Brevity 81: On “The Old West End” and Transforming Formal Poems into Lyric Essays
January 29, 2026 § 1 Comment
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 § 5 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_
Behind the Magic: Why Writing About Writing Works
January 23, 2026 § 8 Comments
By Andrea A. Firth
I’ve always wanted to know how a magician does the sawing a lady in half trick. I see her climb into the box, chat with the magician on one end, and wiggle her feet at the other. Then I hear the buzz saw and watch the magician split the box in two. And I wonder: Why is she still smiling? Where is the blood?
Who doesn’t want to know how it’s done, what happens behind the scenes, how the magician makes their magic? It’s more than curiosity—it’s about being in the know.
Magicians are notoriously secretive about revealing their tricks. But writers often share the methods to their creative art with insights on their craft, process and vocation.
Unlike giving away the ingredients to the secret sauce, writers have always learned from the work of other writers—reading, analyzing and applying that craft and know-how to their own writing. Who better to show us the way than the writer, herself?
Each weekday throughout the year, The Brevity Blog publishes writing about writing (specifically creative nonfiction) and the writing life. Those essays get thousands of reads. Many other popular outlets for writers and readers, like Craft, Lit Hub, Electric Lit, and Jane Friedman’s blog, do the same, expanding beyond CNF to fiction and poetry, too.
One of the first essays I wrote for the Blog was about how to title a personal essay. (A topic that easily translates to short stories and poems as well.) I find titles challenging. My background in journalism, where titles summarize and are more prescriptive, hadn’t shown me how to make a title both connected and creative. So, I did a deep dive into the titles of some of Brevity’s best essays and investigated the craft the author employed, like using a single, specific word, or a distinctive image, or an apt metaphor, or effective punctuation. In the Blog essay, I included seven examples with clear explanations to show the reader what I had learned—seven different ways to title an essay.
But isn’t that stealing? Copy-catting? Won’t that approach make your writing sound like the other writers’?
No, no and no.
Same approach, but the result will be unique to me, to my voice and style. Applying what I learned to my own writing will inherently read differently.
The “how they do it” essay is one of many approaches you can use when writing about writing, and titles are one of the hundreds of potential topics to explore. In the past month on the Blog, we’ve published essays on why taking a pause from your memoir can be generative; how closure gets in the way of creating good work; and what to do when a celebrity blurbs your book and then publicly becomes disgraced. The essays’ styles range from lyric to contemplative, conversational, and humorous.
Why write about writing and the writing life?
One, because you can—whether you’re emerging, experienced, published or not, you can write about your creative work and life. If you’re struggling to identify what to write about, you need only look as far as the mirror. The writing form will be essay, but the content can relate to any genre.
Most importantly, these essays are a way to:
- Share what you know—it’s an act of literary citizenship
- Establish your expertise and support your work as a teacher, editor or publisher
- Provoke thought or issue a call to action
- Engage with the literary community and be part of the conversation
- GET PUBLISHED
Like with all your work, essays on writing need to be a good idea, fully explored and supported with great craft. Don’t submit an early draft—workshop and revise ’til the essay shines. Check the venues you have your eye on for lists of “topics we’ve already heard a lot” and “topics we’d like to hear more about.” Write with respect and understand your privilege.
While writing about writing is more about what you give than what you get, every time I publish an essay about writing or my life as a writer, people subscribe to my Substack newsletter, share supportive comments, visit my website, express interest in a class I’m teaching, or send a chatty email. My community expands and my platform grows—every time. Incremental, steady growth which inspires me to keep writing—and good reasons for you to get to work on these essays too.
Back to that lady being sawed in half. I did some digging and found a YouTube video where the iconic magicians Penn and Teller walk through the steps behind that trick—a special box, a timely distraction, and … Spoiler Alert! True to form, the magician duo never divulges how the trick is done—but do watch the video to the end, because there is blood!
__________
Andrea A. Firth is an Editor at Brevity Blog. You can read more of her writing about writing on her Substack newsletter Everything Essay!
