When an Author Refuses to Tidy It All Up: A Close Reading of Hazlitt, Dillard, and Didion
February 6, 2026 § 20 Comments
By J.M. Birmingham
No tidy bow, no grand reveal, no circling back to the theme. No carefully placed takeaway to reward the reader for making it to the end. Just … the writing. Unresolved, standing on its own merit.
Tasked recently with a close reading of three personal essays by genre-defining authors, I decided on William Hazlitt’s On the Pleasure of Hating, Annie Dillard’s Seeing, and Joan Didion’s Goodbye to All That. Each of the essays moves differently, but each carries the same torch: seeing something clearly for the first time, then seeking to understand, come to terms, and live with it sans neat bow.
Hazlitt’s On the Pleasure of Hating is an unfiltered emotional hemorrhage. One long, bitter screed. One could be forgiven for not realizing how raw his flourished prose is— Hazlitt’s tongue is so antiquated, the prose seems to carry an air of dignity, despite the toxicity he freely lets flow across the page.
Don’t get me wrong. I found myself agreeing with most– if not all– of what he had to say on hatred. Some rang so immediately true, I pictured specific individuals in the “slovenly” second-hand embarrassments recounted. He hit the nail on the head again, and again, in painstaking detail, which isn’t to say that he’s saying anything admirable. Just real. He sees how humans are, and calls us out unabashedly, including himself.
But what really stood out was his structure. He loops, contradicts, lashes out, and then circles back again like someone re-reading an old letter and getting mad all over. He reeks of a strangely composed compulsion. The pacing’s erratic, but the energy’s in full force. He makes no attempt to charm the reader. This is something not read for guidance, but to be caught in the blast radius.
It’s clear that while he is meticulous, providing examples and arguments, logic is not the driving force of this essay, nor betterment. Purely emotion. One specific emotion, sure, but driven by it, embracing, naming, and wallowing in it. No resolution. No peace. No real defined ending. It’s a bloodletting on the page; his, ours, and every acquaintance he could think to include. Which, as a writer, seems a freeing concept to play with.
Hazlitt shows that a feeling alone can be followed, still producing something incredibly raw and worthwhile.
Dillard, on the other hand, disappears into the page. Seeing is observational, but also deeply devotional. She moves from frogs to theology to childhood games with zero announcement that change is imminent.
I found myself needing to read through twice to fully appreciate what was happening.
There’s something trance-like in the way she stacks detail. The essay doesn’t build so much as accumulate. But it works. Her control is so subtle it’s easy to miss. She’s not pushing arguments. She’s creating a lens and holding it for the reader to look through.
Reading her made me rethink how I pace reflection in my own writing. How slow turns sometimes reveal more than thorough analysis or exposition. Do I have the same patience? To be determined.
Then there’s Didion.
Goodbye to All That felt like opening a window to her younger self. It unfolds like memory: fluid and tinted with regret, but not drowning in it. She doesn’t draw conclusions. She puts scenes on paper for us, and lets them carry their own weight: the peach on Lexington, the silk curtains, the air on her legs in spring.
Her structure is emotional rather than logical. The repetition of “I could,” “I still,” “I remember” does more framing than any thesis could have.
Reading this, I couldn’t help but reminisce about when I was young in the Bay Area. All of the things I didn’t do because time wasn’t real while I was there. All of the things that I did which passed by in the blink of an eye, which seemed to have no end in the moment.
In this essay, there are no sharp pivots, no arguments. Just the heavy ache of leaving something before you knew it was ending. Didion slowly builds weight, one feather after another, letting them settle like an elephant on the reader’s chest. Then, she stops when it feels right. Which felt appropriate to the piece. And life.
All three of these iconic essays reject a clean arc. There’s no “and here’s what I learned” moment. No final “aha!”. They don’t teach, but reveal.
In each, the refusal to resolve becomes form.
A piece doesn’t need crescendo or collapse. It doesn’t need a clear “and here’s how that applies to everything in this way” closing. Tone can be structure. Voice, honestly delivered and handled correctly, can carry the weight of any truth.
Even when left to the reader to infer.
Maybe especially then.
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J.M. Birmingham is a father, husband, veteran, student, reader and emerging writer based in Little Rock, Arkansas. He most often writes on lessons learned during his time in the above roles, and is constantly battling his inner cynic while doing so. His other writings not currently trapped in publication purgatory can be found at https://substack.com/@jmbwrites
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Brevity 81: On “Between Us” and Change We Cannot Control
February 5, 2026 § 3 Comments
By Derek Maiolo
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.
