Distilled from an essay of more than twenty pages and part of another of that length, my essay “Kathy” appears in the May 2009 edition of Brevity, a journal of concise nonfiction. Essays for Brevity may not exceed 750 words and are compressed wonders, caught moments, life’s puzzles, shining nuggets fetched tumbling from a brook. I’m proud to have work in this company! “Right before her high school senior photo, Kathy took her mother’s sewing scissors and sawed off her …
from “Visions and Revisions: Writing On Writing Well and keeping it up-to-date for 35 years,” in The American Scholar, Spring 2009 “It now occurs to me that I didn’t really find my style until I wrote On Writing Well, at the late age of 52. Until then my style more probably reflected who I wanted to be perceived as—the urbane columnist and humorist and critic. Only when I started writing as a teacher and had no agenda except to be …
Lois at her blog Narrative Nonfiction alerts writers to an experiment at Creative Nonfiction in which the editors have published, on the journal’s web site, the before and after versions of some essays in the current print issue. The revisions essentially involve massive cuts to the essays’ openings; the web page with the essays showing the changes using contrasting type colors includes a forum for reactions from readers, who can weigh in, pro and con and mixed. Creative Nonfiction’s editorial …