Join Andrea on January 28th for the CRAFT TALKS webinar Essays on the Writing Life: How to Write, Publish, and Get Noticed. With examples from Brevity Blog and other key literary outlets as a guide, learn how to transform your writing experience into published essays that connect with readers and expand your platform. Find out more/Register now ($20 early bird, $30 regular).
Brevity 81: On “With the Braves On, My Father Washes Me” and Finding the Right Form
January 22, 2026 § 4 Comments
By Josh Martin
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 nearly a decade, I tried writing poetry about the surgery that centers my essay “With the Braves On, My Father Washes Me.” I tried to capture the experience’s emotional resonances and narrative urgency in free verse. I tried writing sestinas that reflected the mindless days spent waiting in a dingy hospital room, sonnets that distilled a sense of complex fatherly love into fourteen lines, and ghazals that attempted to capture the tension between a hardscrabble, barstool masculinity and a delicateness that exists only when one parent cares deeply for their child. I tried one poetic form after another. And I failed and failed again. Something about capturing the experience in poetry felt less authentic, less urgent. Something felt amiss, and I started to believe that I simply wouldn’t be able to write about the experience.
Then, this past summer, bored from writing the same poem, I picked up The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction and immediately became enamored with flash nonfiction’s ability to blend narrative precision with poetic compression. I had written longer nonfiction essays before, but I had never attempted compressed narratives that, in my estimation, explode with the immediacy of poetry. For weeks, I read flash essays from the book and Brevity website, and I began thinking about how some poems demand to be expressed in prose.
Then, one morning after reading a few essays, the hospital scene returned to me clearer than ever before, and I began writing the scene in prose. Typically, I am a very slow writer, sometimes taking months to write a single, relatively short poem. But I wrote “With the Braves On, My Father Washes Me” in one sitting. Perhaps for the first time, I witnessed that strange, almost magical, yearning some narratives have for the right form.
Now, when I teach my creative writing courses, I encourage my students to (re)write their work in different forms. For example, last semester, I asked students to rewrite one of their poems as a flash nonfiction essay. Most of the time, my students find it difficult to capture their poems’ particular tensions in the flash form, and they sometimes abandon the piece. This is OK.
But occasionally, a student will have a breakthrough. They will discover, like I did, that sometimes a poem can’t help but burst around the edges of the stanza. Sometimes a poem about masculinity or love or loss or fatherhood or identity needs more room to breathe, needs that paradoxical “compressed expansiveness” that flash nonfiction can provide. Writing “With the Braves On, My Father Washes Me” allowed me to once again understand that life is complex – and different forms are needed to capture that complexity.
Read “With the Braves On, My Father Washes Me” at Brevity.
________
Josh Martin is an English teacher in Alpharetta, Georgia. The winner of the 2023 Pinch Literary Award in Poetry, as well as the 2024 MacGuffin Poetry Prize, his poetry and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, Rattle, The Bitter Southerner, Los Angeles Review, South Carolina Review, The Pinch, Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. His first book, Earth of Inedible Things, won the 2022 Jacar Press Book Award.
A New Issue of Brevity: Essays on Love, Loss, and the Sweet Sting of What Could Never Be
January 21, 2026 § 2 Comments
Brevity literary magazine’s January issue features outstanding flash essays from writers Alex Sokol, Charles Montgomery, Derek Maiolo, José Orduña, Josh Martin, Liz Sauchelli, Margaret Grayson, Nicole Walker, Rocky Halpern, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Shuly Xóchitl Cawood, and Thomasin LaMay. The true stories in Brevity 81 navigate beginnings and endings; the sudden loss of mothers, neighbors, and comrades; the birth of a new realizations during a police stop on a long drive home; the twisted and the tender, the aching and the absurd.
Essays are accompanied by work from Michael Todd Cohen’s ON PERMANENCE series, painted with foraged pigments from the artist’s region.
Writing Long: Unlocking Your Story with Deep Work
January 20, 2026 § 32 Comments
By Kathy McKernan
They say that one way to heal from past trauma is to write it down. The story. The facts. The things that happened. Pour the words onto a page, hand them to the universe, and move on. Write it out. Let it go.
