Excavate, Scrape, and Shape: Using Discards to Improve Your Craft
March 6, 2026 § 19 Comments
By Kim Pittaway
It was a slushy Saturday in January, and I had a few solitary hours tacked onto the end of a busy conference week to spend wandering in New York before heading home to Canada. The Met beckoned.
I had no particular artwork to tick off a list of must-sees, and I might have missed the canvas that captured me if I hadn’t sidestepped a darting toddler. But then, there it was: a dark image stretching almost seven feet by eight feet, featuring what the card on the wall described as “an imposing and ambiguous mound centrally positioned against a dark backdrop.” To me, it looked like a portrait of a massive stone tablet, its face scarred with age, flecks of blue peeking through and hinting at a hidden and possibly happier past. The title made me laugh: Guano (Menhir). Guano isa synonym for excrement, specifically the shit of seabirds and bats, shit that is especially valued as a fertiliser because of its high nitrogen, phosphate and potassium content, elements that also once saw it used to produce gunpowder. Nutrient-rich and possibly explosive: that was intriguing.
As was the artist’s process. Judit Reigl, who fled Communist Hungary in 1950 (after eight failed attempts) and ended up in Paris, had a habit of reusing her unsuccessful paintings as drop cloths, which “became saturated with pictorial matter and were trampled underfoot,” according to the curator’s wall card. Reigl didn’t simply pick the cloths up and hang them as art though: she used homemade tools to excavate, scrape, and shape what she rescued, turning her discards into something new.
The process made me envious, the idea of combing my discarded words for reuse, reshaping. Images of writers’ drafts from an earlier age, handwritten edits over typescripts and pen scrawls, floated to mind. My discarded words had dissolved in the ether, word-processed into invisibility, leaving just final drafts smooth-faced and ready for presentation to the world.
But were those discards really lost? And what would be the value in retrieving them anyway? Would they be nutrient rich—or just shit?
Did it matter?
Poet, memoirist, and teacher Diana Goetsch contends that writers—unlike painters, musicians, and other creators—often fail to engage in practice. We lean in the direction of product rather that process, working on a story, an essay, a book, rather than taking the time to practice the foundational skills that will ultimately allow us to “perform.” So why not use our discards as an excuse to practice?
Excavate
Finding your cast-offs is the first step. Rather than focusing on lost snippets of text—the paint strokes in this analogy—look first instead for the half-finished canvases: abandoned partial pieces, rejected submissions, the V4s, V7s, “draftdrafts” of your computer files. Still attached to their original possibilities? Leave versions where they sit and copy them over into a new folder as well. Suggestion: keep it process-focused—maybe call the folder “Play.”
Scrape
What about those snippets, the phrases that seemed lovely but not quite right for that last thing you were working on? Start a new document in your “Play” folder—maybe call it “Scrapings”—and keep it open as you edit future work. Paste excised bits over as the mood strikes you.
Shape
And now comes the fun. Dip into your folder and play-practice. Some suggestions:
- Bait your hook: Open one of your excavated files. Choose a page at random. Scan it for a word or phrase that hooks you. Use that word as the prompt for ten minutes of hand-to-the-page continuous free writing. Done? Highlight a word or phrase that particularly intrigues you—and use that as your next prompt for ten more minutes of writing.
- Redact your text: Open another excavated file. Print out a random page. Using a marker, “redact” text to create a found poem or word set. If so inspired, use those words as a starting point for new piece.
- Imagine a past…or future: Working with fiction? Pull a character from your page and subtract or add twenty years to their age. Who are they now? What do they hope or know that the original version of them didn’t? What possibilities have opened or closed? What does this newly aged version think of the person you’d originally shaped—and what would that original think of this alternate? Alternatively: whether with fiction or nonfiction, look at your setting and dig into its past. What was this place like ten, fifty, one hundred, one thousand years earlier? What does its past tell you about its present?
- Pick a word, any word: In your Scrapings document, pick a word or phrase. This is your new destination—give yourself one hundred words to write toward it, with your chosen word or phrase as the endpoint of your writing.
- Argue against yourself: Scan your files or Scrapings document for an assertion or conclusion—a point you were trying to make. Now, set yourself the task of counter-arguing: why is that assertion wrongheaded, incomplete, naïve? Finding it hard to write against yourself? Adopt a persona, a character who would argue against you, and write in their voice.
- Put the backgound front and centre: Look for a section of context or background, or a secondary character or bit player in a scene. Pull that person or material into the foreground. What happens if that is your focus?
Has your play-practice fertilized the seed of an essay or the development of a fresh character? Has a new idea gunpowdered its way to the fore? Whether, like Riegl, your once-discarded drop cloth develops into something gallery-worthy or remains simply a tool for tidying your creative space, one thing is certain: it’s not guano anymore.
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Kim Pittaway teaches in the MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is the co-author, with Toufah Jallow, of Toufah: The Woman Who Inspired an African #MeToo Movement (Steerforth Press, 2021), which the New York Times Book Review described as “riveting” and “propulsive”; and, with Dr. Samra Zafar, of Unconditional (Collins, 2025). Visit her Substack “I Have Thoughts” exploring writing craft.
