Category: Craft

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(Re)using Found Forms: The Hermit Crab Essay

From the front a hermit crab looks like a hand, a red-fingered fist, curling out of a shell. This seems an appropriate metaphor for a hermit crab essay," writes essayist Randon Billings Noble.
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A Conversation with Melanie Brooks

I first met Melanie Brooks, author of Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma, at The Iota Short Prose Conference in the..
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You Should Do This Thing You Can’t

I had just walked into Worries of the Poet, Tools of the Essayist, a pre-conference session facilitated by essayist Randon Billings Noble and poet Marshall..
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Writing My Truth

My son is doing that thing with his fingers. He’s done it his whole life whenever something makes him anxious—the top of his pointer finger..
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A Work in Progress

It’s 3 a.m., my witching hour. Miss K, my therapist, calls it the “common hour” because apparently so many people are awake at this time..
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The Book Doctor

This spring, I sent the vomit draft of my memoir to what I will call a “Book Doctor.” A trained specialist who came highly recommended...
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On Writing the Other

In a recent blog post for Ploughshares, Emilia Phillips described how the news had begun its tangle through her subconscious like kudzu, but she felt..
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Shaping a Memoir from Essays

Back in the mid-eighties, I read Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York — a novel in stories. As a novice fiction writer, a novel-in-stories seemed..
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Wandering, Writing, and a Return

It was the first (and only) class I didn’t try to skip. My teacher’s name was Larry and he had freckles and short spokes of..
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The Root of the Writing

Sharon & David Mathews are a mother and son duo from Chicago. The pair recently started co-writing poetry and recently published their first poems. They..