocaust through her book and her acclaimed multimedia presentations. Learn more at www.shatteredstars.org.

An Attempt at a Lyric Introduction to the Forthcoming Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord

The essay that follows shamelessly rips off language from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ezra Pound, and William Wordsworth

By Heidi Czerwiec

It is the honourable characteristic of the Essay that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind. The evidence of this fact is to be sought, not in the writings of Critics, but in those of Essayists themselves.

This is why the best craft writing comes from its practitioners.

During the first summer that author and editor Karen Babine and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of creative nonfiction, the power of exciting the intellect of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of craft writing, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of the lyric essay. 

We called it “Craft Cider.”

At a particular date in a particular backyard, two essayists, neither engaged in picking the other’s pocket, decided that the lack of creative nonfiction craft and pedagogy materials, and the general floppiness of discussions on the lyric essay, had gone too far and that some countercurrent must be set going. Parallel situation one and two centuries ago in England, in the heave from Enlightenment to Romanticism, and again from Victorian lit to High Modernism. Remedy prescribed: hard cider, baked goods, and conversations weekly. Writing regular drafts. Results: several pieces published in what forums for creative nonfiction craft writing exist. Divergence (more general creative nonfiction craft and pedagogy for Karen; lyric essay craft and theory for me) later.

There’s a certain arrogance in riffing on Wordsworth and Coleridge, on Pound on Eliot. A certain arrogance to suggesting a parallel between their projects and ours. In fact, at one point, I argued for the two of us co-authoring a project titled Craft Cider or Lyrical Craft, à la Wordsworth’s  Lyrical Ballads, to throw down the gauntlet, because the project we were setting ourselves had the potential to be groundbreaking: to respond to the relative lack of creative nonfiction craft, pedagogy, and theory writing by writing those pieces ourselves and publishing them primarily online – ideally in multiple locations, but in Assay if we had to – so that the pieces would be widely available and accessible for writers and teachers of nonfiction. Then, collect the pieces together into a relatively inexpensive paperback.

But the timing and demands of different projects and teaching schedules demanded that our projects peel off from each other, though we still pursued our craft writing in tandem. I had already written “Consider the Lobster Mushroom” for my previous book, Fluid States, and at one of our earliest Craft Ciders, Karen showed me a call for submissions from Randon Billings Noble for what would become the anthology A Harp in the Stars and suggested that I write something like “Lobster Mushroom” for it, a craft essay on the lyric essay, itself in the form of a lyric essay. That became “Success in Circuit,” but I couldn’t stop. Over the pandemic, this project mutated into the hybrid Creature that became Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord.

However, while not picking, we each still had our hands very much in the other’s pockets. Without the keen eye of Karen, la migliore fabbra, these pieces would not exist – she pushed me to connect the dots between lyric theory and the lyric essay, making my essays tighter and more relevant; I pushed her to make new dots, new associations.

And I think “conversation” is key to this enterprise, and to where creative nonfiction craft is at this particular moment. The Craft Cider conversations, yes, but also conversations that happened before, during, and after panels like NonfictioNOW’s “The Essay as Unstrung Lyre” (2018) and “Collecting Essays” (2021), or AWP’s “Strike a Chord: The Lyric Essay Forms of A Harp in the Stars” (2022). The conversations among the editors at Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. The conversations among texts and friends that led to pieces in this collection, and which I’ve tried to preserve the traces of in the pieces themselves. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many of those conversants are women/queer/nonbinary/BIPOC/disabled, who are conversant with lifting up others, and who have written and are writing some of the most exciting work in creative nonfiction and its craft.

Maybe this conversation will continue with you.

The pleasure which I have proposed to myself to impart is of a kind very different from that which is supposed by many persons to be the proper object of craft essays. As Wordsworth says, the majority of its pieces are to be considered as experiments. 

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Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord, out February 2024, is now available for preorder at Bloomsbury Academic.

This introduction shamelessly rips off language from the following sources:

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria, 1817

Pound, Ezra, talking about meeting T.S. Eliot in 1917, in an essay on “Harold Monro,” Criterion (XI, 45), July 1932.

Wordsworth, William. “Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads,” 1798.

___. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” 1802.
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Essayist and poet Heidi Czerwiec is the author of the lyric essay collection Fluid States, selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, the forthcoming Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord, and the poetry collection Conjoining, and is the co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay and editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets. She writes and teaches in Minneapolis, where she is Senior Editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com

Exploring the Memoirist’s Creative Soul

On the occasion of memoirist Sue William Silverman’s new craft guide, Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories to Ignite the Soul, Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore took the occasion to interview Silverman about her unique, holistic approach. Like a torch in the darkness, Silverman’s advice to writers “brings together the heart, mind, and senses to illuminate the human condition.”

Moore: I have read my fair share of craft guides over the years, and have even written a few, but I am struck by your willingness in Acetylene Torch Songs to break out of the familiar box and acknowledge what writers know in their hearts but don’t always bring to the classroom: the more ethereal elements of craft such as risk, desire, vulnerability, and, as you put it, the “spiritual, interior quest” that involves the writer’s soul. This goes far beyond traditional craft elements like characterization, structure, metaphor, and voice. What moved you to tackle these more spiritual facets of what we do as writers?

Silverman: One day, struggling with an essay, I realized what was missing from it: my soul. The words sounded flat on the page. And I recalled how, in workshops and classes, we typically discuss the need to “embody” an experience to make it vivid for the reader. Equally true (more true?) is the need to “ensoul” an experience in order to plumb its emotional depths. The origin of creativity is the soul. So Acetylene Torch Songs examines how this creative soul enhances craft elements such as voice, metaphor, structure, sensory details. The book’s intention is to assist writers to discover their courageous, creative selves—to take risks, pursue their obsessions, embrace vulnerability—follow the soul’s desire on its quest to write with emotional authenticity.

Moore: Speaking of vulnerability, another choice you made in this book is to write brief essays illustrating what you are hoping to convey in each chapter. That took not only time and creative energy, but some courage. Teachers are most comfortable giving strong suggestions and nudges, but it’s not always easy to back it up with successful examples from our own writing. What was the impetus for this aspect of Acetylene Torch Songs?

Silverman: I don’t differentiate the writer “me” from the teacher “me.” So I wanted to ensure I could employ my own advice! How could I suggest to a writer—a reader of the book—to consider, say, a strategy to enhance one’s artistic memories in an essay or memoir if I couldn’t do it myself? My hoped-for tone of the book is not academic, but rather writer-friendly. Accordingly, I share mistakes I made while studying how to write, with the hope that readers might avoid some of my missteps. I think of writers as all being in it together. We all struggle. We all receive rejections and acceptances. In short, I didn’t feel comfortable writing a book with lots of suggestions if I’m not willing and able to implement them myself.

Moore:  This is wonderful, and so admirable. Was there one of these brief essays you wrote for the book that surprised you, one where you learned something unexpected in the writing of it?

Silverman: Yes, in “The Girl’s Summer Vacation: Some Questions.” Initially, I had only two vague memories about a family trip to Los Angeles: the name of the motel where we stayed, The Rip Van Winkle Travel Lodge (metaphor, anyone?), and a chocolate-covered banana I ate at Disneyland. I was surprised this proved to be enough to write a 690-word essay. By exploring these memories using various speculative nonfiction techniques, I learned why that vacation haunted me. I (re)learned to fill in the blanks by asking my writer-self a series of questions. I then opened myself to answers I uncovered in the writing process. It was unexpected how furtive answers gave up their hiding places once I sought them out!

Moore: That’s the essence of what I love about Acetylene Torch Songs and what I love about you as a writer. You’ve had a remarkable career as a writer and as a teacher of writing yet even now you still talk about learning and (re)learning the mysteries that create meaning in our work. You touch on this in your brilliant and brief AfterWord, the idea that each essay or book is a new, uncharted journey. How, in your mind, do those who may be just starting out as writers come to understand and trust this mysterious process?

Silverman: I hope beginning writers know they’re embarking on a remarkable quest of self-exploration. Since each memoir is a slice of a life (each essay a smaller slice), what I realized, over the years, is the truth of Walt Whitman’s quote, “I contain multitudes.” We all do. We each contain multitudes of memories all longing to be examined.