Hustle and a Spreadsheet: A Debut Author’s Blueprint for a Book Launch
March 5, 2026 § 23 Comments
By Amy Shea
In September 2025, my debut book, Too Poor to Die: The Hidden Realities of Dying in the Margins, was published. In the five months since, I have done thirteen in-person events across the country and seven online talks, recorded three podcasts, wrote four book-adjacent pieces, and posted 180 Instagram posts plus countless reels. I’m not going to lie—I’m tired.
Launching a book is a marathon. I began campaigning over a year out. One of the first things I did was join a local writing network that met monthly to discuss book marketing. That’s where I acquired many of the ideas that I share with you here. Additionally, my publisher, Rutgers University Press, had me complete a comprehensive author questionnaire to help guide them in their marketing efforts. This generated action items including reviews and interviews to request, awards to apply for, conferences to attend or present at, and more. For me, a spreadsheet was a better way to visually process all the information and make it actionable. Then I imported all of the tasks from the spreadsheet into Asana, a project management tool, where I could organize myself with to-dos and deadlines.
But I knew I couldn’t rely solely on my publisher to promote my book. If I wanted it to be a success, I had to get my hustle on. Rutgers’ goal was to sell 1,500 copies in the first three years. For my book—a collection of essays bearing witness to disparities in death and dying faced by some of society’s most marginalized and vulnerable and often homeless—that projection felt low. For a narrative nonfiction book with a timely topic, I felt it could do more. I wanted it to sell more. This would allow me to write and publish a second book. I set a goal of 1,000 copies sold by the end of the year. My plan: build interest and work toward consistent, steady sales with each marketing activity.
I wish I’d logged the amount of time I spent on everything. I took to joking, “I have two full-time jobs: the one I get paid for and the book launch, plus a part-time job as an Instagram influencer.” I met with event collaborators; prepped marketing materials; researched event opportunities and spaces; identified people to promote the book to and events to make that happen; organized my travel plans; and emailed everyone I’d ever known asking them to come to events, buy the book, request it at their library, and provide reviews—and I reminded myself to breathe.
My book’s topic led to multifaceted conversations and connections with a diverse range of folks. Those connections led to hosting different types of events—solo presentations, in-conversations, panels—and opened the door to a variety of event paces: bookstores, cemeteries, and arts-based venues. Each event had a different vibe. Some focused more on end-of-life and hospice care, some on writing craft, others on homelessness and advocacy.
As the pub date drew closer, my Type A, Virgo brain drove me to feverishly prepare. As though I was redefending my doctoral dissertation (where the first draft of my book was born), I wrote fifty pages of questions and answers, covering everything from why I’d written the book, to policy issues the book addressed and craft techniques I used. Although helpful and comforting, I realized about three events in that I no longer needed to study so intensely. Everything I needed to say was already there inside of me.
In addition to events, an effective way I promoted my book was through book-adjacent writing. I wrote a blog post on incorporating research into a creative practice, an OpEd on the harms of homeless encampment sweeps and a blog post on the same topic, and this blog post you’re reading now!
I recognize the immense privilege I had to embark upon this kind of promotion: I work for a supportive organization, used hotel and airline points to defray travel costs, and was able to support the book launch financially in many ways, including revising my website; printing bookmarks and postcards; hosting giveaways on StoryGraph and Goodreads; and eating out the two months while I traveled. Not every writer can do this, and not every writer needs to. Book marketing depends on your goals, your audience, and your access. Keeping the launch local and adding online events is a great way to engage an audience that requires much less bandwidth, travel, or money.
Yes, I’m exhausted, but it’s a good kind of exhaustion. I now know what it feels like to be a rockstar (on a slightly smaller scale): getting nerves before an event, being highly engaged during, and being wired and tired after. And, I received so much joy from this experience. I basked in the support of good friends and family who showed up with their beautiful smiles and faces to cheer me on, I visited new-to-me places, reminisced in old haunts, and toured so many cool cemeteries. Promoting the book was full on, controlled chaos, and at the end of 2025 I nearly hit that 1,000-book goal!
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Amy Shea is an essayist and the author of Too Poor to Die: The Hidden Realities of Dying in the Margins. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Portland Review, The Massachusetts Review, the Journal of Sociology of Health & Illness & others. She works as the Writing Program Director for Mount Tamalpais College, a free community college for the incarcerated people of San Quentin.
Creating the AWP Magic At Home
March 3, 2026 § 22 Comments
By Allison K Williams
Are you going to AWP, or sadly/gratefully watching it happen on social media? The Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ annual conference and bookfair is in Baltimore this week: four glorious days of trudging through a fluorescent-lit convention center with gray concrete floors, trying to match real live faces with social-media names, and perpetually looking for a snack that isn’t a $16 tunafish sandwich.
Writer friends and writer acquaintances are coordinating meet-ups and announcing their readings. Editors I admire are posting about their panels, and offering themselves as last-minute panel replacements. Everything is liminal. Or intersectional. Or intersectionally liminal. In a few days, countless editors, writers and journal staffers will head back to their home institutions with swag bags, connections and newly autographed books.
But even if we’re not meandering the aisles of the giant book fair, awkwardly avoiding eye contact with big-deal writers we admire (we don’t want to look like fangirls) or hoping the staff of the magazine that just published our work will spontaneously recognize us (because introducing ourselves might be bragging), we’re still in this together. And if you’re at home watching the literary world scroll by, you can still recreate the AWP experience.
