How Time Whispers a Different Story

By Lisa Witz

As a child, my father told me about living in the one-story house in Owl Canyon, just up the road from the modern house where I was born. He’d light a fire with newspaper in the woodburning stove, and he’d show me where his mother set the pot used to cook every meal. They had no electricity, no running water, he told me, his long fingers pointing to the outhouse that served as their bathroom for his entire childhood. He’d talk about the cold mornings, about the way the eucalyptus trees protected them from the winds, about the owls perched in their branches and how every spring the bulbs his mother planted would bloom: pink lilies, naked ladies they called them, their stems erect and their scent blossoming along the small stream that meanders in front of his childhood home.

And then there are the stories I didn’t hear, from my mother, that I still yearn for. She kept them inside: the story of the almond farm where she grew up; the story of her brothers and sisters and parents that I tried to get out of her in fourth grade, when I had to bring in a family tree to school. My Dad’s side of the tree was full, but for my mother’s, I couldn’t get her to tell me much more than the names and birth years of her parents. It wasn’t until much later that I learned her dad died unexpectedly when she was eighteen, and her mother six weeks later of what I think was heartbreak. Unexpectedly parentless as a young adult. By the time I knew her story she was gone. I could not ask the questions; I could not find out about the stories I wanted to know. I thought I had time.

As a teenager, my stories nestled into the pages of my journal, the colored pens, the big letters, the desire to express the things that were happening inside my body and my heart that no page had enough space for. 

In college, the stories changed because I was reading so much more. Anaïs Nin. Henry Miller. May Sarton. Tim O’Brien. Spanish authors, reading in another language, at times dreaming in Spanish. The Dirty Wars in Argentina and the Chicago Boys in Chile, the way I became enamored with other places, other histories, the way learning their histories taught me more about mine—and made me realize how little I knew about the world. 

My stories now tend to be hidden. I think of them as caterpillars in their chrysalis. They need the safety of the darkness before they can be birthed. They contain beauty, but it is fleeting. It may or may not arrive, it may or may not make it out of the chrysalis, it may spread its wings for just a day or a few weeks. The stories burgeoning inside me carry weight but fly lightly, once released. Once in a while a story emerges with clarity, but most of my stories hover like the hawks circling a dead animal in the fields of my childhood farm, poking, prodding, turning the carcass over to examine from another angle, diving and then swooping back to the sky to take in the longer view. I try to not be like my father, telling too many stories of childhood hardships. I try to not be like my mother, holding on to my stories too tightly. 

My youngest son tells me about artificial intelligence devices that can read your mind, about glasses with the world at their fingertips—or rather, eyelids—with the internet accessible from the lenses, not unlike my readers. He has his eye on a future of rapid stimulation and YouTube videos and devices with the capacity to control everything. He envisions a world foreign to me, a place where I find myself more dependent to understand the way things work. To decipher the stories. I want to take him to the woodburning stove; I want to show him the meandering creek and the way the pink lilies bloom each spring, even though there is no gardener, no sprinkler system, no artificial intelligence device keeping them alive. I want to see his fingers get dirty in the soil and pull carrots from the garden and walk on the paths of his ancestors. I want to fill him with my past and I want to make space for his future. And I want to have the sense to be present to hear the story that is playing out right now.

Lisa Witz grew up the youngest of nine children on a sheep and cattle ranch in western Marin County. She left the small town to feed her wanderlust, but often returns to the rolling hills and trails of her childhood. She lives in the California beach town Carlsbad with her husband and their three children.  Visit http://www.lisareginawitz.com/ for her work.

The Lost Art of Pretending: Imagining a Positive American Future

By Lindsey DeLoach Jones

On a sleepy Sunday afternoon, my daughters, six and eight, play with dolls on our stairs. From the bedroom where I’m folding laundry, I overhear charming caricatures of adult speech. “Hey Barbie,” my younger daughter says in imitation of a male bass, “I can train your puppies to do tricks.” She wiggles Ken, her preferred doll, back and forth as he speaks, that universal doll-gesture for conversation.

I peer around the corner, where tiny plastic dogs are being tossed through a hoop. Lowering her voice to a whisper, my oldest says, “Pretend there’s a dog show tomorrow.” The whispers are stage directions that inspire their play. Without missing a beat, they adjust the scene. When another idea strikes, my daughter whispers again, as though she can keep her exegesis from intruding on the real world they’ve created: “Pretend Barbie is the judge!” After a while, I lose track of how many times they use the word “pretend.”

