By Andrea A. Firth As we drive to the airport to catch an early flight, I see a sliver of moon, the waning crescent, in the morning sky. I look at the weather app on my phone and report the five-day forecast for our destination: “Hot and sunny for two days, clouds over the weekend, and on Monday a 45% chance of rain starting at noon.” “Doesn’t sound like eclipse watching weather,” says my husband. The classic, chronological construction of a story has five elements: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution. The narrative arc follows the trajectory of an upside checkmar ..read more

By Carolyn Roy-Bornstein When my foster daughter recently got a job as an assistant veterinary technician at a local animal hospital, she bought a brand-new pair of scrubs. Because she is petite, they needed to be shortened. Janine climbed onto a stool at our kitchen counter and turned in a slow circle while I measured and basted, some of the common pins in my mouth rusty from lack of use. After everyone had left for work, I sat down on the couch to hem. I hadn’t done any hand-sewing in some time and found my eyesight not quite up to the task. Just to thread the needle, I had to move my head ..read more

By Olga Mecking “On the test, you will have to write an essay of around 200 words,” my English teacher said. I first encountered the idea of wordcount in EFL classes and was taken aback. Where I come from, long essays written in flowery style are the norm, especially in school. Teachers said, “Write for as long as you need to include all the necessary information,” but their preference was clearly on the longer side. Lacking any other guidelines, I submitted one-page assignments and was shocked when I got low grades. “But I already said everything I wanted to say,” I argued. With time, I chal ..read more

by Rachel Kramer Bussel Over the past 35 years, I’ve written about everything from my sex life, hoarding, and binge eating, to declaring bankruptcy, dropping out of law school, being an obsessive worrier, and more. If you’d asked me a year ago, I’d have told you there was nothing I was afraid to write about. That was true, until last summer, when pretty much overnight I became the sole caregiver for my mother, who’s in the early stages of dementia. At first, I was so overwhelmed with the myriad tasks involved in her care that I didn’t have time to do anything more with words than the tasks re ..read more

By Olga Katsovskiy I avoid disclosing anything about my life to my students, nor do I ask them to share any facts about their personal lives when we first meet. My teaching philosophy is to let the writing do most of the talking. In my Adult Education classes, we get acquainted by examining published essays and flash fiction I’ve selected to demonstrate a point. We talk openly about our emotional responses, then dissect the craft. Sometimes someone doesn’t like an essay I assign for “homework” or bring to class. It takes a certain level of trust to be able to say you don’t like something in a ..read more

By Ona Gritz “Things take the time they take,” Mary Oliver says in a poem kindly titled, “Don’t Worry.” My memoir took ten years to complete. No one who knows my painful, complicated story is surprised by this. The book centers on my sister Angie who, twenty-five and pregnant, was brutally murdered with her husband and infant son. As the youngest in an insular, secretive family, there was a lot I didn’t know about my beloved sister’s life. When I finally began to write about her thirty years after her death, I knew little more than I had as a child. I had to acquire school and court records ..read more

In his newly-released craft book, Truth Is The Arrow, Mercy Is The Bow, subtitled “A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories,” Steve Almond offers essential lessons on the basic building blocks of storytelling such as plot, character, and tone, alongside less technical essentials like mystery, intuition, bravery, and authenticity. He offers this advice with his signature clarity, and often wit, alongside specific examples from books and writers he has learned from along the way. Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore recently interviewed Almond about his latest book and that “magical, elusive state ..read more

By Jocelyn Jane Cox The initial draft of my memoir Motion Dazzle went swimmingly. I got deep into a flow state with ethereal music while munching on unsalted almonds and non-GMO kale chips. I was buzzing off my undeniable literary genius. Sometimes I’d even pat myself on the back while yelling “I’m doing it!” Of course, when I read through that first draft, I realized there was still a lot of work to do, so I tore the manuscript apart then tinkered with it for at least another ten drafts. But I enjoyed that too. I did not, however, love the idea of writing a book proposal. I avoided that odio ..read more

By Cathy Alter I recently broke my ankle, and even though surgeons have rebuilt the joint, crutching around with grace, sleeping on my side, or taking a shower without the combination of my husband and a wobbly plastic stool still feels like a pipe dream. So, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. Mostly about hunting bears. Example: the night before getting a billion stitches removed, a procedure that would have me writhing like a worm on hot cement, I comforted myself by repeating a line from the 1989 children’s book, We‘re Going on a Bear Hunt. It begins, “We can’t go over it” and ends with ..read more

By Lisa Cooper Ellison When I picked up my badge at the AWP registration desk, I’d had so many plans: Meetups with colleagues and friends. Must see panels. A list of booths to visit at the bookfair. Dabbing tears and willing myself not to full-on sob as I stirred scrambled eggs around my plate wasn’t one of them. But on the first morning of the conference, I sat in the hotel’s restaurant, sniffling and staring at my phone, praying no one would ask why, because I didn’t have the strength to say it was the twenty-seven-year anniversary of my brother’s suicide. After almost three decades, you’d ..read more