First, you’ll need wine. Pour half a plastic cup of unfortunately-sharp white, and sip politely (hide those winces!) as you pull from your shelves every literary journal, small-press book, and poetry collection. Arrange the books on your dining-room table in a pleasing display. Rearrange three times. Settle on the original arrangement—it should be about the work.
Find the last free tote bag you got from a conference, NPR funding drive, or those Girl Scouts at the Super Walmart when you bought six boxes of Thin Mints. Fill the bag with twelve bookmarks, two souvenir magnets, five pens bearing the names of businesses you don’t remember patronizing, and some sticky notes. Print out the first fifty pages of your newest manuscript, just in case, and slip it into your tote bag while reciting your elevator pitch like a mantra.
Browse the books in your pleasing display and ask yourself of each one: Do I know this author personally? If so, why did they only sign their name on the flyleaf and not something that says how great I am and how much they can’t wait to be beside me on the bestseller list?
Download photos of Lucy Sante, Ken Liu, the Cave Canem Poet Laureates, the editor of any literary magazine you’ve ever wanted to be published in, and all your writer friends on Facebook. Create a slideshow, setting the time to 1 second per photo. As the pictures flash, guess who each person is. Each time you get one right, choose a book from your pleasing display and put it in your tote bag. Each time you get one wrong, practice saying, “So great to see you! How is your work going?” and estimate how many minutes of conversation it would take to identify the person you’re talking to and whether you have in fact met before.
Turn the lights down. Put on a smooth jazz playlist. Go to that YouTube video of the coffee shop sounds and turn it all the way up. Pour yourself a beverage you actually like and call a writer you met anywhere last year, on speakerphone. Count how many times one of you says, “I’m sorry, can you repeat that?” As you converse, look through your display for any journals in which that writer’s work appears and add them to your tote bag. When you hang up, flee to the bathroom, lock yourself in and look through your tote bag journals. Find a piece so powerful, all you can do is lean your forehead against the coolness of the wall and wish you had written it, even though you have never even contemplated making a poem in Sapphics.
The next morning, visit the nearest coffee shop and order your usual. Go to Brevity’s list of craft essays and read six of them. Every time you find the word “ruminate,” drink. Scan the coffee shop. Does anyone look like they might be a writer? See if you can work up an excuse to talk to them without looking like a doofus. If they refuse to start a conversation, slink away, then drink. If they chat enthusiastically but are not a writer after all, drink. If you can’t figure out how to end the conversation gracefully, drink. Eventually you can excuse yourself to pee.
Go back home on foot. Enjoy the blissful silence. Leaf through the last few books in your table display and just take anything you want (the last day of AWP is a free-for-all, nobody wants to pack it all up and take it home again). Look at the Acknowledgements and start writing down agent names. One of them’s gotta be right for you. Carry the tote bag around your house for the next two days until you set it down to pick up something else and forget where you’ve left it. Gently mourn.
When you trip over the bag on the third day, find the poem you loved in the bathroom and read it again. Imagine the writer you love most in the world feeling that way about your work. Imagine AWP happening in your house, and know that it kind of is, that you are a ‘real’ writer, that you’re allowed to talk to any author you want via social posts or emails or handwritten cards, that it doesn’t matter whether or not they talk back. Know that you’re part of this world, no matter where you are.
If you’re heading to AWP, please say hello at Bookfair Booth #353!
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Allison K Williams is Managing Editor of The Brevity Blog. Yes, she sure will be at AWP–find her with literary agent Jessica Berg for (free!) feedback on your pitch and query at Bookfair Booth #353. Or catch them March 10 on Zoom for Writers Bridge: Pitch & Platform (live only, no replay).
When a Poet Writes a Memoir Then a Novel and Returns to the Memoir
March 2, 2026 § 26 Comments
By Lisa Rizzo
- When your father begins to fade into dementia, you find yourself writing a memoir about your distant relationship and how illness is taking away any chance of reconciliation. Surprisingly, your grief leads you to write prose instead of poetry. You have a lot to learn about this new genre, so you take numerous classes and workshops, work with four developmental editors and coaches and attend at least five writing retreats.
- Because you have always been a poet, you think small and choose to organize your memoir as a collage, weaving short pieces together à la Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas or Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful. You think this will make it easier to write, but you are wrong. It takes you almost ten years to write 70,000 words, which you edit down to 58,000, but finally you believe you are done.
- Knowing your memoir has a challenging structure and you are not famous, you don’t try to get an agent. Instead you submit your manuscript to small presses. Two of those submissions are to editors who requested your work.
- You hit send and wait. The rejections roll in—even from the editors who had asked to read your manuscript. As always, you are stung by the form letter no’s, but the personal rejections from those two editors devastate you.
- Your fingers shake on the mouse as you scroll through comments like: characters not as compelling as I hoped, unsympathetic narrator, loose story development. Reading these words hits hard and you feel your confidence shrivel in your chest.
- You believe all your hard work is for naught. You can’t write about how your father’s silence and distance affected you. You can’t express your struggle to understand him—and yourself. You cannot bring your emotions to the page to get your meaning across. No one will ever read this book. You have failed.