So, I wrote. And wrote. And kept writing.
I showed up in small, faithful ways—half hours, ninety-minute co-writes, daily consistency. I believed progress was a matter of accumulation: enough sessions, enough pages, enough words.
Every time I finished a draft, I asked the same question: Is this enough?
My body answered immediately.
Strange dreams. Joint pain. Random swellings.
Not a whisper. Not hesitation.
A full-bodied, unequivocal no.
I assumed this was resistance. Or perfectionism. Or trauma refusing to loosen its grip. So, I doubled down on consistency. I revised faithfully. I trusted the process I’d been taught: show up often, show up small, trust momentum to do the work.
But something wasn’t happening.
I had written what happened to me.
I had not yet told my story.
(Those are not the same thing.)
What I’d produced was accurate—sometimes even brave—but inert. My nervous system knew it. Nothing had reorganized. Nothing had settled. The body doesn’t release just because facts are acknowledged. It releases when meaning has been metabolized.
And meaning, it turns out, requires time.
Not just duration across weeks, but depth across hours.
The shift came when I began writing in long, protected blocks—full weekends, once a month—where the only thing on the calendar was the work itself. No errands. No travel. No “productive” distractions. No escape hatches.
Once the interruptions fell away, the story took over. The book changed. Themes surfaced unexpectedly. Metaphors arrived uninvited and refused to leave. Revision stopped being punishment and became excavation.
When I committed four, six, eight hours, it became easier to spend three hours reworking a single sentence. Less charged. Less desperate. Less urgent. Letting it fully form mattered more than just “getting it done.”
I learned something crucial in those weekends: Fragments can maintain, but depth transforms.
There’s a neurological reason the long blocks mattered. As neuroscientist Amy Arnsten explains, “The prefrontal cortex is critical for maintaining attention over time, integrating information, and supporting complex, goal-directed thought.”
Cal Newport uses the term “deep work” to describe the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. Sustained attention keeps the prefrontal cortex engaged long enough for integration to occur. When the nervous system settles, the story can finally take shape.
Short sessions kept me oriented; they preserved continuity. But the long blocks—the once-a-month intensives—were where the real movement occurred. I realized, writing about the religion I left, that I had the antagonist wrong: what I’d been serving wasn’t belief, but a publishing machine—a correction that changed the frame, letting the structure emerge so the book could finally reveal itself.
When the program that introduced me to monthly writing weekends ended, I promised I’d keep it up on my own. But without a designated container, weekends filled quickly. I didn’t lack commitment; I lacked protected time.
I kept writing during the week. I showed up. I moved forward. But to write the story, rather than tend it, I needed more structure.
The intensives were never about productivity alone. They were about staying with the page long enough for the deeper layers to surface. About giving the work the uninterrupted time it needs to reveal itself. About letting the book become something I couldn’t have planned in advance.
In those open spaces of time, revision became exploration. Effort became curiosity. I stopped asking, Is this good enough? and started asking, What else is here?
And sometimes—quietly, unexpectedly—I felt my body let go of the embedded pain.
Not because I wrote it down.
But because I stayed long enough to finish what the story was asking of me.
________
Kathy McKernan is an author and former technical writer who splits her time between Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the California desert. She writes on Substack and is currently at work on Even When I Stayed, the first in a memoir trilogy.
Beginning this weekend (January 24-25) Kathy hosts Marathon Weekend Co-Writing sessions, 10AM-3:30PM Eastern on Saturday and Sunday, the last full weekend of each month. Sessions are FREE, no registration required, and anyone diving deeply into a creative project is welcome. You don’t have to stay the whole time. Sundays close with a visit from The Brevity Blog editor Allison K Williams to discuss writing and publishing questions. Full details and the Zoom link here.
My Mother’s Red Pen and What I Did About It
January 19, 2026 § 55 Comments
By Heidi Croot
My mother was my first editor. Having wangled me into writing a weekly column about my high school doings for our village newspaper, she would sit at the kitchen table with her jubilant red pen and pore over my first drafts. The column soon devolved into passionless sports scores.