For the last several years, I have been in the process of writing an extended piece of narrative journalism about the town where I grew up in rural Colorado. The town, and my family, has relied on the coal industry. When news broke out that the coal-fired power plant would shut down, and with it one of the area’s largest mines, a cascade of anxieties followed. I was a journalist at the time, had returned to Colorado, one town over, and reported on the industry’s decline for the local newspaper.
The closures weren’t exactly a surprise. When I was in high school, the mine where my father worked was cutting jobs, as were mines across the country, a result predominately of market forces but politicized into what is now the “war on coal.” People worried about losing their jobs, revenue for things like schools and the hospital, and their way of life. How their fears manifested often took bewildering forms, such as an attempt to secede the county from the United States, or, years before, enlisting the high school band (me included) to perform for then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney during a campaign stop in 2012, where he made a now-familiar promise to stand up for the coal industry.
In the context of these larger stories about struggling with change we cannot control, which I explore in my writing, I was also, as an adolescent, reckoning with profound personal change. The same summer that my father started rallying with fellow miners on the steps of the Colorado State Capitol, I developed my first crush on another boy. We took the drive described in my essay. As I look back on this moment of time, there is so much fear, uncertainty, and anger. This small moment represents a reprieve from all that. I also wanted to show that even coal towns enjoy their moments of beauty. It was hard growing up there, harder still to describe what it was like with the generosity that any town, composed of its own legends and grievances and secrets, deserves.
Read “Between Us” at Brevity Magazine.
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Derek Maiolo received his MFA from Chatham University, where he was the 2021-2023 Margaret L. Whitford Fellow. His work appears or is forthcoming in High Country News, Witness Magazine, The Denver Post, The Indiana Review, and Split Lip Magazine, among others. He is currently working on a memoir about growing up gay in Colorado coal country.
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Writing in Collaboration: How Four Lives Became a Braided Memoir
February 4, 2026 § 7 Comments
A Q&A with David Carlin and Peta Murray
By Andrea A. Firth
Last month, Peta Murray shared insights on how she wrote a book in tandem with her colleague and friend, David Carlin, in her Brevity Blog essay “On Writing in Collaboration: The Art of the Duet”. Their braided memoir, How to Dress for Old Age, was recently released by Upswell in Australia. Here the co-authors talk about their art, craft, and process of collaboration.
Andrea A. Firth: You’ve written a memoir together, but you’re not related. How did that happen and what’s it about?
David Carlin: We have known each other for years, initially through working in theatre, and then at the university where I became Peta’s PhD supervisor. Her PhD was a fabulous exploration of what she calls ‘elderflowering’, the art of ageing creatively. We decided we would write a book together that followed on from this.
Andrea: You weave together your stories, David’s and Peta’s, but you closely track the stories of Joan, David’s mother, and Peta’s father, Frank too. Four stories?
David: Initially, Joan and Frank’s stories were sidelines, but we ended up making them the narrative throughline that binds the book. It became two sets of parallel stories, as Peta and I reflect on the changes we confront in coming into later life (with all its many euphemisms) as we are also caring for Frank and Joan—who ended up living in the same aged care residence, in the same corridor—with all of the negotiations and emotions that come with that.
Andrea: The title points to clothing and the book includes many great descriptions of the apparel you each wear. How did getting dressed serve as a touchstone and advance the narrative?
Peta: There’s a subtle play on words here, as we associate the word “dress” and the word “address” without laboring it. Clothing choice is the way we chose to think about what it means to keep showing up across one’s life. How does one keep getting out of ones pjs and covered up to go out in the world? We also loved the paradox of the sheer ordinariness of getting dressed as a daily obligation, and the opportunities for self-expression and transformation that lie in the wardrobe, or better still, the dress-up box.
Andrea: How did you handle point of view in a book with two authors?
David: This was both the biggest puzzle in writing the book and one of its most rewarding aspects in the end.
Peta: Initially, it was a kind of call-and-response process, which allowed for natural shifts in point of view.
David: That was lots of fun but then we discovered that readers felt a little left out, as if it was a dialogue we were just having between ourselves.
Peta: Over time, the point of view became determined by thematic shifts and the comparative chronologies between my story and my Dad’s story, and David’s and his mother’s stories.
David: We also took turns to address the reader directly. For a while we had our names indicating who was speaking (like here) but it seemed clunky, and we realised that we could use the invocation of Joan and Frank, as well as each other, to cue the reader as to who was speaking.
Peta: As we refined the manuscript and learnt from early readers, it became clear that our voices were distinctive enough to let such markers go. The book’s layout and white space is designed to allow the reader to breathe, with us, and to make the adjustments necessary to discern one voice from the other.