- You tuck your manuscript away and start a new project. You write about your Sicilian ancestors, people you discovered while researching your father’s family. You turn their story into a novel since you know few facts about them, freeing you to make up anything you want. After working so long on a memoir (once an unfamiliar genre), you feel brave enough to tackle fiction and liberated by the new form.
- Words pour out of you at an astonishing rate. After years of digging into your own psyche, it is a relief to write from the point-of-view of a narrator who is not you. You give your main character a secret love affair and create conflicts with her children. You write her as a parent who doesn’t know how to open up to her children and the damage that does. In one year, you write as many words as it took you a decade to write before. This feeling of success not only soothes the pain of those rejections but also renews your belief in your writing ability.
- In your novel-writing workshop (of course you sign up for another workshop!), readers tell you that they enjoy the imagery and setting descriptions. They find the dialogue realistic. And you hear one comment over and over: you write about grief so well. At first you are confused, how could you write your fictional character’s grief so well but not your own? Was that what was missing in your memoir?
- You close the novel file and re-open your memoir manuscript for another edit (who knows what number it is!). Now you understand that you must write yourself as a narrator with the flaws and desires and fears of any main character. You must trust your readers enough to lay yourself on the page.
- You must create sympathy for that sometimes unsympathetic narrator by showing your pain, how you yelled at your father for not helping with housework, how you moved far away instead of telling him how it hurt you when he wouldn’t listen. You cannot hide behind silence like your father did.
- You need to write the scenes—like watching your father lose his words from dementia, which reminds you of the times he hid behind his newspaper instead of talking to you—that draw the reader into the story and create connections between the pieces of your collage to make the story whole. You will use your craft, employing sensory details and descriptive language, to make your sentences resonate.
- Buoyed by your new awareness you feel ready to face your memoir again. You look at your work with new eyes, the eyes of a writer. Not a poet or a novelist or a memoirist, but a writer who can use the imagery and lyricism of poetry, the storytelling of fiction and the honesty of memoir to bring your words into the world.
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Lisa Rizzo is the author of the poetry collections Always a Blue House (Saddle Road Press, 2016) and In the Poem an Ocean (Big Table Publishing, 2011). Her nonfiction appears in journals including The MacGuffin, Rain Taxi, Brevity Blog and The Sun. A retired teacher, she spends her mornings working on a novel in between edits to her memoir Half-Orphans: A Poet, Her Father and the Silence Between Them.
Fishing With Pelicans: Lessons in How to Hook a Publisher
February 27, 2026 § 13 Comments
By Liz deBeer
Overhead, a pelican circles, exhibiting its huge wing span, big beak, guttural grunt, and prehistoric vibe. It glides above the cove, searching for flashes of movement before diving straight down. I hold my breath, silently cheering for the bird. But it’s a miss. The pelican tries again. And again. Finally, throat pouch bulging, the large bird swallows its prey.
Watching from the shore, I’m struck by how this scene resembles my pursuit of publication and inspires me to keep trying.
Spot the Prey
Pelicans hunt by skimming water surfaces, searching for bubbles or splashes. They maximize their chances by avoiding choppy water and deep depths.
My hunt begins by skimming through guidelines, wish lists, updates, and open calls to augment my prospects for publication. If something’s not a match, I move on. I wouldn’t market a memoir to fiction agents, just like pelicans won’t hunt in deep, rocky, open ocean waters.
Seize the Moment
Pelicans are opportunistic feeders. They forage for schooling fish, like sardines or anchovies, but are willing to consider less appetizing prey like crustaceans or even frogs.
Hungry for publication, I consider myself opportunistic too. When I began seeking publication of my longer manuscripts and my collection of flash (both fiction and creative nonfiction), I thought I needed a literary agent. But after multiple rejections and receiving feedback from a few agents online or at conferences, I’m now casting a wider net that includes small niche publishing houses.
Some writer friends have received contracts for memoirs or novels via small presses, and a few have had modest success with self-publishing, so I recognize the benefits of expanding my search.
Dive and Scoop
When pelicans decide to dive, they position themselves and go for it, grabbing their prey without comparing it to another pelican’s.
When writers plunge into their publishing quests, they too should avoid comparison. Each of us has original stories to share, in authentic voices and styles.
Pelicans’ quick decision-making nudges writers to advance when opportunity arises. Once, I waited too long, not realizing the call had a cap. The window closed before I could submit, so now I’m determined to be better prepared and to move fast when reentering the submission process.
Gulp and Swallow
Once pelicans scoop a fish, they swallow it whole, without picking it apart.
Writers must swallow self-doubt to avoid choking caused by chewing too long or worrying about rejection. Just gulp those fears down; take a risk and learn in the process.
After no bites on a recent manuscript submission, I’ve decided to rework it entirely, including the title and format. In the past, my willingness to rewrite has reaped rewards, like the time I revised a previously rejected flash piece, which was subsequently accepted.
This past year, I participated in a 100-rejections challenge: a big gulp. Taking this risk led to double-digit literary journals publishing my creative nonfiction and flash fiction. In the process, I’ve gained confidence as I seek publication for my longer works.
Work Cooperatively
Some pelicans form a group to herd small fish into a confined space before scooping them up together. They reap more when they work collaboratively.