For example, after I finished my first book, I thought: That’s it. This is my story. Not so fast! Soon, I found myself writing another. In short, by dissecting my life, I’ve written books and essays on a variety of themes and topics. These include growing up in an incestuous family; struggling with sex addiction; a misguided search for spirituality; and, in How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences, my fear of death—and more. I’m mostly aware of my obsessions before I write. I’m only able to abundantly scrutinize them, however, while I write, and as I elucidate them through language and metaphor.

If you’re concerned you don’t know enough to write about yourself: don’t worry! Each work you write will bring you to a deeper part of the soul. As a writer, keep your antennae actively seeking the internal universe of the psyche. Never fear what you might find, either, for what you’ll discover is more and more of you!

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Sue William Silverman is an award-winning author of eight books including Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories to Ignite the Soul. How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences won the Gold Star in Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award as well as the 2021 Clara Johnson Award for Women’s Literature. Other books include Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction, made into a Lifetime TV movie; Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, which won the AWP Award; and The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew. She co-chairs the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

What I Learned About Writing From Donkey Kong

By Wendy Swift

My secret passion for Donkey Kong started when I bought my husband a Super Nintendo off eBay. It was his 70th birthday. This was a few years ago and since then, pretty much every Friday night we position our chairs in front of the TV, tell Echo to play 60’s rock ‘n roll, order-in pizza and grab a couple of beers before settling into a night of jumping the bad guys. And though it can be fun, it’s also quite challenging with surprise threats around every turn. I admit that I break into a cold sweat when I see those nasty buzzing insects hovering, ready to kill my ape as he tries to jump from one ledge to another.

But that anxiety is nothing compared with what I experience when I wrestle with an idea or wait to hear from publishers. I’ve developed a love/hate relationship with my email: eager to receive notification, frightened to receive notification.

And, in the same way I research cheats and strategies to level up in Donkey Kong, to ameliorate my publishing anxiety, I research avenues to publishing including agents, indie presses, feminist presses, hybrid presses, and self-publishing. I submit essays to lit mags, journals, news outlets and contests. I’ve joined writing groups and organizations. Any success, any recognition feels great though sometimes I’d like to be free of my ego. At age 69, I still can’t shake it. My age compounds the anxiety with the burning sensation that my time is limited and the fear that my words could lose relevance.

Just the other day I asked Google, “who buys memoirs from unknown authors?” I need to know where I stand. The first response listed was from Princeton Public Library with the heading: Anything But Ordinary Memoirs by Non-Celebrities. If I felt worried before my search, I felt panicky after discovering the Princeton Library considers non-celebrities to be authors like Dani Shapiro, Tara Westover, Jeanette Walls, and Tracy Smith. I wish I could be a non-celebrity like one of those fabulous writers whose memoirs have collectively sold in the millions. Really? Elizabeth Gilbert isn’t a celebrity? Maybe once she wasn’t famous, like when she was a toddler.

I don’t think Google understood my question. I want to know who reads memoirs from truly unknown writers. You know, people who aren’t British royalty or famous musicians or don’t have a large presence in the publishing landscape but nevertheless have an important story, one truly worthy of sharing. Writers like me. The authors Princeton touted as unknown were, in most cases, known before their memoirs. They were known for their journalism, their poetry, their novels, or in the case of Alison Bechdel for her long-running comic strip. I’m sorry, Princeton Public Library, but these authors are writer celebrities, maybe not Hollywood types, but celebrities in the writing world.

I’ve read a few memoirs from writers who are truly unknown outside of a very small circle of readers. I’ve read these works because I am interested in submitting to the same presses, including Woodhall Press, Vine Leaves Press, Sandra Jonas Publishing, Cynren Press, She Writes Press and Zibby Books. I want to learn what those presses are most interested in publishing. The memoirs are by turn inspiring, funny, and poignant. I’m glad I read them. It’s vital to read what successful authors write, to glean insight into craft but it’s also helpful to study the work of not so famous authors to see how their craft compares and where we stand in the mix. It may be they are equally skilled at turning a phrase but their scant fame derives from limited publicity, not talent or a compelling story. The hope is that over time, the work of lesser-known writers will gather recognition, particularly if fellow writers hold them up with reviews and shares. That’s comforting.

I’m working on my anxiety. I take deep breaths before Kranky Kong jumps. I practice, reminding myself to jump by pressing B, and holding the right arrow because if I race forward without proper timing, I will end in an abyss. But even if I lose, I can quickly recover with a reset. I read, write and submit, read, write and submit. That’s my writing reset.