Andrea: How did the structure emerge? Did you have any comp titles that you read or tried to emulate?
Peta: There are so few models for this kind of venture. Few writers attempt to collaborate in this way, so we didn’t have examples to lean on.
David: I recall that for a while we had some sections written in a kind of combined voice, but that felt didactic and weird. The structure emerged through many rounds of cutting and pasting, rearranging, stitching and trimming—as with any book, but here we had the pleasure of doing it together.
Peta: We also tried to organise it with sub-headings based on “looks” for seniors – dour, beige, dapper etc. But that didn’t work. It was too essayistic. We had to come back to memoir and its intimacies.
Andrea: David already had one memoir under his belt, but Peta admits she was less comfortable sharing personal details. How did you support each other through the writing of the book?
David: With lots of espresso coffees, soups and salads. And lots of listening.
Peta: I also think it was through a kind of parallel play, which saw us embolden each other, like “I dare you to tell me more….!” but not so explicit. A gradual trust built that led to more honesty and more personal disclosure.
David: Yes, we found that we loved sitting in the same room, writing separately, and then immediately sharing our raw drafts with each other.
Andrea: Can you talk about the benefits of collaborative project like this?
David: I think that in many artforms there has been a return to collective practices. There is such joy in working in close collaboration on a project, working in that relational space.
Peta: It’s also a wonderful kind of riff on coaching and co-mentorship. I really feel you learn a lot from another writer by having such close access to their process.
Andrea: What advice would you give writers who want to explore a collaborative book-length project?
David: Go for it! We found it very helpful to involve a third person in our process: in our case a brilliant structural editor, Nadine Davidoff, who helped provide an ‘outside’ perspective on what we were doing.
Peta: Be prepared for it to be a slow burn. And look after your friendship—if you have one to start with—because things will get tense from time to time, or one of you will flag and the other will need to urge the other on.
———-
How to Dress for Old Age by David Carlin & Peta Murray is available online and distributed internationally via Upswell here, and the Kindle version of the book can be pre-ordered here.
David Carlin’s previous books include Our Father Who Wasn’t There, The Abyssinian Contortionist, and The After-Normal. Emeritus Professor at RMIT University, and co-founder of the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange and the non/fictionLab, his award-winning career as a writer and director has spanned memoir, essay, theatre, film, radio and circus. His essays have appeared in Overland, Griffith Review, Hunger Mountain, Sydney Review of Books, and elsewhere.
Peta Murray is known for the plays Wallflowering and Salt, as well as AWGIE-winning works of community theatre Spitting Chips and The Keys to the Animal Room. Peta’s short fiction has been published in Sleepers Almanac and New Australian Stories. Senior Lecturer at RMIT University in Melbourne, she is co-editor and contributor to Bloomsbury Academic’s A-Z of Creative Methods. Her essays have appeared in Sydney Review of Books, The Mekong Review and TEXT.
Andrea A. Firth is an Editor for the Brevity Blog. Find her on Substack at Everything Essay!
Brevity 81: On “A Normal Couple” and Taking Up Space
February 3, 2026 § 6 Comments
By Liz Sauchelli
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 BrevityBlog about their craft.
I don’t like to take up space.
I’ve always been more comfortable being an observer than an active participant, whether it be avoiding the bouquet toss at weddings in my 20s or working as a reporter, where the focus is on my subject and (hopefully), never directly on me.
That, for me, has been one of the more challenging parts of my husband’s health condition, which I wrote about in my piece “A Normal Couple.” Asthma attacks can be messy, they can be loud and sometimes they can be frightening. They take up space, and for someone who would prefer to draw eyes anywhere but on me (especially in public), they create an underlying worry: what must people think of us, of me?
If you’ve ever loved someone with a chronic condition (or have one yourself) you learn, over time, the best ways to care for them. For my husband and I, that’s done by not reacting when something goes wrong. What might look like indifference — or, though I hope not, cruelty — to people who do not know our story is me supporting, of loving, my husband the best way I know how.
The term “care partner” is a problematic word for us as a couple and we often don’t feel like it fits our situation, as my husband can largely take care of himself. But there are moments where he needs my assistance and with that can come resentment we work to keep in check, often silently. I also always live with an underlying fear that quiets, but never fully goes away, that these blips of bad health can lead somewhere Very Bad if they’re not dealt with properly.
The emotion I struggle with the most is rage and the ensuing guilt that follows because his health challenges are largely connected to his military service. Who am I to be annoyed at him for forgetting an inhaler when he was willing to sacrifice so much for his country, when so many others have sacrificed, and are living with, so much more?