This, it occurs to me, is something many adults have forgotten how to do.

It’s a truism that, after a certain age, we outgrow our imaginations. We express a mild nostalgia for Sunday afternoons spent on the stairs, making up life as we went along. But what if the loss of imagination is more than a casual, inevitable failure? There’s a darker side to our inability to pretend. No matter how we define the problem currently facing America, we may have lost the ability to see a way out.

For adults living in an increasingly threatening environment, pretending sometimes feels impossible. Others see no reason for pretending, considering it territory for the weak and foolish. For them, pretending equates to the kind of willful ignorance that allows people to shirk responsibility for making things better.

But the kind of pretending I’m talking about isn’t the kind that opposes action. It’s the kind that inspires it.

We need a collective imagination like the one Martin Luther King shared at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. King insisted, “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair… Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.” At his core, Dr. King was a writer. His dream speech was wishful thinking, yes, but it was backed by action, protest, force of will. One man’s private imagination had untold constructive consequences in the real world. We seem to think we have outgrown this kind of thinking, that hope is for suckers. But to abandon the project of pretending is to abandon any hope for improvement.

Even as a professional storyteller, this kind of imagination is hard for me in our current climate of fear and dread. Reading materials for fueling despair are abundant; harder to find are the voices reminding us that the fear we fuel will eventually become the air we breathe. We need time-outs to intentionally envision what a better America might look like and how we might contribute to that vision.

One thing is certain: finding a way out of a problem isn’t as simple as it is for my kids. On the stairs, a dog breaks her leg leaping over a plastic obstacle and lies on the sidelines for a few seconds. “Pretend her leg is better now,” says the older girl, and Lassie is back on her feet.

There are, of course, a few major differences between the wishful thinking of childhood and the robust moral imagination our society needs now. Children need only speak something into existence, like that miraculously hurt-and-healed dog. Adults must commit sustained effort, keeping our imaginings in front of us at all times. These become the whispered reminders of where we want to go, stage directions for our own theater of democracy. For me this means reading BIPOC authors, joining protests, supporting clear-eyed candidates with integrity. Most of all, as a writer, it means insisting on nuanced understandings and, whenever possible, hope.

But I pretend in other ways, too. I find joy in the play of my children, I read poetry. I plant gardens and cook meals and drink wine on front porches with friends. Sometimes they seem frivolous, but these things remind me of the goodness we’re after. In this country we cloister our artists as though they belong in a category all their own, one without much practical purpose. Instead, we turn to economists and politicians to find a way forward. But as has often been the case throughout history, as our collective problems become less the domain of policymakers and more the domain of the human heart, it may be the storytellers who help us imagine a future for our democracy.

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Lindsey DeLoach Jones is a professional writer, editor, and teacher in Greenville, South Carolina. She has a BA and MA in English and an MFA in nonfiction from Seattle Pacific University and has taught literature and fiction writing at Clemson University and served as Editor-in-Chief of Emrys Journal and Edible Upcountry. She co-founded a regional writer’s network called Writeshare. Among other places, her essays have been published in Paste, South Carolina Review, Literary Mama, Relief, and Ruminate. She is the winner of the VanderMey Nonfiction Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Why We Write: On Pandemics, Heat Waves, Police Brutality, and Resiliency

By Melissa Hart

My mother was a professional writer as I am now, and when I was young, she created an office with a thrift store desk and a bookshelf in her garage. She wrote at dawn before my siblings and I woke up, the door thrown open to birdsong and backyard cats, a table lamp illuminating the page tucked into her electric typewriter.

When I woke, I brought her coffee spiked with cinnamon and slipped away to read whatever kids’ novel captivated me at the time. But the details of a writer’s life—the purr of the typewriter in its circle of light, the coffee, breeze blowing in through the door and cats winding around her ankles—made an impression, and I could think of no more fulfilling career to pursue than the creation of stories where there’d been only blankness before.

