New Craft Essays

The Art of Literary Olfaction, or Do You Smell That? by Jill McCabe Johnson

Two confessions: I have a big nose, and my nose leads me. Not because it’s so big that wherever I go it arrives well before I do, but because that big nose of mine takes in a lot of smells. Last night, my husband and I took the dog for a walk. Right as we stepped outside—before feeling how cool the evening was and the slight mist to the air like it wanted to rain, before noticing the mint plants looking leggy and spotted, before seeing the hazard of a hose across our path—I smelled the sweet-acrid scent of burning wood, smoke from a neighbor’s chimney that told me more about the temperature and season than any other single item I encountered.

Jill Talbot's Creative Nonfiction Class Interviews Ryan Van Meter

"I don’t know anything about neuroscience, but my hypothesis is that the imagination and the memory reside in the same fold of our brains. It might even be the case that we use one to access the other – that in order to claim something from the filing cabinet of memory, we use the imagination to pull open the drawer."

Whispered Wills and Words That Bleed: On Transparency of Thought in the Essay by Jennifer Bowen Hicks

When a writer voices the agitations of her will through words, I feel my own blood moving inside my veins, transfused and transformed by the essay’s greatest potential gift: full access to another human’s thinking, feeling, core—that place where our truest feelings and agitations live.

Want to write a craft essay, or do an author Q&A or podcast interview for an upcoming issue of Brevity? If so, send your essay topic or author-interview idea and a brief bio note to craft editor Julie Riddle at brevitymag+craft@gmail.com.

Past Craft Essays

Issue 37, September 2011

Silence and Not-Knowing: An Introduction, and Silence Is My Playlist (On Being Asked for One to Go with My Work) by Lia Purpura

Ignorance, Lies, Imagination and Subversion in the Writing of Memoir and the Personal Essay by Lee Martin

Issue 36, May 2011:

Against Knowing, by Dinah Lenney

Method and Mystery: Speculation in Narrative Art, by David Huddle

Issue 35, January 2011

Discovering What Lies Beneath: An interview with Lee Martin
by Dawn Haines

So What’s Your Point? Thesis Statements and the Personal Essay
By Cynthia Pike Gaylord

Revising the Muse: An interview with Thomas E. Kennedy
by Cynthia Pike Gaylord

Issue 34, September 2010

Exploring Intersections: An Exercise in Dismembering and Remembering Selves
by Lockie Hunter

The Wonder of Geese
by Bryan Furuness

Q&A: Using Tension and the Narrative Arc
by Brendan O'Meara

Issue 33, May 2010

Flesh on the Bones: Turning Dry Ancestral Details into a Life Story
by Sharon DeBartolo Carmack

My Muse – He’s Just Not That Into Me
by Drema Hall Berkheimer

Issue 32, January 2010

Excavating a Moment’s Truth
by Kerry Cohen

Becoming Your Own Best Critic
by Jim Heynen

The Necessity of Navel-Gazing
by Lisa Gill

Issue 31, September 2009

Back-Form.: Me ‘n’ Those Manuscripts
Edit: back-form. < Editor
by Stephen Corey

From Confession to Craft: Memoir as Its Own Reward
by Dinah Lenney

To Blog or Not to Blog? Using the Blogosphere to Shape Narrative Voice
by Towles Kintz

Issue 30, May 2009

Balancing Music and Meaning: An Interview with Kim Barnes on Short Nonfiction
by Gretchen Clark

Ten (or Twenty) Points on Publishing, Plus a Few Playful Tidbits
by Judith Kitchen

Rejection: Give Up or Show Up?
by Kelli Russell Agodon

Issue 29, January 2009

Listen: An Interview with Brenda Miller (14:44)

On Practice: Letter to Holly from Cougar Ridge
by Brenda Miller

“Perhapsing”: The Use of Speculation in Creative Nonfiction
by Lisa Knopp

Issue 28, September 2008

Tiny Masters: An Artful Trick to Writing the Personal Essay
by Sherry Simpson

On Bridging the Distance Between Therapist and Theorist
by Barrie Jean Borich

Issue 27, May 2008

The Fact Behind the Facts, or How You Can Get It All Right and Still Get It All Wrong
by Philip Gerard

Issue 25, Fall 2007

Advice to My Friend Beth’s Undergraduate Creative Nonfiction Students
by Dustin Michael

Nonfiction Is Translation
by Brian Goedde

Issue 23, Winter 2007

Of Nails, Nonfiction, and Various Adhesives
by Shane Borrowman

Issue 21, Summer 2006

On Miniatures
by Lia Purpura

Prose Poems, Paragraphs, Brief Lyric Nonfiction
by Peggy Shumaker

Issue 20, Spring 2006

Frelection: The Transformative Power of Reflection in Nonfiction
by Rebecca McClanahan

A Riff on the [NonfictioNow] Writing Conference
by Rosemary Davis

Issue 19, Fall 2005

Writing Brief: Notes on Past and Future Brevity Submissions
by Linda Norlen

On the “Speedy Narrative”
by Jeff Gundy

Copyediting. Vital. Do It or Have It Done.
by Diana Hume George

Innocence & Experience: Voice in Creative Nonfiction
by Sue William Silverman

Laughing through Life: Humor in Autobiographical Writing
by Tim Jackson