Those kitchen-table sessions taught me to see revision as punishment, to brace for evidence of what I’d done wrong—a tendency that would follow me into my long career in corporate communications, where a certain amount of creativity could sneak through, but where keeping it professional and crisp was the best way to thrive in that rarefied stratosphere.
One day, feeling complacent in my quiet office at the midpoint of my twelve years with a company that operated more than 200 long-term care facilities across Canada, I arranged to spend a week working with frontline nursing home employees in a distant town. I thought the hands-on experience would help me better understand the challenges faced by the people I believed I truly worked for: not so much the corner-office executives, but the facility managers, and through them, the frail and elderly people who lived in those homes.
I asked not to be spared.
During that hauntingly intense time, I sorted parades of socks and helped scour the commercial kitchen. Working alongside care staff, I snapped on incontinence briefs, lifted breasts into bras, and helped clean a weeping resident who’d had two bouts of diarrhea. I assisted in the tub room, lifted spoons to mouths, and comforted residents abandoned by their family or in the grip of cognitive impairment so complete they could do nothing for themselves.
At week’s end, my husband picked me up. I couldn’t speak on the long drive home. He poured me a glass of wine, and I cried in his arms.
A few days later, I wrote the first draft of “In Your Shoes,” an open letter to my company’s thousands of staff, explaining what I’d done and why.
That first draft was written by corporate Croot.
But corporate Croot had not reckoned with the emotions she was feeling—some of which evoked my beloved grandfather who’d spent his entire life on a quest for the elusive pot of gold and who, in the first tragedy of my young life, had fallen to Alzheimer’s. My week in the trenches had given me a glimpse of what it must have been like for society’s heroes and heroines to care for him.
My sadness would not fit into the corporate mould. I needed to talk to someone, but the emotions were too big. I turned to my journal, always a dependable listener but not my usual go-to place to solve corporate-writing dilemmas.
No, the draft letter told me, it’s not as simple as telling staff “thanks for what you do.”
I put down my red pen and began asking questions in the margins. Each answer walked me down a staircase, and I soon found myself revising the open letter not with an eye to corporate conformity, but out of tenderness and truth.
I closed my letter with “dignity,” a term that appeared often in the company’s Commitment to Residents.
“I’m able to demand respect for my dignity. It comes from the inside out. But for many residents, dignity more often comes from the outside in. Through hundreds of daily acts of caring, you are the keepers of residents’ dignity, and they depend on you for it. You do this through your incredible imagination and compassion, your ability to see them for who they were and more important, who they would wish to be now.”
A vice president questioned why I’d made the letter personal. But it wasn’t about me. It was a mirror I was holding up to staff. Thankfully, the CEO understood the emotional intent and cleared a flight path for “In Your Shoes.” Gratitude soared in from across the country—a binder’s worth of letters, notes and transcribed telephone calls.
We feel seen.
I’ve come to realize that early drafts are our earlier selves—raw, hopeful, reaching for something they can’t yet name. First drafts aren’t failures. They’re attempts. They’re invitations.
Neither is revision punishment for what I got wrong; it’s a conversation across time. A conversation with who I was when I first set the words down. Journalling taught me attunement. When I engage with those pages, I hear the searching, the confusion, the flashes of clarity and the empathy I missed in the moment. My journal is the place to practice curiosity and excavate layers I didn’t even know were there.
That’s the voice revision needs most: the curious, unguarded, authentic one we use when no one is watching. Now, when I return to a draft, I don’t arrive with a red pen. I arrive with a question: What were you trying to tell me? And the work deepens the more I’m willing to listen.
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Heidi Croot is a Brevity Blog editor.
More Than a Hook: How to Open with the Heart of Your Memoir
January 16, 2026 § 6 Comments
By Arya Samuelson
Where to start and where to end poses a unique challenge to the memoirist. When working with the raw material of our lives, we must make a deliberate decision about where to place the brackets, because the question isn’t about where your life begins, but about where the deeper story of your memoir begins.
Editors, agents, and even teachers stress the importance of opening with a “hook” that grabs the reader’s attention as soon as possible. TV does this all the time with its blaring sirens, blazing fires, and dead bodies—a combination algorithmically guaranteed to make you need to know what happened.