Groupwork helps me as well, such as book inc, which describes itself as “a dynamic writing collective” that supports “authors through the entire journey of crafting memoirs and novels – from initial concept to final publication.” Participants write about different topics and genres, but we share ideas and support each other. For example, several of us practice pitches together before attending Pitch Fest events.We also offer feedback on one another’s manuscripts and query letters.
I’m also a member of Flash Fiction Magazine’s Authors Only Collective, an international online “community feedback exchange” where writers of both fiction and nonfiction share prompts, editing advice, open calls, and publications. We purchase, read, and review one another’s work, as suggested in Heidi Croot’s recent Brevity Blog essay. Workshops and classes in both writing groups have helped me improve my skills.
Rest
After pelicans eat, they relax by floating on gentle waves or sleeping on rocks and piers. No guilt, as an exhausted pelican is unlikely to catch dinner.
Writers need to recharge too. That’s why I’m often walking on a nearby beach while watching pelicans. During this time, I determine seasonal objectives, preparing myself for my next round of fishing for a publisher.
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Liz deBeer is a teacher and writer with Project Write Now, a writing cooperative based by the Jersey shore. Her flash has appeared in BULL, Fictive Dream, Does It Have Pockets, Bending Genres and others. She has written essays in various journals including The Brevity Blog and is a volunteer reader for Flash Fiction Magazine. She holds degrees from University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers University. Follow Liz on her Substack.
I Like Shiny Writing: Moving Past Perfection
February 26, 2026 § 19 Comments
By Kirsten Voris
One Christmas in grade school, I asked my parents for a rock tumbler. They sold them in the Sears Catalogue, that slick-paged Bible of want filled with everything from colonial bedroom sets to car tires to Barbie’s town house. I had the rock collection, so a tumbler was the next logical step in my evolution as a rock hound. How did it work?
Like the ocean. Only faster.
You add your chosen rocks to water and grit in a tumbler, place the tumbler in its housing, and plug it in. It rotates. For days and days. Then you switch the grit. Repeat. The starter grit is huge, the final grit silky. So many grits in between.
The wait would be long. But I loved colorful shiny rocks.
At the beach, I chose carefully, watching the waves dampen the shoreline pebbles, selecting the best colors. At home, I emptied my pockets of sand and rocks only to discover my treasures had been transformed into a pile of grayish stones. Enter the tumbler, which promised even the most humble of pebbles a fresh-out-of-the-water gleam.
But it was loud.
So loud, in fact, that even though we put it in a far corner of the basement, I could hear it. Even with a box over it, I couldn’t sleep. I have a very “Princess and the Pea” relationship with sound. In fact, I remember the tumbled rocks clicking when I shook them like dice. I remember moving my fingers through the cold sludge of fine grit. Finding the first finished stones, smooth as tooth enamel. I remember giving the tumbler to my cousin Andrew.
And that’s it. The rest, I have to freestyle.
It may not seem like much, but it’s enough to begin writing something that’s true.
I conceived of my newsletter, in part at least, as an exploration of memory. I’ve talked about the myth of perfect recall, the malleability of memory, muscle memory.
But how do you remember things?
On purpose and by accident.
Memories that become writing are rarely summoned. They surprise me. Real quality remembering happens when I can drop the self-conscious tending of my life, which is much like the self-conscious tending of words. I can start to believe I have all the answers and stop listening for them.
It’s easiest for me to remember when I’m not trying. For example, when I can spend three full days ignoring emails and texts. When I’m dancing, not talking.
A meditation friend introduced me to Open Floor Dance. A descendant of Five Rhythms, or what my sister might call crazy hippie dancing, Open Floor isn’t about losing yourself in the music, it’s about being present in your body. Which I find super uncomfortable, though not as uncomfortable as sitting in silent stillness on a meditation cushion waiting for the gong to release me.
As with seated meditation, stuff gets worked out when I dance. I remember things. I hate to write this, because I can turn any enjoyable activity into a something meant to fix a perceived shortcoming. Another job to do. So far, dance is immune.
Last November, Open Floor teachers Lori Saltzman, Kathy Altman, and Joseph Machado gave a 3-day workshop in Tucson, which means dancing from 4-8 hours a day, but not really, because lunch. Plus we wrote in the afternoon, with Lori supplying the prompts. I arrived at dance on Friday, tired, after a week spent editing my own writing, the writing of others, simultaneously trying to ignore the voice that never stops nattering on about how everything I decide is good enough, isn’t. Now, at dance, I have to write more?
Screw it, I decided. It’s just going to have to suck.
Each night after the workshop I ate dinner and collapsed into bed. Had weirdly vivid dreams as promised. Little of my workshop writing makes sense as I read it now. I didn’t take good notes. Victory! I was in my body.
What I did note was my struggle to follow Lori’s directions, although they were aligned with my disinclination to write well. In a nutshell, we’d be sharing our words, but the focus was on getting the truth out—not polishing.
On the last day, I pulled Lori aside and copped to my poor attitude, my fear of sharing brain dump when everyone else seemed to be composing poetry (the voice again).
“But that was the point,” Lori said. Then, she broke my brain:
“If I said ‘let’s dance,’ would you polish yourself before stepping onto the dance floor?”