Yet it is those little bursts of annoyance that I often cling to as proof that I can see my husband as separate from his health. It’s a simple touch to acknowledge The Scary Thing, and then it’s back to disagreeing about whose turn it is to clean out the refrigerator.
In “A Normal Couple,” I hoped to show what it’s like to live with what can feel like A Very Big Thing, how uncomfortable it can be to take up space in a way that isn’t a choice and — beyond anything — the many ways that “normal” couples behave.
Read Liz Sauchelli’s “A Normal Couple” at Brevity.
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Liz Sauchelli lives with her husband, four cats and hundreds of books in a Victorian-era home that used to be a funeral parlor. She works as a reporter/editor at a daily newspaper in Northern New England. After studying creative writing as an undergraduate at SUNY Oswego nearly 15 years ago, Liz has recently returned to creative nonfiction to try to make more sense of things. Brevity is the first literary journal to publish her work.
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How Audience-Building Shapes Our Writing Craft
January 30, 2026 § 15 Comments
By Allison K Williams
I’m writing an essay. Or a short story. Or a full-blown book.
I really want to publish that thing…but is anyone going to take a chance on me?
I’m so happy I got that thing published! Do I have to tell people to read it?
As writers, we tend to see writing, publishing and marketing as three separate realms. The friends who support our spirit as we write are one social group; the colleagues with publishing advice another; the audience who will read our words is some nebulous creature yet to be identified. The process of creation feels distinct from submissions for publication—for many of us, the marker of readiness is finishing a draft. Feeling like it’s done. And often, after publication, sharing our work feels like an interruption of our writing life, something embarrassing begrudgingly done, or at least done without—horrors!—bragging.
But we’re missing out. Sharing our work at every stage of the process can be one of the best ways to refine our craft and deepen our creative power.
Sharing while we write is the easiest. Most of us know at least a couple of writers, whether that’s our own writing group or people we met in a webinar chat. If you’re not in a regular writing group, it’s worth starting one. Identify what you, particularly need (because the one who makes the group gets to set the rules!) and ask a few other people you think want that, too. For example, my writing group meets monthly, we share up to 20 pages each, and we give only verbal feedback—several of us are professional editors, and writing margin notes feels too much like work. What do you need? Weekly co-writing time to get the words on the page? Only positive feedback to keep you going? Reading aloud to each other?
If you’re already in a group, get deeper. Purposefully bring work that isn’t your most polished, to experiment with feedback at different stages of your process. Bring a synopsis or an outline for story feedback. Write too much backstory and ask what details seem most compelling to bring into the actual manuscript. Too often, we want to share our “best” work instead of what actually needs help. And if you’re in a group where it feels weird to bring “not-best” pages, are you with the right people?
During submissions and publishing is where we tend to share least. 1) It’s embarrassing to talk about where we send our work, because then we have to talk about rejections; 2) what, exactly, is there to share? This is where your social media and casual personal conversations come in. You don’t have to run down a list of journals and word counts, but ask your friends and acquaintances where they read, and check out those publications for your submissions list. For OpEds, ask what’s riling them up—and where they encountered that view. For personal essays, ask your social circle who else needs to know this. Because we’re often shy about our own problems, but we always know other people who have them. By sharing during our publishing process, we not only discover new venues for our work, we expand our readership by letting people know, “this is what I’m thinking and writing about.” And when we retell our story casually, or hit the key points, we expand our writing craft. What details make our listeners perk up, and are those details prominent in our pages? What questions do they have about the subject, or what information do they have that adds context, and might belong in our own work?
Once we reach publication, it’s tempting to focus only on “marketing”—the part of sharing that leads to sales (or clicks). Yet listening to our audience at this stage is more important than ever. In a friendly venue (like The Brevity Blog!), respond to any comments. Strategically, more comments show more engagement, which in turn leads search engines to show your work to more readers. If you’re publishing something more controversial, or in a location where the angry-mob quotient gets higher, have a friend screen those comments and report back on commonalities. When you share your publication on your own social media, or in your email newsletter or blog, ask specific questions of your readers. Not everyone will respond, but seeing how strangers react to your work, and what strikes them most, are valuable clues for your next creative project. For your platform, those responses show the algorithm your work is worth sharing, and email replies teach Gmail and Outlook that you belong in the main inbox instead of spam.
As writers, we fall prey to binary thinking—liked it/didn’t, accepted/rejected, listened/ignored. Not only are we hurting our own feelings with these sharp divisions, we’re losing out on creative development. Refocus how you share your work at every stage. You don’t need approval, you need insight. Your friends may not know the publishing landscape, but they can tell you where they get information and entertainment. And talking about our published work, from personal blogs to big-deal media, isn’t bragging—it’s learning what we did that worked, and how to do it again, better, and more.
