Craft Essays: Issue 28

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

We’ve gone around the table introducing ourselves, and now comes the awkward moment when I sound a bit like a door-to-door salesman peddling an unfamiliar doohickey that costs too much and nobody really needs anyway.

“What is a personal essay?” I’ll begin. Students start shifting uneasily in their seats. It’s that word, essay. So scholarly, so stiff, so self-important. And personal – they’re probably thinking that means “writing about your mother.” I hurry through my notes.

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

She’s one of those therapists with a plush blond face. She leans toward where you sit, on the sofa with the pillows that are a little too squishy, in that faux living room where neither of you live. You sink into those pillows and then you get real, get intimate, get wound up in the breaking details of your story, perhaps for the first time.

Wanna 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 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

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