I might not ultimately triumph at Donkey Kong but the fun is in the play. The process is as important as the product, always. I remind myself that my worth is not tied up in a silly monkey’s success and it shouldn’t be even if I’m the silly monkey sending off copies of my manuscript.

Press B and move forward.

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Wendy Swift is a graduate of Syracuse University. She recently retired from directing the writing center at a Connecticut independent school. In June 2023, her personal essay, I Lived A Charmed LIfe was published by HuffPost. In May 2022, Swift’s memoir, A Dream Life won The Memoir Prize for Books, awarded by Memoir Magazine as an unpublished manuscript. “The Sentencing” earned Honorable Mention from the Connecticut Press Club in 2023. Her work is published by Yellow Arrow Publishing and has appeared in Memoir Magazine, Grub Street Literary Magazine, Barely South Review among others. She is a fiction reader for Mud Season Review. Swift lives in Farmington, Connecticut.

The Frozen Pond of Chapter Openings

By Margaret Anne Mary Moore

“I didn’t realize at the time how much of a frozen pond my life was back then, at six years old.”

But I did realize the impact of this line as I crafted my memoir in my mid-twenties.

My debut memoir Bold, Brave, and Breathless: Reveling in Childhood’s Splendiferous Glories While Facing Disability and Loss chronicles my experiences navigating childhood with a physical disability, cerebral palsy, a wheelchair, walker, and Assistive and Augmentative Communication device, losing my father to stomach cancer just before my second birthday, and being raised with two older brothers by a single mother who enabled my pursuit of regular education, athletics, and activities such as Girl Scouting. Its intended purpose is to inspire others to find ways to overcome adversities and reach their greatest ambitions. The book is organized thematically; each chapter highlights a different aspect of the disability experience. Collectively, these chapters show a comprehensive view of my early life with CP.

Employing this structure prompted me to consider the function of chapter openings. Of course, they are tools to capture readers’ attention. They also set the stage for what can be expected of the narrator. I like to start with the narrator in the thick of action that readers likely wouldn’t anticipate. Most of these scenes do not directly relate to the chapter topics themselves but rather serve as creative, fun segues into serious discussions about disability-related issues.

When the frozen pond appears in my book, for instance, it materializes as a narrative of how my narrator manages to ice skate in her walker thanks to her mother’s ingenious creativity. The preceding chapter is primarily dedicated to my youthful athletic endeavors—adaptive soccer, biking, and horseback riding. To avoid overloading readers with narratives that demonstrate how, contrary to societal expectations of disabled individuals, I, as a child, left my wheelchair to play sports, I decided not to frame the skating scene as solely an illustration of athletic participation. I instead include it in a separate chapter as a metaphor describing another aspect of the disability experience.

This chapter, “Flying on Many a Frozen Pond,” centers on my introduction to navigating the regular education system and using assistive technology to complete the same academic work as able-bodied peers. My narrator (younger me) has no cognitive deficits—she is able to keep up with the curriculum taught to her age group—but her weak fine motor skills prevent her from handwriting legibly and manipulating school supplies independently. With her speech impediment, she can also rarely use her own voice to contribute to class discussions. She must use a specialized computer to write out her work and share thoughts aloud. Since it is uncommon for students with such impairments to pursue studies in traditional academic settings (the prominent trend is to enroll them in transition programs where they learn life skills—cooking, baking, and doing laundry among others—instead of delving into normal school subjects), the premise of my chapter involves the idea that my narrator is treading on a path that is both new to her and, as Robert Frost would say, “less traveled by.” The chapter showcases the assistive technology and procedures devised by her mother and school administrators to ensure her ability to complete assignments and participate in class discussion.

The ice-skating segment allows me to introduce readers to the process of taking an activity traditionally labeled “off limits” to people with disabilities and making it accessible. The chapter’s first two lines, “It was as if I was flying. The only sensation telling me I was still grounded was the vibration of the skates sliding across the ice beneath me,” immediately reveal to readers that the narrator has stepped into an environment in which someone in a wheelchair and walker is rarely found. Along with disclosing the setting and the Girl Scout trip that brought her there, the prose details her mother’s decision to devise a plan enabling her to skate, equipment used—the narrator’s walker, ankle foot orthotics, and double-bladed ice skates that, together, offered her as much physical support and stability as possible—and the physical movements made by the narrator to glide across the ice. The scene concludes with the narrator, now accustomed to the rhythm and routine of these actions, increasing momentum and speed, catching up to and skating side by side with her able-bodied friends.