My mother desperately needed that hour to refresh and heal, to fight off the wild dogs of depression. My father had abused her for years until she fled with her kids to a girlfriend’s house and came out as a lesbian. In 1979, the judicial system regarded homosexuality as mental illness. The divorce judge ordered us to live with our father so we wouldn’t be tainted by our mother’s love for a woman.

Those mornings I brought her coffee and left her alone to write came few and far between; we were only allowed to visit her every other weekend. Her writing represented both financial and emotional survival. For money, she edited a small newspaper and freelanced articles. For solace, she wrote stories at dawn. Some were published, and some weren’t. Publishing wasn’t the point.

This is the part of the writer’s life that has nothing to do with rejection or promotion. It’s not about building platform or networking or attending conferences. This is the part that’s about focus and creation. It’s about donning metaphorical blinders and earplugs in order to concentrate, whether that means waking up before the kids or installing distraction-blocking software or turning a corner of the garage into an office with a desk and a lamp. It’s about respecting yourself and your work enough to provide tools so that both can survive.

I’ve been thinking about my mother and her writing a lot. She passed away a year ago of cancer at age 73, leaving file cabinets of rough drafts, magazine articles, the murder mystery she’d published in her sixties. Her other love was psychology; a PhD scholar, she knew the necessity of developing a habit and a reward system as a writer.

Every day for 39 years, she showed up at the same desk at dawn. The electric typewriter gave way to a word processor, and then a PC. Cats died, and she adopted new ones to wind around her ankles. She sold one house and bought another. Regardless, she woke up and sat down with her cup of coffee and honored her need for solitude and story.

A similar hour has sustained me for decades, as well–as a teen spending nights at a friend’s house after police showed up at my father’s door to cite him for domestic disturbance, through my tumultuous first marriage and my own cancer diagnosis, and last year, the death of the woman most important to me in the world.

My mother was also a runner, as I am now. At a certain point in a workout—Mile Six for me—there’s euphoria, the “runner’s high.” It’s an endorphin flood, a feeling of well-being, a sense that everything in that moment is aligned and joyful no matter what’s happening in the world. That’s the feeling I chase as a writer, as well–a sense of being in the zone, of breathing in contentment for an hour in the midst of chaos.

In the midst of pandemic, of heat waves and police brutality and job insecurity, I’ve been up early each morning to write. My daughter, home from middle school, wakes up later and pads barefoot to my backyard office. I watch her beautiful brown eyes absorb my thrift store desk, sunlight streaming through the open window, the cat curled beside my computer.

I hope I’m showing her what resiliency looks like. She’s been struggling with her history as an infant relinquished by her biological mother and adopted from foster care. As a Black biracial teen, she’s been grappling with news stories, and also with the loss of friends, of teachers, and her dance studio.

This morning, I left my office to help her with algebra, and found her on the couch, laptop open and brow furrowed as her hunt-and-peck fingers found the keys.

“What are you working on?” I asked her, anticipated Spanish verbs or emails to friends.

She looked up, eyes misty with concentration and calm, focused joy. And then she said the words that let me know that she would be okay in this unpredictable and tumultuous and brutally unfair world.

“I’m writing a story,” she said.
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Melissa Hart is the author of Better with Books: 500 Diverse Books to Ignite Empathy and Encourage Self-Acceptance in Tweens and Teens (Sasquatch, 2019). www.melissahart.com

 

Brevity Podcast Episode #10: One-Minute Memoir

It’s been five months of exciting technical challenges since the last Brevity Podcast, but we’re back! This episode, we finally reveal the fifteen One-Minute Memoirs, and our podcast host Allison K Williams and Audio Editor Kathryn Rose discuss why we chose them (from over 300 submissions!), the process of reading and listening to all the submitted essays, and key things writers can do to make their work stand out from the rest of the submissions pile.

Stream the show right from this post, or click over to  iTunes, Soundcloud or Stitcher. If you’re subscribed, we’ll show up in your podcast app queue. And wherever you listen or download us, please take a moment to leave a brief review–it helps us show up in searches and recommendations.

The memoirists:

Anne Boaden earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College and is writing a memoir of her active duty with the United States Marine Corps flying AH-1W Cobra attack helicopters. Her work has appeared in The Pitkin Review and NELLE. She lives in England with her husband, two cats, one dog, flock of chickens, and brand-new baby Robin Anne Delgaard Boaden.