Dance is not just about remembering. It’s about surprise. Play. Going even when I feel terrible. Bringing it all. Whatever it is. Which is the opposite of obsessively grooming sentences, then paragraphs, agonizing over word choice.* At dance, I’m a mess. Sometimes I fear it’s the only place I let that happen.
But that’s how every single piece of writing begins—with no clear path through.
Now, I’m trusting the lessons of dance. Embracing the humble gray pebble. Sitting at this desk when I don’t feel like it. Ideas and memories will materialize as I brave the excruciating doubt part of writing, when things don’t seem to be coming together—until they do. I’ll save polishing for later. The fine grit after the big grit.
It takes a long time.
How do you let go of polishing and start something new when you’re not sure how it’ll hang together? Or is the mess your specialty? Let’s talk about it in the comments.
*Should it be choice or selection? Well, choice has one syllable. Reads better. Or does it….
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Kirsten Voris is a writer and translator who blogs about the mind readers and the mystery of human memory. A Best of the Net nominee and co-creator of the Trauma Sensitive Yoga Deck for Kids, she’s completing a memoir about the psychic who predicted her mother’s birth and taught her to believe in her own magic. Learn more at Dark Chamber.
A version of this essay originally appeared on Kirsten Voris’ Substack.
o
How A Mentor Kept My Book Alive
February 25, 2026 § 22 Comments
By Jason Prokowiew
In 2023, I called the writer Alysia Abbott’s phone. We’d planned to discuss my intention to give up on my memoir War Boys.
Alysia was my instructor in the Memoir Incubator Program at GrubStreet in Boston from 2021-2022. When I was offered a spot in the program, I immediately found a therapist. If I was going to do a deep-dive into War Boys, my braided memoir about my Russian father’s adoption by the Nazis who murdered his family at the start of World War II, and the trauma he carried into parenthood, which I’d been working on for twenty-two years, I knew I needed artistic and psychological support. I’d learn, Alysia sometimes provides both.
I brought War Boys to the Incubator with the goal of improving how I included my perspective. By the end of the program, my skills of exposition, or, as Alysia sometimes called it, musings, had grown stronger, War Boys changed for the better, and I ‘d received full manuscript requests from seven agents.
After revising and submitting the manuscript to all seven agents, I went to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. From my unventilated dorm room, I took calls with five agents and left the conference with five offers of representation.
Back home, I called Alysia to discuss. The agent I leaned towards and ultimately signed with felt War Boys was ready to submit to publishers, while the others wanted to further develop it. Alysia, who’d read one of its latest iterations, thought the book was ready too.
By mid-September, I thought my publication dreams for War Boys were coming true. My agent and I predicted multiple offers. Instead, we received twenty passes that fall. By the start of 2023, my agent had all but disappeared, along with his enthusiasm for War Boys.
I fired my agent that spring and spent a few months spiraling. From there, I worked on other projects and got more comfortable with the idea that the book that I’d been writing since 1999, was dead, at least in terms of publication.
My “I’m giving up” call to Alysia in summer 2023 was meant to be as much an apology for wasting her time with War Boys as it was a beaten down writer’s final scream into the void. I barely got the words “I think I’m giving up on War Boys” out of my mouth when Alysia started doing one of the things she does very well: instills her students with a belief in themselves, a sense of confidence that was nearly depleted in me then.
She dismissed the idea of giving up on War Boys with a firm “We’re not doing that.” She launched into a list of reasons the book mattered, historically and artistically, and encouraged me to think of ways to pivot from the well of despair I was looking to throw myself down.
The “on submission” group I was a part of on Facebook largely advised that after twenty passes I should let War Boys go. Members cautioned that, after firing an agent, I’d be hard-pressed to find another interested in repping a book with multiple rejections. Alysia countered these thoughts by reminding me of the work I’d done on War Boy and that not everyone had a father adopted by Nazis.
I left our call annoyed that she’d contradicted what I’d come to believe. After I cussed her out to my husband, I rolled my shoulders and opened my palms, trying to soften when I so badly wanted to harden. I considered what she said, let her enthusiasm fill the spaces that had emptied of hope, and decided to fight for my book again.
I knew I was facing an uphill battle to publication. I made a year-long plan to revise War Boys, worked with two developmental editors, and the book underwent major revisions. In the fall of 2024, I queried over 100 agents, telling them where War Boys had been, and where it was now. Most of them said no, many citing the previous passes, but three didn’t. I signed with my new agent in November, and we sold War Boys to Trio House Press for publication in July 2026.
My mentor Alysia has become a voice in my head that says “don’t give up” when I most want to go back to practicing law, the much steadier career I left in 2024 to pursue writing full time.
Thinking back to the end of the Incubator program at GrubStreet, I remember our cohort gathered at my house one Saturday night to dance and sing karaoke. Alysia belted out her version of The Four Tops’ “Reach Out I’ll Be There,” literally reaching out to all of us as she sang, impressing upon me that the community we’d built would buoy me going forward, that we should reach out to each other, and to her, when things get tough.
I took this as an invitation. When the writing life beats me down, or I’m confused and don’t know what to do, I reach out, often first to Alysia. And she reaches right back.