The two lines that follow the skating scene act as a bridge between the pond and school settings: “I didn’t realize how much of a frozen pond my life was back then, at six years old. No one knew how I would navigate the terrain I approached that year, but those who cared for me were certain that it was the key for me to prosper in life.” This not only signifies the transition to a new setting and topic, but it also illuminates the skating narrative’s relevance and function. When the next paragraph introduces the account of my narrator’s inaugural academic experience, readers are already attuned to the process of making traditionally able-bodied activities accessible. Because the pond scene has already depicted how combinations of conventional and assistive equipment lead to participation in unique activities (regular skates + walker and ankle foot orthotics = the narrator skating), it becomes easier to delve into the specifics of methods and technology involved in her educational pursuits. Readers can see how, just like on the ice, the narrator must use different tools—a specialized computer, keyboard, and speech device—but completes and succeeds in the same assignments as able-bodied peers.

What can the frozen pond teach us about crafting chapter openings? These sections are critical tools for establishing key themes. My frozen pond permits me to say to readers, “Here’s my physically impaired narrator skating for the first time thanks to her mother’s ingenuity. Note the fine details of her movements, equipment, and how she gains the capacity to gracefully fly on the ice. Now watch her use this process in life’s other sectors to reach prodigious success.”

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Margaret Anne Mary Moore is a summer 2022 graduate of Fairfield University’s MFA in Creative Writing. She is an editor and the marketing coordinator at Woodhall Press and works as an ambassador for PRC-Saltillo. Her debut memoir is Bold, Brave, and Breathless: Reveling in Childhood’s Splendiferous Glories While Facing Disability and Loss . Watch the book trailer here. Her writing has appeared in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy, Independent Catholic News, Positive Writer, Two Drops of Ink: A Literary Blog, and How We Are among other publications. Find her on Twitter/X: @mooreofawriter

Hard Silences, Hard Stories: A Memoirist’s Difficult Journey

Suzanne Strempek Shea interviews Melanie Brooks

Sitting in summer shorts while reading Melanie Brooks’ heart-enveloping memoir A Hard Silence: One daughter remaps family, grief and faith when HIV/AIDS changes it all, I was reminded that the best memoirists’ long treks through the land of memory often require tactical gear.

A Hard Silence details with documentarians’ precision the story of Brooks’ 53-year-old father’s death from AIDS during Canada’s mid-1980s Tainted Blood Scandal. The author was 13 when he was infected, and 23 when he died, a decade during which her parents required their four children to keep their situation private. Brooks’ father, Orville Messenger, was a respected physician heavily involved in his Evangelical Christian Church, in a time long before drug commercials illustrated the carefree lives of those with HIV. A Hard Silence story pays homage to the isolated soul of every child who’s been made to bear a family secret. It also is among the latest examples of the long, rutted path a memoir writer must tread toward truth, a semblance of peace, and becoming the person able to write the story fittingly.

As we speak over Zoom, Brooks’ Lab Wally snoozing behind her, the 51-year-old native of the Canadian Maritimes nods at lessons learned. “I lived the ten years, then I put myself through it again. I don’t think I knew that’s what I was going to be doing. I think if writers really knew what this was going to be like, they wouldn’t write.”

Melanie Brooks

Brooks did have some inkling, her first book Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma (Beacon, 2017), featuring 18 in-depth interviews including with Edwidge Danticat and Richard Blanco, began as a project three years into her memoir and during her studies at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program.  

“It became very clear to me that I needed something like the ‘gate’ that (James) Baldwin once said of his work, how he didn’t set out to write about ‘being a Negro,’ as though that were his only topic, but that was the gate he had to unlock to get to anything else. Writing Hard Stories was the gate for me—I had to have those conversations with those writers and really work through what the experience was for me, feeling re-traumatized, and maybe traumatized for the first time, by this writing… ‘You get to the other side of it.’ I needed to hear that to keep going.”