Tracy Royce is a poet, writer, and doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work has appeared in The Fat Studies Reader, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Affilia, and Mother of Invention: How Our Mothers Influenced Us as Feminist Academics and Activists.

Anne McGrath’s work has appeared in Antioch University’s Lunch Ticket, The Brevity Blog, Chapman University’s Dirt Cakes, The Caterpillar Magazine, and the One Hundred Voices anthology. Ms. McGrath is an assistant contest editor at Narrative Magazine and is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Irvin Weathersby is a Brooklyn-based writer and professor from New Orleans. His work has appeared in literary journals and magazines including Notable Black American Men Book II, Killens Review, The Atlantic, Ebony, and Esquire.

Patrice Gopo is a 2017-2018 North Carolina Arts Council Literature Fellow. All the Colors We Will See, her essay collection about race, immigration, and belonging is now out from Thomas Nelson, and has been named a Fall 2018 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.

MFC Feeley attended UC Berkeley and NYU. She has published in The Tishman Review, Mainstreet Rag, WicWas, Plate In The Mirror, and Ghost Parachute, and was a 2016 fellow at the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and a 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Quarterfinalist. She won the Raven Prize for CNF and is writing a series of short stories inspired by the Bill of Rights for Ghost Parachute.

Jamie Zvirzdin teaches in the Master of Arts Science Writing program at Johns Hopkins University. Her work has previously appeared in The Kenyon Review, Issues in Science and Technology, Creative Nonfiction, and CONSEQUENCE.

Evie Gold is a non-fiction humor essayist, a sushi connoisseur, and a wandering nomad.

BK Marcus is a homeschooling dad in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he also performs and coaches live storytelling.

Erin Murphy‘s work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including The Georgia Review, Memoir Magazine, The Normal School, Field, Southern Humanities Review and North American Review. She is the editor of Creating Nonfiction: Twenty Essays and Interviews with the Writers, and is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State Altoona.

Georgie Hunt’s writing has appeared in Prick of the Spindle, NANO Fiction, River Teeth’s “Beautiful Things” and Brevity. She was a finalist in Black Warrior Review’s 11th Annual Nonfiction Contest, and holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

Karen Egee writes to savor the good and try to make sense of the rest. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and dog. They spend as much time in Maine as possible.

Rhonda Zimlich’s fiction and memoir has appeared in publications such as Crow Pie, Acorn Review, and Ink Stains. She enjoys living in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, twin daughters, and feisty black cats. She received her MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts this summer.

Scott F. Parker’s book A Way Home from Oregon: Essays has just been released from Kelson Books.

Jennifer Lang writes mostly about her divided self. Her essays have appeared in Under the Sun, Assay, Ascent, The Coachella Review, Hippocampus Magazine, and Full Grown People. She’s been nominated for Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize, and is writing her first memoir.

Additional voices: Hananah Zaheer (Dubai), Iobel Andemicael (Dubai) and Brian Pastor (Chicago).

Additional music by Sergey Cheremisinov via freemusicarchive.org, and sound effects from freesound.org. Call to prayer from Learn Truth Find Peace.

Next episode, we’ll be talking about Writing Hard Things.

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Allison K Williams is Brevity’s Social Media Editor and the author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book. Want writing news, events, and upcoming webinars? Join the A-List!

Get It On The Radio: Taping and Telling

On Tuesday, I wrote about the process of pitching radio stories. What happens next? Much of that depends on who accepts your pitch (or whether your name comes out of the hat at The Moth). Here’s what some of those processes looked like for me.

The Moth

The Moth StorySLAM is one of the most accessible ways to practice radio storytelling and potentially end up in a bigger show or on the air. Moth stories are told live without notes, and (loosely) on a particular theme, announced ahead of time. Just show up at a local storySLAM and add your name to the list. Ten storytellers are picked from a hat, and each one has five minutes to tell a true, first-person story. Audience teams score the storytellers (don’t worry, everyone is enthusiastically supported by the whole audience); the winner moves on to the invitation-only Grand Slam. Grand Slams are in bigger venues, and every storyteller has won a local slam.