How have your readers influenced your work?
________
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Allison K Williams is The Brevity Blog’s Managing Editor. Join her to think about your audience, and how reaching them is part of your mission and your craft, in Writer Mind, Marketing Mind, a webinar with Jane Friedman Feb 4th ($25 early bird). Find out more/register now.
Brevity 81: On “The Old West End” and Transforming Formal Poems into Lyric Essays
January 29, 2026 § 6 Comments
By Sean Thomas Dougherty
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.
“The Old West End” is a sister essay to a previous essay I wrote and published in Brevity, “Toledo, 1977”. I wanted to write an essay to complement it with a more pluralistic point of view.
For years I’ve been writing in poetic forms and then breaking the forms and putting them into prose so I could better tell a story, a story perhaps that was being held back or constricted by the poem’s form. The poem transforms into an essay. This is the kind of work we do in the slipstream between genres: the essay takes Lucille Clifton’s poem “In the Inner City” and makes it a kind of map of verbal bread crumbs to follow within the prose.
“The Old West End” is written in a form I call a “collapsed golden shovel.” The Golden Shovel is a form invented by the poet Terrance Hayes, to show homage to the poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Hayes’ poem, “The Golden Shovel” uses the lines of Brooks’ “We Real Cool” as the end words of his poem’s lines.
To write my essay, I first wrote a Golden Shovel using Clifton’s complete poem. Then I deconstructed the end lines into sentences, and expanded the sentences so the line breaks were completely erased. But I keep the poem visible to the reader by bolding those original words, as the essay is in conversation with Clifton’s poem, articulating my school years in inner city Toledo, Ohio.
Clifton’s poem is an iconic poetic testament to the resistance of the inscription of otherness in the economic apartheid culture of the United States. It is a voice that speaks from “the inner city” and speaks, even after decades, to anyone who has called an inner city neighborhood “home.” I wanted to speak to the African American poet Clifton, one of my idols, whose work transformed and liberated me as a white writer from an interracial working class family.
The form of the Golden Shovel is a constricting form. But first writing the subject as a poem forced me into constricted language choices that heightened the lyricism of my language. Then deconstructing–or maybe a better word is unraveling–that form, I can consider more essayist or referent language and facts:
We were the kids of Collingwood Ave.
We were mostly Black, and some white like me with a Black stepdad.
These moments are not poetic language, but the language of prose that enables the essay to give information in the narrative. These moments were added after the “poem” was written and revised into sentences.
I’ve worked this way for many years, and my book Death Prefers the Minor Keys is full of moments of poetrick deconstructions like this. Long ago I used techniques of collapsing poetic forms into prose to heighten and enrich my language, to create more sound in my sentences by investing techniques of meter and assonance, alliteration, and prepositional metaphor. The lines of the poem form are never fully erased, but act as ghost lines on the roadway of the sentences to follow. If I was stuck on how to begin an essay but I had an idea of the content of the essay, I’d draft a sonnet on that idea, then change the sonnet into an opening paragraph.
Poetic form for me enables content. The puzzle of the form ignites my imagination. Once the form is completed, I then have a realized draft, and can look for places to lengthen and expand. Meanwhile, the Clifton poem still exists within the essay, and the essay then does what the original form of the golden shovel is designed to do: to both pay homage to and begin a conversation with the original text.
Read “The Old West End” at Brevity Magazine.
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Sean Thomas Dougherty’s most recent book is Death Prefers the Minor Keys from BOA Editions.
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The Literary List and the Art of Transcendence
January 28, 2026 § 11 Comments
By Beth Kephart
Decades ago, in my first writing workshop, a writer among us in that old stone building on that hilltop in Spoleto responded to nearly every prompt with a list. Lists about love. Lists about flowers. Lists containing the seed of a story.
They were always very beautiful lists.
They were lyrical, and lovely.
But they were lists, and this was my first writing workshop, and I had questions: Was a list a story? Was a list enough? Was a list taking the easy way out, or was it a higher-order genus of writing, a kind of poem I personally had not mastered?
I wanted the fine lines explained. The difference between a grocery-story list and a literary list, say. Or the difference between a checklist and a poem.