Most writers keep going while also shape-shifting through life. Over the decade of writing A Hard Silence, Brooks was wife, mother, runner, MFA student, undergrad and MFA writing instructor, Narrative Medicine Certificate student, prolific op-ed submitter, new author, and therapy patient with a manuscript in progress. She and her voice, perspective, and skill grew as the story did, despite writing that brought avalanching reminders of the deep love shared with her late father, and the struggles with a childhood faith that once was as much a given as the fact that her father one day would walk grandchildren along the shore. Brooks credits cognitive behavioral therapy, which she began during a confidence crisis around A Hard Silence’s start, for developing necessary emotional muscles and understanding.

“The writing fed therapy and the therapy fed the writing. It needed to be done like that for me. And, certainly, when I started I did not anticipate that I’d be in therapy for over a decade.” The sessions, which she’s continued, also became a story line underscoring the hard and long duty of revisiting the past.

Brooks recalls friend and colleague Richard Hoffman saying he needed 19 years to write his searing on-point memoir of childhood abuse, Half the House, another book in which silence is a main character. “I always say that that time includes all the striving to become the writer who could write that particular book,” Hoffman explained. “I think that’s pretty much true of all my books. None of them are written by the guy who first envisioned them. They are all the result of a process of becoming the author of each book. “

It was the same with A Hard Silence. “There’ve been a lot of times for me when I’ve thought, why haven’t I gotten this done? Why isn’t it published yet?” Brooks says. “But I also realized if this had gotten published right away after Writing Hard Stories, it wouldn’t be the book it is.”

Because the author would not be who she is right now, a woman turning more fully ahead, feeling able to telling the world her story. Is she someone who believes things happen when they’re supposed to? A Hard Silence, Brooks says, “speaks to some of the lessons of Covid that need to be continuously learned” and points to the re-emergence of HIV-AIDS in public conversation—and to a generation unaware of that pandemic’s story. “I do feel like it’s relevant to the current conversation,” she says.

A Hard Story easily will slip into worldwide discourse, but Brooks’ goals are more personal.

“I’m not counting on this being on the bestseller list,” Brooks says. “I’m putting it out there because it might give me the opportunity to have one conversation with somebody who says to me, ‘You know, before I read your book, I felt really alone. I don’t feel so alone anymore’.

“As much as I don’t want to say good has come from my dad’s tragedy, I am able to say I am the person I am, capable of sitting with people in their grief and leaning into hard stories, because of my own experience of a hard story.”
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Suzanne Strempek Shea’s six novels and five works of nonfiction include Songs from a Lead-Lined Room: Notes—High and Low—from My Journey through Breast Cancer and Radiation, Shelf Life and This Is Paradise. Her journalism and fiction has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Irish Times, Yankee, Golf World, Down East, The Bark, and ESPN the Magazine. She is former writer-in-residence and director of the creative writing program at Bay Path University, founded its MFA program and co-founded its Narrative Medicine Certificate program.

American Breakdown: Crafting a Literary Mystery & Memoir

by Marcia Meier

Jennifer Lunden

In her genre-crossing literary mystery, American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life, Jennifer Lunden crafts a story that interweaves wide-ranging threads such as chronic illness, environmental pollution, chemical sensitivity, and the history of a little-understood illness that was questioned and made fun of by the medical community for over 100 years into a complex and fascinating memoir that masterfully brings the reader into the world of her illness, and recovery. Lunden and I spoke recently over Zoom.

Marcia Meier: American Breakdown has exceptional breadth and depth in the topics it explores, from chronic illness to chemicals in the environment, to psychiatry, to capitalism, to 19^th-century medicine. How did you decide on the structure of this book?

Jennifer Lunden: I didn’t know the book was going to have as wide a breadth as it did. That really happened as a result of being curious and wanting to get the bottom of things. Doing that, the book became much more multidisciplinary than I pictured at the beginning. An agent I spoke to very early on said the memoir should be the through line, and that was good advice. Then my agent recommended that I restructure the book so the memoir was in chronological order.

Originally it was just going to be third person, objective, factual. But really quickly I felt like I needed a story, a memoir aspect to help people connect to these bigger stories I wanted to tell.

MM: You ultimately discovered you were suffering from myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS). But it was many years—more than 27—that you were ill. Can you briefly explain what these are and how they affected you?