You’re on your own for the local slams, but it helps to practice your story over and over, especially the ending. A clean, powerful ending compensates for a multitude of rambling sins! It’s also important to be inside the time limit, because laughter and mid-story applause add time. Shoot for four minutes–that also gives you time to pause for moments of emotion or laughter. For the Grand Slams, one of the Moth’s producers in New York will work with you via phone or Skype. For example, I pitched “filling the bird feeder for my grandmother right before she died,” “scattering my own dad’s ashes at a major political funeral in India,” or “being a terrible prostitute” (believe it or not, they’re all funny). Producer Jenifer Hixon helped me find the most powerful thread, and listened to me over three phone calls while I figured out how to start the story, get to the good parts quickly, and end clean.

The Moth records all stories told at local and Grand Slams, and some are selected to be on the radio–not always the winning ones, so you have a chance no matter how you score. I also tape myself by setting my phone in an inconspicuous place, so I can listen after and hear how the story went and pick up audience reactions I didn’t notice through my own nervousness. Tape also helps me shape the story into a written essay, and I’ll submit that version to print venues.

Love Me and Definitely Not The Opera

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has some great story-driven podcasts. Definitely Not The Opera ran for 22 years; Love Me was an eight-episode season. I signed up for the DNTO “pitch list” at their website. Each week, an email went out with the next episode’s topic, and I submitted probably 35-40 pitches over two years and got picked up three times. Love Me sent one story call for their season, to people from the DNTO list among others, and I pitched three stories to them and sold one. For CBC shows, a Canadian setting or connection helps (I’m Canadian) but isn’t mandatory if you’ve got a great story.

Major-network podcasts often rent time at a recording studio or local public radio station near the storyteller. I taped in studios in South Africa and Florida before buying a good-quality microphone for my computer. Now I’m able to tape in any quiet location, as well as doing “tape sync”–recording another storyteller locally, while the network interviewer talks to them on Skype.

My biggest challenge was not sounding “rehearsed.” Performing live at the Moth, practicing and tightening my story had been an advantage, but both DNTO and Love Me needed a more conversational sound. In each case, I ended up telling my story once, then being interviewed by the producer. S/he asked questions and I responded with chunks of the story told off-the-cuff; then the producer edited the takes together to get the sound and style the program needed. For this type of show, it’s truly OK to have your pitch and a sense of the story rather than planning every moment out.

Snap Judgment

One of my bucket-list venues, I got on the pitch list for Snap Judgment by sending an email. They also accept many pitches through the submission form on their website. My first try wasn’t so good–I got a call from a Snap producer in response to a pitch, she asked me to think more about transformation/change in the story, and I dropped the ball by not calling her back in time (life events happened).

But last week I got an email, “Hey, I heard you on Snap Judgment!” My first thought was there’d been some mistake, maybe it was the actor from Girls, but no–Snap Judgment picked up a story I’d told on Love Me. Surprise! Another credit without doing anything!

My hope now is that since their producers have heard me tell a story, perhaps they’ll accept a future pitch.

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How does this work for you, Brevity reader and first-time radio storyteller?

1. Go to a story slam (Moth or any other brand) near you. Listen to what the audience loves. Listen to what you love. Think about how you’d take your powerful personal story and deliver it to an adoring audience.
2. Practice pitching. It’s OK if it takes fifty–or more–pitches before a producer bites. Keep focusing on how your material fits specific shows, and tailor your pitches to suit their style. There’s no blacklist of “uurgghh why does this person keep emailing us…” so keep trying. If one show doesn’t bite, reframe your story so it feels right for someone else and pitch again.
3. You don’t need to own any recording equipment to get started. It’s been convenient for me to have a digital recorder and a mic, but if they want your story, they will figure out how to tape you. That’s their job. I went to Oman last week to tape-sync and the producer set it all up–all the storyteller had to do was lock his cats out of the room. If you do enough radio to start needing equipment, Transom has great product reviews and recommendations.

Even if you never sell a radio pitch, the process of thinking about your personal experiences from different angles can help you transform that material into essays. And doing radio is fun! Writing is so often a solitary pursuit, it’s a joy to talk with a producer, hear immediate feedback, and collaborate on the shape of a story.

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Allison K Williams is Brevity’s Social Media Editor and the author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book. Want writing news, events, and upcoming webinars? Join the A-List!

Get it on the Radio: Pitching

Star pitcher of the Brevity baseball team. Next week we play Tin House.