__________
Jason Prokowiew received the PEN America Grant for Literary Oral History, a Fulbright Scholar Award, and the Aurora Polaris Nonfiction Award for War Boys, debuting from Trio House Press in July 2026. His writing has appeared in The North American Review, The Guardian, Salon, Roxane Gay’s Emerging Writer Series “The Audacity,” WBUR’s Cognoscenti, and on PBS’ Stories from the Stage. He’s a recovering attorney living in Massachusetts with his husband Dave and their greyhound Champ.
Brevity 81: On “I Only Know Jimmy Because” and What Happened Yesterday, and Why It Matters
February 24, 2026 § 2 Comments
by Shuly Xóchitl Cawood
The latest issue of Brevity Magazine, edited by Dinty W. Moore and Zoë Bossiere, is live, and some of our authors are writing for The Brevity Blog about their craft.
This essay emerged during my morning writing, which happens every day like clockwork. Most of the time I mine my own life experience for my morning writing, and for months now I have been writing about whatever happened to me the day before. Sometimes this is a tiny thing (watering the plants, running an errand, getting a phone call) because even mundane things can be rich with meaning. However, sometimes the prior day’s events are more important, and this was one of those times.
I am married to a third-generation funeral home owner, and I’ve learned a great deal about grief, death, and loss because of the funeral home we now own together. Americans in general don’t know a lot about funeral homes and what happens when a death occurs, and what happens after. I think Americans are uncomfortable with grief. I realize I am making sweeping statements. Of course not ALL Americans are uncomfortable with grief, but I often hear people comment—when they have a friend going through significant loss—that they don’t know what to do for or what to say to that friend who has experienced a death. People are afraid of saying the wrong thing. They are afraid of intruding.
But there is one thing I know now for sure: it’s important to show up for people. Showing up communicates the importance of that loss. It says, “I see you.”
And it’s important just to listen.
I’m sure I wrote about this moment in part because of grief I have experienced, am experiencing even now.
I always tell my students that their brains know best what they need to write about, and I urge them to follow what falls onto the page, wherever it goes. That’s what I do. Whatever rises to the surface is where I need to be, and where I need to go, whether I know it or not.
Read “I Only Know Jimmy Because” at Brevity Magazine
________
Shuly Xóchitl Cawood writes, teaches, and doodles—all while raising two party poodles and a dwindling number of orchids. She is an award-winning author of six books that span multiple genres: creative nonfiction (memoir and flash essays), short fiction, and poetry.
A Letter to the Brevity Blog Community—Our Editors’ Wish List for 2026
February 23, 2026 § 2 Comments
DEAR WRITERS,
We were thrilled with your responses to the Blog essay topics we proposed with our Wish List last year. So, we’re back with the Wish List for 2026. We’ve carried a couple topics over, added several new ones, and are looking forward to what you come up with too.
Diversity
As always, we seek to read and publish a wide and diverse range of writers—across age, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic background, gender, geography, and lived experience. We encourage you to share this Wish List with writers whose voices you’d like to read on the Blog.
How Do They Do It
Writers have always learned from reading and analyzing the work of other writers. Share your close read with us. Using your own experience and the best of the nonfiction you read, consider writing a Blog essay that looks very closely—a granular look—at sentences, or sentence length, or nouns, or first lines, or last lines, or titles, or descriptions of place, or how dialogue is handled, or internal thought, or structure, or whatever compels you.
The Fiction in Nonfiction
Creative nonfiction has always drawn from the craft of fiction using elements like scene, dialogue, details, tension, narrative arc and more. How are you or the writers you read digging deeper into the art of fiction to address the gaps in memory or what’s missing or undocumented to tell true stories? How do you signal these fictive moments to your readers? Imagined scenes, dreams, multiple versions (maybe it happened this way or that way or not at all), or shifting point of view—how far do you dare to speculate?
Writing About Real People
Writing about family, friends, and past lovers has always been a hot-button topic on the Blog, and these situations continue to confound us. What’s fair game in the age of social media posts, reels, group chats, texts, and screen shots? What does consent to use my story look like, require? Can minor children truly consent to being written about? And the issues around composite characters, purposeful omissions, posthumous publication? What are the rules when writing about strangers?
Places to Publish
Where are you sharing your work in the world, and where do you love to read? What has the publishing or submissions process been like—beyond “I got a lot of rejections, and I kept trying,” have you focused your revisions to particular venues or had a good (or bad) editing experience? Tell us about leapfrogging gatekeepers with your own Substack or newsletter or publishing in unexpected places, from industry newsletters to niche hobby forums to posters on bathroom walls.
The Long and Short
Are you writing long essays, 4,000 to 10,000 words? What topics, structures and styles work best in long form and what outlets to target? And at the other end of the spectrum, what about the micro narrative, 400 words or less, how do you tackle these flashes, these intensely specific moments?
The Graphic Memoir
Tesse Hull’s graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts, won the Pulitizer Prize for Memoir last year. Do you read these illustrated stories? Tell us how the combination of pictures, panels, and speech balloons enhance the storytelling and your reading experience. Are you writing a graphic memoir? How does that work? What does the author/illustrator collaboration look like?
Maybe you’ve integrated art with prose in a different way—tell us about that combination and collaboration.
The Travel Essay
The trip may be to an exotic location on the other side of the world or to a familiar spot at the edge of the backyard—how have you or a writer you’ve read used a journey and destination as the theme of an essay or as the thread that anchors a memoir?