JL: The first thing that happened was I had a case of mono, which is a fatiguing illness. I was very tired and also had just moved to Maine so was under a lot of stress to make a living and get established. I finally found a doctor who diagnosed me with CFS. It’s symptom-based. Fatigue is the most common, like bedridden fatigue. Also post-exertional malaise, which for me meant even just getting up and walking down to the corner store for a stick of butter would exhaust me for the rest of the day. Other people have serious neurological symptoms: brain fog is one.

I’d been sick for a few years yet was still using pesticides and other chemicals without thinking about how they were affecting my body. Initially I had a reaction to some soft soap that somebody had. When my boss put a new desk in my office, I started experiencing headaches day after day. Well, the new desk was off-gassing formaldehyde. For me the worst symptoms were headache and brain fog. Some people react to all kinds of things: car exhaust, dryer sheets.

MM: Your own illness is the thread that binds all these topics together. How long did it take to write this book, and how did your illness both inform and affect the writing of it?

JL: I was still very ill when I read the biography of Alice James in 1996, which sparked the whole book. I was really interested in her neurasthenia, and how much it felt like the same experience as my chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS, which is the preferred term now. I began to fantasize about writing a book about Alice and me. I started researching in 2001 as I was finishing up my master’s degree in social work. It informed the writing because I feel like having a bodily experience similar to Alice’s helped me to understand Alice in a way that the wonderful, amazing biographer Jean Strouse might not have been able to understand her.

The other thing is my illness makes me have to be in my body. It challenges me to be in the place that’s not as comfortable to me as being in my head. Which I think makes me a better writer. But also having this illness prevented me from being as productive as I would have been without it.

MM: Alice James, born in the mid-1800s and younger sister to the writer Henry James, becomes your companion on your journey to recovering your health. Who was she and what role did she play in your journey?

JL: Alice just made feel that I wasn’t alone with this very alienating illness. I call her my “dead bed companion.” She was someone I wanted to hang out with. She was so sharp-minded and so smart and so funny and so edgy. Yes, she was a woman of her time, but I don’t think we think of women in that time as having the intellectual heft and wit that she had.

MM: Just before you finished the book, you had a relapse—how are you doing today?

JL: Thank God, I’m doing so much better than I was then. I was basically on the bed or on the couch. Even walking to the bathroom was exhausting, other people were taking me to appointments, my husband was doing every single thing around the house. Now I’m able to swim in the river, play with our new puppy. I’m not able to do everything but I’m so much better.

MM: Has your philosophy on life changed through this experience?

JL: I got this illness when I was 21. One thing that I know that’s changed is I am fully aware that the worst thing can happen to me. Most of us walk around thinking, well that wouldn’t happen to me. Also, understanding that it’s really important to feel my feelings. That absolutely came from the illness, and from therapy. As for writing the book, it gave me something I was passionate about and a focus. It was something that mattered to me. And now I’m a writer with a book.

MM: What are you working on now?

JL:  I’m writing about the river. I’ve been swimming at the river for many, many years. I want this book to be about the wonder and the connection I feel with the animals, nature and the people whom I meet there. I want to bring that feeling to others.
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Marcia Meier is an author, book editor, and publisher of Weeping Willow Books. Her latest book, Face, a Memoir, won the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, the May Sarton Award for Memoir, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Eric Hoffer Book Award grand prize. She is the author of six other books, wrote for newspapers for many years, and her freelance articles and poetry have been published in numerous magazines and journals. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and an MFA in creative writing, and teaches middle school English. Visit her website for more information.

Jennifer Lunden, recipient of the 2019 Maine Arts Fellowship for Literary Arts and the 2016 Bread Loaf–Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship in Nonfiction, writes at the intersection of health and the environment. Her essays have been published in Creative Nonfiction, Orion, River Teeth, DIAGRAM, Longreads, and other journals; selected for several anthologies; and praised as notable in Best American Essays. A former therapist, she was named Maine’s Social Worker of the Year in 2012.

Flashes of Memory: Exploring the Emotional Breadth of Short Form Writing

An Interview with Davon Loeb

By Arielle Bernstein

Davon Loeb

In his memoir, The In-Betweens, Davon Loeb writes lyrical essays that explore family, identity, and culture. I was particularly struck by Davon’s embrace of the short form and had the honor of speaking with him about his choices in crafting this beautiful and powerful collection.