Right now, podcasts are a thing. Podcasts about accused murderers, about science, about old Hollywood. And many, many podcasts about personal stories. Ever listen to This American Life or The Moth and thought, I have a story that would be great for that show?

You probably do.

So what’s the process? How does the story get from your head (or the essay you already wrote) to the airwaves?

First, listen to the show(s) you want to be on. Different programs have very different styles and subject matter, and the story that’s perfect for Risk! is going to be terrible for Radio Ambulante. If a program is broadcast on the radio rather than solely on the internet, they have FCC restrictions on language and content. Some shows have a presentation component, where the first step is showing up at a live show and sharing your story in front of an audience (eek!).

Then think about your story, and whether it’s right for radio. As it happens, most of the points that make a good podcast story are the same things that make a good essay. On their pitch page, This American Life says:

…each of these stories is a story in the most traditional sense: there are characters in some situation, and a conflict. These pitchers are clear about who the characters are and what the conflict is. Also: each of these stories raises some bigger question or issue, some universal thing to think about. That’s also pretty important, and you stand a better chance at getting on the air if you let us know what that is too.

Radio stories are sold with a “pitch.” Instead of sending a whole story, you craft a pitch email–it’s a lot like a query letter–and submit your idea. At Transom, a site with hundreds of resources for radio storytellers and independent producers, Ari Daniel gets even more in-depth with seven tips for successful pitches, including:

Pitching a story about a generic idea — a group of people losing money on their subprime mortgages, say — isn’t nearly as effective as finding one or two people experiencing that issue who can illustrate the broader idea.

…If there’s any reason why the story needs to be aired soon, mention that. This is called a news peg.

…Don’t worry about chasing press releases and embargoed about-to-be published studies. It’s likely that staff journalists will cover these. I like to look for stories that aren’t yet on the news radar. In fact, most of my story ideas emerge out of casual conversations.

If you’re feeling like a total beginner (which is a great place to start) Youth Radio breaks it down for teens, and it sure helped me navigate at the beginning. That page has a great interview with Radiolab’s Robert Krulwich, too.

Snap Judgment even has a handy flowchart to see if you have a story (scroll down on the linked page).

Most of the shows that accept pitches have very specific and detailed guidelines. It may be challenging to structure your story to fit their mold, but it’s not hard to find the instructions. In learning to pitch, I found two things incredibly helpful:

1. As an exercise, I listened to podcasts I wanted to be on and wrote pitches for the stories I heard on the air. This helped me identify characters, conflict, bigger issue, and see how stories were structured for particular shows.
2. I downloaded archived sessions from the Third Coast International Audio Festival. Each year their conference includes Getting to Yes: The Art of the Pitch, and listening to people pitch their ideas to radio producers, and the producers picking them apart (kindly) helped me understand what does and doesn’t make a story. After you’ve listened to two or three sessions, you’ll start saying, “No! That’s not a story! But if you came at it from this angle…” before the pitcher even finishes their spiel.

Another great resource on story structure is This American Life’s Radio: An Illustrated Guide. It’s a $2 PDF download, and it’s so useful an approach to “what makes a story,” I think you should get it even if you never want to be on the radio.

On Thursday, I’ll be back here on the Brevity blog to talk about the process of actually presenting and/or taping. Meanwhile, check out some pitch guidelines, and see if one of these shows is the right match for your story.

Snap Judgment

This American Life (it’s a treasure trove including sample pitches that succeeded)

The Moth (with a link to tips for telling live stories)

Radio Ambulante

AIR’s pitching page, with links to many shows and how-to-pitch resources

Happy storytelling!

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Allison K Williams is Brevity’s Social Media Editor and the author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book. Want writing news, events, and upcoming webinars? Join the A-List!

Artist, Photographer, Engineer, but Maybe not a Writer?

Christa tells a story through melody

By Christa McHugh

“I am a photographer, artist, musician, engineer… and goofy kid at heart.”

This is a quote that I use to describe myself on all of my social media profiles, and back in my single days, my dating profile. These are things that I am.  One thing I am not and have never claimed to be: a writer. Somehow, this non-writer’s first class in her Critical and Creative Thinking Masters program is Creative Nonfiction and one of my last assignments of the semester is to write about writing. So here I am. Writing about writing.