Across the years, the questions have hovered. Tracy K. Smith’s short poem “Soulwork,” for example, is list as art, as interrogation, as transcendence, but how did she do it? Katie Manning’s “What to Expect” is a beloved prose poem that uses—not just for its base but for its whole—the material lodged in the index of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, so that it begins:
Expect accidents. Expect acne, additives, age, and airbags. Expect alcohol, allergies, and altitude. Expect analgesics. Expect animals, ankles, and antidepressants. Expect autopsy findings. Expect bathing, bending, botanicals, and breaking news.
“What to Expect” is an index list, but something—what is that something?—makes it infinitely compelling. You read it, breathless, up to the very end. You stop, with Manning, at her yoga and zinc and ask yourself what just happened.
And then, of course, there is Pablo Neruda and his Odes to Common Things—a book of short-lined odes that often read like lists of attributes. The stuff of a table, a chair, an onion. The stuff of socks and scissors. The stuff of a cat:
O little
emperor without a realm,
conqueror without a homeland,
diminutive parlor tiger, nuptial
sultan of heavens
roofed in erotic tiles: …
Surely no laundry list, grocery-story list, honey-do list, checklist. But a list, just the same—one full of power.
If we can master the list, can we master a poem? If we can master a poem, can we master a prose poem, an essay, a memoir, a novel, a work of unclassifiable hybridity.
I believe the answer is yes.
In contemplating the literary list across the years, I have come to some conclusions:
Every literary list is conceived around a fulcrum, a thing, in dictionary-speak, “that plays a central or essential role.” Think of the fulcrum as an object (that cat) or an idea (soul work) or a catalog (what to expect).
Every literary list is a thing of parts, each roaring with specificity. Don’t neglect the specificity. Neruda’s cat isn’t some mere tabby with a soft tail and green eyes and uncut toenails. Neruda’s cat is, among other things, the very “nuptial/sultan of heavens/roofed in erotic tiles.” Try equaling that.
Every literary list becomes a cascade, a movement. It seems ironic, does it not, that a list, a bit of writing that sounds like the most static, going-nowhere thing can become (and, indeed, in literature must) become symphonic—rhythmic, fluid, rising, falling, gathering a song within itself.
It will never be enough—in literature or in story—to name the attributes of a person, a moment, an era, a thing. We elevate our lists, and the odes that sometime contain them, by reaching meaning, a previously unforeseen something.
There is joy in this process. We begin with what we know. We extrapolate toward story and meaning. When we are alive in the process—even grateful for it—our readers will join us on the journey.
________
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Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of some forty books, an award-winning teacher, and a paper artist. My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera was a finalist in the 2025 Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award. “Join Beth on her bestseller Substack, The Hush and the Howl.
Join Beth Kephart February 4th for the CRAFT TALKS webinar, Fact, Memory, Imagination: Connecting the Dots to Uncover Meaning in Our Moments, to explore the power of the literary list, as well as the dot-to-dot exercise, to uncover the heart of our stories. Find out more/register now ($20 early bird, $30 regular).
Brevity 81: On “Somewhere on a city street” and Naming the Hurt
January 27, 2026 § 5 Comments
By Thomasin LaMay
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.
It is a hurting time, for so many reasons. Somewhere on a city street is part of a collection of micros where I wanted to lift up a small beauty in a rough neighborhood known now for Freddie Gray. To see sweetness in their everyday living. Perhaps like the writer Ross Gay, I wanted to rub that beauty against a terrible harshness, and kindle joy. So we don’t forget about it, I say to my students. I teach high school kids in this area, and I always tell them to name the hurt, something they have a hard time with, as do I. Call it out, a short, bright portrait, but write to the muscle of human kindness. In the spirit of brevity they write each week. They have 15 minutes a day, and by Friday they must have 100 words, exactly. They have their own notebooks for this, called Recipe Books. Imagine if you could paint your feelings, I ask them, what would those words look like? Or what if you made your words into a meal? What would you want me to taste? Even the tiny moment is full of all there is. I love micro prose because when it’s spot on everything is there, clean and dirty, here – take a look. Have a sip.
Read Thomasin LaMay’s “Somewhere on a city street” at Brevity Magazine.
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Thomasin LaMay is a writer, singer, teacher, occasional midwife in Baltimore, MD. She’s taught music and women/gender studies at Goucher College, and currently teaches high school for at-risk teens. Her writing appears in Thimble Literary Journal, Ekphrastic Review, Yellow Arrow Journal, Yellow Arrow Vignette, and forthcoming in Tiny Memoir and Bluebird Word. She lives in the city with 50-ish plants, 100-ish books, 9 dulcimers, two cats, a dog, and random strays.