While intrigue is undoubtedly important at the start of many stories, I want to call for a different way to think about what a hook really means—not just as a cheap plot thrill or a salacious kick-off, but as a way to introduce your reader right away to the story at the heart of your book.
One of my favorite ways to imagine narrative beginnings is to study independent and foreign films, many of which open with image rather than plot, a technique that immediately introduces viewers to the visual logic of the story. We glimpse the film’s pacing, quality of attention, emotional textures, and the questions and themes at the core of this film.
We may not know what all these (more or less) subtle clues mean until later, but once we watch the film and then go back to the beginning, it almost always makes a completely different kind of sense—why the film opens with that field where so much pain will transpire, or those clouds that convey so much of the moral murkiness the story will grapple with, or that love letter to a house that will no longer exist by the end.
Even plot-driven films can benefit by opening with images. Take Back to the Future and what its “title sequence” teaches us even before Michael J. Fox waltzes into Doc Brown’s house, skateboard in tow:
The tick-tick-tick of various clocks of different shapes, sizes and degrees of modernity—some old-fashioned pendulums or gilded carousels, others blinking crude digital numbers.
A procession of synchronized inventions: a coffee machine sans pot, boiling water hissing on the hot plate as the TV reports on breaking news; a toaster that repeatedly pops up burnt toast; a malfunctioning automated dog feeder that fills Einstein’s bowl with a week’s worth of brown sludge overflowing the brim.
We know immediately that this movie will have something to do with how time and technology succeed and fail to line up across the complicated journey the characters are about to navigate. The comedy in these innovations gone wrong tells us the narrative will be messy, heady, and entertaining.
If Back to the Future can accomplish this in two minutes, I guarantee that we can convey just as much—about tone, texture, theme, and stakes—in the first two pages of our books.
Take T Kira Madden’s unforgettable opening to her memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls: “My mother rescued a mannequin from the J.C. Penney dump when I was two years old.” Consider the impact not only of such an unusual image, but the choice of verb, rescue—how it pulls on your attention like a spool unraveling.
Lidia Yuknavitch’s Chronology of Water opens with a stillbirth, a visceral and narrative collision between death and birth, and of course water—the horror of such an event, and yet the way that that event has radiated into a whole new way of understanding what is possible about survival and transformation.
Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, a fragmented account of the trauma and abuse she suffered as an Indigenous woman, begins with the personification of story itself: “My story was maltreated. The words were too wrong and ugly to speak.”
Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of The Man Who Could Move Clouds, talks about opening with the crux of your “poetic argument” or the “poetic knot.” She urges authors to begin with the most urgent question driving them, the question that this narrative may never untangle, but whose labyrinth nonetheless haunts and compels the attempt.
What makes it so hard to write memoir beginnings is that we usually can’t write them until the end—or until we truly know what is at the core of our story. Because the core is what’s most important to the story: not the hook, but the heart. Or perhaps another way to see it: the hook of the memoir is the heart.
Whether you’re just embarking on a memoir, or have been deep at work for years, here are some questions that may offer a new way in:
- What are the core themes of your book?
- If you had to distill your book into its strongest three to five film reel images, what would they be?
- Write a scene / memory / moment during which your core themes and images are at their strongest. Try starting your book here.
- What is the knot at the center of your book? How might you bring this central struggle to life through your opening?
Even if you have always imagined your book starting in a particular place, there is profound value to asking your story these questions and experimenting with new possibilities. Maybe you’ll find a fresh opening, or maybe you’ll understand its heart in a new way.
And because all beginnings live inside endings, and vice versa, you may even find your ending, too.
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Arya Samuelson—writer, educator, editor, creative coach—has been awarded nonfiction prizes from New Ohio Review, Lascaux Review, and CutBank. She has been published in Fourth Genre, Bellevue Literary Review, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. Her January 25 class, How to Begin (Again & Again), 1-4pm ET, addresses how to investigate your memoir’s core themes and images and open with your story’s heart in surprising and compelling ways. Learn more about Arya.