Guilty Reading Pleasures
What nonfiction do you read and enjoy and can’t get enough of but feel a bit embarrassed to reveal. Andrea loves to escape into the celebrity memoir. She’s read dozens and has the director Cameron Crowe’s The Uncool sitting on her bedside table right now. Maybe you like books about con-artists, or editors who behave badly, or deep dives into tiny topics like weather disasters, or fonts, or the history of butter. What’s the attraction and what makes it a good read—the idea, the craft, the voice?
We hope our Wish List provides you with inspiration. Make us think, make us feel, and if you are so inclined, make us laugh—we love to laugh.
Best,
Allison, Dinty, Heidi and Andrea
The Brevity Blog Editors
Right Story, Wrong Time
February 20, 2026 § 13 Comments
By Morag Wehrle
It arrived in my inbox like a gift: the perfect call-out.
I read it with growing excitement. A prestigious literary magazine was producing a special issue on a topic dear to my heart. The guidelines: open-ended. The judges: writers I admired. And as though it had been waiting for just this moment, the perfect metaphor presented itself to me. It was whimsical, clever, a delightful pattern to lay out a rich, detailed essay. Here was a tailor-made opportunity to discuss and dissect an experience I was living through right now. I would explore through words the knotty, complex health challenge I was facing. I would use my writing to make meaning out of life.
I dove headlong into research mode, pulling up books and articles to bolster my metaphor. I made a list of the strands that would make up my essay and sketched out the pattern I would follow to weave them together. Although the outline of the piece’s shape felt vague and amorphous, I started to write.
The work emerged in fragments. I made tentative forays down each of the threads I’d identified: a paragraph here, a brief arc there. More strands kept emerging, and I kept laying them down. My Scrivener file bulged with bits and pieces, bright glimmers of colour that I couldn’t resolve into a single palette. I had never crafted a piece in this manner. It felt strange, unfocused. But the metaphor was so good, and the research galvanized me, and I had so much to say.
I wrote the submission deadline on the whiteboard that hung beside my desk. It was two months away; I had plenty of time. It was a month away — now I really needed to get down to business. It was two weeks away, and I started to berate myself. Why couldn’t I pull the piece together? Was I really going to waste this opportunity, this prompt that seemed tailored to me and this particular moment in my life?
I had written over three thousand words. I held a double-handful of threads, some bright and strong, others mere wisps. They were powerful. They were haphazard. And the more I tried to weave them together into a coherent tapestry, the more they fell apart.
A week before the deadline, I sat at my desk trying to work on the piece. Mostly, this meant I read it over and over again, changed a word here and there, and thought about what a garbage writer I was. I dreaded the virtual co-writing workshop I had committed to that day, where I would have to put on my most studious face for the benefit of my colleagues and pretend I was making progress.
“What are you working on today?” my writing mentor, Karen, asked when my turn came.
I decided to allow the smallest bit of vulnerability. “I’m really struggling with this piece that’s due at the end of the month,” I said. “I have all these bits and all this research, but I just…” My voice, unexpectedly, wobbled. “I can’t figure out how to braid them together.”
Karen eyed me for a moment through the screen. “You know,” she said, “it could be okay to not meet that deadline.”
I recoiled.
“You’re not going to let anyone down by not submitting to this particular call-out,” she said.
“Myself,” I said, scandalized. “I’ll be so disappointed in myself.“
“Why?” Karen asked.
I opened and closed my mouth a few times. She took pity on me. “Think about it,” was all she said, and we moved on to our next colleague.
For the next forty-five minutes, instead of continuing to stare at the stalled essay, I thought about it.
I kept coming back to my first thought when I saw the call for submissions: that it was my chance to make meaning out of an experience I was living through. The chronic pain condition that had settled into my nerves, muscles, and tendons over the last five years loomed over every aspect of my life, and I did not know what to do with it. I didn’t know how to hold the wretched tangle of emotions it elicited: fear, exhaustion, rage, resentment, confusion. I wanted to talk about it, to write about it. I wanted to take the ruin it had made of my life’s plans and transform it, via the magic of my words, into something meaningful.
But it kept falling apart under my frantic attentions. Why?
I shut my laptop and went outside, where I stared up into the dripping cedar boughs and watched my breath plume on the cooling evening air. Winter was settling in, a time of contemplation and rest: two things, I realized, I was not allowing myself to have. I was forcing perspective on an experience I had not yet had time to process, because someone had asked for a story about pain and I wanted to throw my beautiful words at their feet to prove what I had learned.
I went back inside and, after a long pause, I erased the deadline from my whiteboard. Perhaps this was, indeed, the ideal metaphor, the perfect story, a call-out that felt personal. But the deadline was artificial, and I was pushing myself to produce a full tapestry when I was still figuring out how to spin the thread. I had to meet myself, not with disappointment, but with grace: with the understanding that sometimes, a story isn’t ready to make meaning for you, until you’ve had a chance to see its pattern for yourself.
—
Morag Wehrle (she/her) is an author and educator who writes at the intersection of culture, health, and history. Her work spans fiction, nonfiction, and academia, and has been included in various anthologies and literary magazines. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of King’s College. Morag lives and writes on the traditional unceded territories of the WSANEC peoples on Vancouver Island.