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Capturing, Collecting, Collating, and Making Them Work: Prompts on How To Organize Your Free-Floating Ideas
January 26, 2026 § 22 Comments
By Diana Ruzova
Ideas can feel nebulous. Free floating blobs of memory, quotes, colors, past experiences, and overheard conversations. Ideas can spark through the senses. The grating wail of a dying animal. The smell of your mother’s drugstore lipstick. The texture of a pilled sweater.
Rarely, but sometimes, ideas arrive fully formed. From the divine. Perhaps concocted by the subconscious in a dream, just waiting for the dreamer to wake up, crawl to the nearest surface and write it all down.
Other times ideas are hard won. Taking months, years, decades of time and research to arrive and settle in the mind. Some ideas come and go so quickly we have little time to catch them. Buzzing around the room like a flying insect, refusing to be contained. We hold vigils for those ideas. The ones that will never be, because we were too slow to write them down or too distracted to make them into something real. But it’s the ideas we are able to catch like late summer fireflies in glass jars that fascinate me most of all.
Where do these ideas come from?
In her 2015 craft book, Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert introduces her readers to the “ideas cloud.” Gilbert believes that creative ideas are not solely generated by individuals but are on the contrary external free-floating entities searching for a human collaborator. According to Gilbert, ideas are not afraid to move on and find another host if we are not prepared to implement them. Here, ideas and inspiration are seen as sentient beings or as a “big storm cloud rolling in.” And if we are so lucky, the idea will become our destiny, see our raised hand in the troposphere and choose us. Soak us in the cool rain of inspiration.
Some of these theories stem from Ancient Greece. The Daimon. Our individual destiny.
“The soul of each of us is given a unique Daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth. This soul-companion, the Daimon, guides us here; in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe we come empty into this world. The Daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and therefore your Daimon is the carrier of your destiny,” Jungian analyst and author James Hillman articulated on her podcast, This Jungian Life.
What are we to do with these ideas once they are ours?
Albert Einstein once said, “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”
Toni Morrison mused in The Paris Review, “I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don’t have any answers to.”
Rilke wrote in his letters, “Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist’s life: in understanding as in creating.”
In an interview for Hyperalleric about her book Devotion, Patti Smith said, “I can’t even go to the bathroom without a book in my hand. I have to have a book with me, or a notebook, and I’ve been like that for most of my life. You know, being an artist is like being a double agent. You’re trying to move through life with full attention but you can’t because something happens that triggers an idea.”
Melissa Febos for The Isolation Journals also insists that multiple notebooks are key. “I always keep multiple notebooks—at minimum, three: one for my morning pages, one for my daily notes and thoughts, and one for whatever book I’m currently writing.”
Christina Catherine Martinez for her newsletter Clównicas writes: “I’m collecting stuff. A lot of my projects start as image albums on my phone. I collect screenshots of things I’m reading, quotes by famous artists and authors, etc.”
One of the many definitions of the word “idea” in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is: “a plan for action.”
***
Aside from barely legible hand-written notes tucked away in decades of notebooks, I am obsessed with organizing my ideas digitally. The ones that arrive in the shower while I’m shampooing my hair or halfway through a hot yoga class or in line at the grocery store or in bed as I attempt to fall asleep. I bravely store them in the Apple Notes App that lives in the nebulous iCloud server that I can access from my phone or computer. This is, of course, where the idea for this very blog post lives.
My ideas are compartmentalized into a bunch of different folders, from the practical:
“Pitch This,”
“Quotes,”
“Buy/Need,”
and “Movies 2 Watch,”
To the more imaginative:
“Write About These Things,”
“Overheard Conversations,”
and “Observations on Public Transit.”
I have a folder for “What Not Say” which is a place for me to dump my disappointments instead of sharing them with others, and a folder full of a very long list of writing prompts I’ve collected from books and various corners of the internet. Every now and then I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, afraid that if I don’t transfer these ideas over to paper or at least a Word document and/or my external hard drive I will lose everything—all my ideas—my second brain.
One wrong click or power outage or an act of technological terrorism and all my ideas could be deleted. Gone. Caput.
When it comes to the photos I take on my phone and the documents that live on my computer, my fear of losing them is so extreme that I spend a few hours each month meticulously loading them onto an external drive.
Maybe I like the feeling of knowing my Notes App ideas could disappear. That there is an end in sight to my digital hoarding. That one day I might be able to start fresh, to simply use the memory bank that is my own meaty mass of fat, salt, carbs, water, and proteins. My brain.
In a recent viral essay on Medium, “I Deleted My Second Brain,” writer Joan Westernberg intentionally deletes 10k notes/seven years worth of ideas and finds relief in the freedom.