Arielle Bernstein: Your short, lyrical essays are so poetic—what is exciting for you about the short essay form? What unique possibilities does that it offer?

Davon Loeb: I love writing short essays, which was something I learned from reading poetry, especially writers like Ross Gay, Patrick Rosal, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Iain Haley Pollack, and so many others who embrace the narrative form, but emphasize the lyric. In my early attempts to create The In-Betweens, I wrote prose-style poems and envisioned this as a collection of poetry rather than a traditional memoir. However, many of the chapters demanded longer storytelling, so I married these two forms and structured the memoir as a series of vignettes with varying lengths. I think there’s such power in writing that is equally narratively and lyrically driven.

AB: How do you decide the length of a particular passage?

DL: Sometimes retelling a story only allows for flash-length passages because the memories themselves vary in length. If I only remember a feeling, a sensory detail, an image, nostalgia, my memoir wants to replicate that, as well as honor the authenticity of remembering through these variations in the storytelling. The decision to write flash essays versus longer-form essays is simply driven by the memory itself, which is why the chapters later in my memoir are longer. In those chapters, the memories are clearer, and the writing reflects that certainty. Developing The In-Betweens towards a full-length book was motivated by creating a union between self-discovery, the lyric, and a conventional memoir. 

AB: Something I really admired about your book is how you demonstrate empathy for every person you craft as a character—how do you approach this type of character exploration in a shorter form? 

DL: Writing characters is really challenging. How do you create a round and dynamic character if the very real person you remember was flat and one dimensional? Memoir is truth-telling, so it is incredibly difficult to build these people and show them wholly, especially in short form writing because of the page time and the narrator’s perspective. In short form writing, you have to utilize every word with economic precision, so my descriptions of characters are always direct and indirect characterizations—that each detail builds a picture of who they are, mentally and physically, as well as what they contribute to the essay, to the entire memoir. You have to be intentional about the details you include. Can you demand empathy from your reader in a flash essay? Yes, absolutely, but only if your details, when describing your characters, are intentional and are working for you. 

AB: Will you continue to explore the short form as you work on new projects?

DL: I’m currently working on a collection of essays about parenting and fatherhood. I recently published a piece, “The House Fire by the Lake” at Gulf Coast Journal, which uses the braided structure and is written as a short-form essay. I’m really interested in embracing this structure but using my poetic muscles, the lyric, with the same economy as my word count. As a parent, to young children, writing about parenting, I really don’t have the time to pursue essays longer than 2,000 words, and to be honest, I don’t want to write longer pieces because I enjoy the constraint of language.

AB: Something I love about lyrical writing is that it allows for the reader to connect to your emotional experience in a way that feels nuanced rather than didactic. Why was it important for you to resist the “neat” ending?

DL: Life is not neat. In writing creative nonfiction, there is this push to end with neat reflections, but that doesn’t interest me, at least, not from a craft perspective. There are examples of didactic reflections in my memoir, but I use a braided structure to mend personal narratives, the first strand, to ethics, to culture, to race, the second strand, while arriving at meaning, the third strand, throughout the essay rather than saving it for the end of the chapter. I prefer this form because it allows readers to experience this understanding alongside the narrator, which feels realer to me–that we don’t reflect at the end of any given experience in life, that the learning comes in flashes, or sometimes, not at all.  
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Davon Loeb is the author of the memoir, The In-Betweens, a Lyrical Memoir (West Virginia University Press) and is an assistant features editor at The Rumpus. He earned an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University-Camden and has had work published in the Sun Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Slate, Electric Literature, Catapult Magazine, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Joyland Magazine, Gulf Coast Journal, the Best American Essays Anthology 2022, and elsewhere. Davon is a husband, father, and teacher located in New Jersey. Learn more at linktr.ee/davonloeb. 

Arielle Bernstein is a writer and cultural critic who explores how social media and digital communications shape human expression, interaction, intimacy, and empathy, as well as the impact of artificial intelligence on our emotional lives. Her work has been published in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Millions, Salon, AV Club, and many other publications. She teaches writing at American University in Washington, DC, where she also co-directs the MA in Literature, Culture, and Technology. She is writing her first novel.