But, in all these things that I actually am, I am a storyteller. As a photographer I can tell a story through an image. I can use perspective, color, light and focus to lead the audience down a narrative path to my visual conclusion. As an artist, I can create designs that convey a story through two-dimensional lines and colors. As a musician, the notes from my guitar tell a story through the ebb and flow of the melodies. And even as an engineer, I craft my story through my technical ideas, using the binary narrative of 0’s and 1’s to provide my customers with a solution to their technical problems.

But, I am definitely not a writer. I have never attended a writing workshop. I don’t spend hours hovering over a shiny silver laptop in a trendy coffee shop. I don’t even own a leather bound notebook. I do not “network” with other “writers.” I do not keep a journal.  I don’t own a vintage typewriter. And come to think of it I don’t think I have ever used a typewriter. I’m not even an alcoholic, although I do enjoy a good dry dirty martini and a nice glass of wine.

So, what is my word count? 312? Why am I here?  And am I done yet?

When I do write, I do what most writers describe… I pour my thoughts and feelings onto the page.  I let it flow.  But, then I refine, refine and refine; every word, every phrase and every sentence. I read and revise again. I solicit feedback and revise even more.  I pull from my archive of the lessons I have learned through my music, my art, my photography and my professional career to ensure that these words display the imagery, paint the picture, sing the melody and create the design that leads my readers on my narrative journey.

I obsess over every word and every minor detail.  I over analyze. And then I over analyze my analysis. I question every word on the page, until I feel that warm sensation in my chest of satisfaction and exhaustion. It is my body, mind and soul letting me know that I have done all that I can to pen my narrative… as good, bad or ugly the final product may be.

And I enjoy every step of the arduous reiterative process.

So, I may never be cool enough to be a writer.  But, hopefully, one day you can call me a storyteller.

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Christa McHugh (@christaphoto) is a photographer, artist, musician, engineer… and goofy kid at heart.  She has received her MFA in Media Design Management from the International Academy of Design Technology in Tampa.  She is currently pursuing her Masters in Critical and Creative Thinking at the University of Nebraska Omaha.

The Commodity of Others’ Lives

Short nonfiction storytelling–often photo-driven, largely consumed on social media and at events staged in bars–is enjoying a vogue. Which personally, I like. The Moth is one of my favorite venues, I enjoy Jeff Sharlet’s micro-essays on Instagram and post my own.

But as a “storyteller,” am I ducking my responsibility to the people who figure in my work? Am I appropriating their stories? Is mine the best point of view to deliver their experience?

In The New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham reviews Humans of New York–first a series of Facebook posts, now a book. Author/photographer Brandon Stanton has compiled his work and published with St. Martins, even as he moves into new Humans territory in Iran, India and Pakistan.

Cunningham doesn’t like it. He compares the work (unfavorably) to the social justice journalism of Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell, James Agee and Walker Evans, and Jacob Riis. He posits:

The quick and cavalier consumption of others has something to do with Facebook, Humans of New York’s native and most comfortable medium. The humans in Stanton’s photos—just like the most photogenic and happy-seeming and apparently knowable humans in your timeline—are well and softly lit, almost laminated; the city recedes behind them in a still-recognizable blur. We understand each entry as something snatched from right here, from someplace culturally adjacent, if not identical, to the watcher’s world; there’s a sense (and, given Stanton’s apparent tirelessness, a corresponding reality) that this could just as easily be you, today, beaming out from the open windowpane of someone else’s news feed. Any ambiguity or intrigue to be found in a HONY photo is chased out into the open, and, ultimately, annihilated by Stanton’s captions, and by the satisfaction that he seems to want his followers to feel.

But maybe it’s OK to want the reader/viewer to feel kinship, immediacy, identification. Maybe satisfying stories have their own charm. Our editor here at Brevity, Dinty W. Moore, advocates that a piece is by definition not ‘nonfiction’ if you make stuff up, change the timeline, or condense characters. I’d add that it’s very possible, through selective leaving-out and keeping-in, to form a messy, chaotic, even improbable story into a tight bundle of nuance, character growth, temporal journey, and yes, satisfaction.

Check out Cunningham’s review and tell us what you think.

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Allison K Williams is Brevity’s Social Media Editor and the author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book. Want writing news, events, and upcoming webinars? Join the A-List!