Maybe we have all become obsessed with holding our ideas hostage? Maybe this is holding us back from making things? Maybe ideas are meant to be fleeting? To only rain down on us when we are ready for them and not live in dusty notebooks or digital vaults made of ones and zeros.
Or maybe our ideas are more sacred than ever and should be held close to our chests until they have been well-fed and nurtured into being. Until they have gone through their individual gestation periods.
Or maybe the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead was right when he said, “Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done with them.”
Prompts on How to Organize Your Ideas:
Consider how you organize your ideas.
Where do they come from?
Where do they live? Terrestrially? Digitally? In a notebook?
Why do they live there?
Is it working?
What is one thing you could do differently to make your ideas more accessible and organized? What is something that can be done with your ideas., now? This month? This year?
_____
Diana Ruzova is a Soviet-born writer based in Los Angeles. Her interviews, essays, articles, and criticism have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, Flaunt, The Creative Independent, Hyperallergic, New York Magazine’s The Cut, and other publications. Her essay “The Sauna” was a Notable in Best American Essays 2025. You can read more of Diana’s writing at dianaruzova.com. IG: @druzova_
The Power of Words (To Hurt): Restraint As a Form of Kindness
February 2, 2026 § 23 Comments
By Jeannie Ewing
I wasn’t fully sensitive to how the word retarded could be so offensive until my daughter Sarah was born. When we learned that her rare diagnosis of Apert syndrome could include an intellectual disability—the more diplomatic term—I remembered, with a sudden weight of shame, how freely my friends and I once used that word as shorthand for frustration.
As Sarah approximates adolescence, I’ve wondered more deeply about the ways language can both harm and heal: Sarah has returned from the splash pad on more than one occasion, sobbing because someone jeered at her, “Look at that witch!” But there once was a girl of maybe nine or ten who stopped us in the checkout lane at Kohl’s and told Sarah, “I think you’re pretty.” Witnessing my daughter’s experiences sharpened my ear, and I noticed the ways capricious language wounds and how rarely it pauses.
Within the last year, I shared a photo on Substack of my five kids enjoying ice cream on the last day of summer, and a commenter wrote, “You certainly have a litter. What are you, one of those broodmares?” Naturally, I blocked and deleted this person without replying, but I sat with their words. It occurred to me that using the word ‘litter’ was akin to the days when I liberally peppered every frustration with the ‘r’ word. ‘Litter’ and ‘broodmare’ stripped me of my sense of agency and replaced it with a stranger’s gut-level instinct to judge.
This opened past wounds I hadn’t fully processed, and I recalled when I was pregnant with my fifth child and a friend said, “Another one?” The memory of these remarks added to the shame I felt about my family size when I read the words ‘litter’ and ‘broodmare.’
After this incident, I began sitting with these questions more thoughtfully: What meanings are embedded in metaphor? What does animalizing language do rhetorically? What is the writer’s responsibility when responding—or choosing silence?
My impulse is to over-explain or defend myself, but sitting quietly with the pain I felt at being called a broodmare pointed to something I hadn’t considered before: how my daughter might feel when people call her ugly. This expanded into a revelation that saying, “That’s so retarded,” like I did as a young teen, hurts specific people.
I needed to stay with the heartache of feeling the emotional imprint of a stranger’s perception, because I needed the affective impact of recognizing how damaging snap judgments about groups of people can be. Silence felt not only necessary, but vital in that moment as I deleted and blocked this comment, because I was attuning to the message of my own heart.
Restraint, I began to understand, could be a form of kindness, a type of quiet power that offers me and others space to think and reflect. Refraining from responding also preserved my dignity and allowed me time to process the meaning behind this person’s description of me. This experience revealed a new reality: that my need for resolution was based on my inability to sit with fraught and complex emotions, and that some problems cannot be resolved but must instead be lived and integrated.
Sometimes responding too quickly, or at all, becomes a way to justify my existing beliefs, values, or perceptions. I end up projecting my biases onto others, especially when something they say feels like a gut punch. But refusing to translate who I am to a hostile commenter on Substack showed me that there is no formulaic way of being human or humane. Language in all its forms, especially when used as metaphor, always lands in a way that changes me. Metaphors are invisible assessments that tell me I need to look at myself differently, or stand in the conviction of my worth.
Silence is my invitation to slow down, settle, and turn inward. It remains with me even when words stop.
____
Jeannie Ewing is a writer and speaker who explores grief, motherhood, and identity in midlife. She shares personal stories with emotional depth, helping audiences navigate life’s complexities with compassion. Her work blends authenticity and insight, inviting connection through the beautiful, broken, and brutal parts of being human. Connect at jeannieewing.com and jeannieewing.substack.com.
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