What We Owe the People We Write About
February 12, 2026 § 18 Comments
By Kathryn Smith
“You should give Katrina a heads-up,” my friend said. I had just sent her my essay about serial sexual assault that happened decades prior in our town.
“I don’t know,” I said. “This story happened fifty years ago.”
“For that very reason—the case is so old now. She’ll be blindsided if she randomly comes across your essay.”
Hmm. I hadn’t thought of that.
Katrina was a girl we’d gone to elementary school with. Her father had molested me, several of our classmates, and dozens of girls in our community in the 1970s and 80s. He’d been tried and sentenced in 2008. In the article, I didn’t mention Katrina’s name, but I did mention her father’s name, which could draw the story back to her. Maybe I should reach out to her. But what would I say?
“I think it’s the right thing to do,” my friend said.
Was it? I’d written about people in my life who’d grievously injured me. I hadn’t given them notice. But Katrina had been a friend of mine. What happened, happened to both of us.
The idea that my essay could act like a time machine—transporting Katrina back to a painful place without warning—weighed on me. I didn’t have to tell her. But courtesy seemed worth the cost, even if that cost was my own discomfort.
I wrote to her via Facebook. I explained about the article, attached it, and expressed the hope that she and her brother were safe.
She didn’t respond for several tortuous days, but when she did, it was simple. She thanked me for letting her know, and wished she could undo all the damage he had done. I was relieved and glad I’d reached out.
Disclosure isn’t permission-seeking or the promise of censorship. It’s a courtesy that allows the people we write about to prepare for parts of their lives to be revealed, sometimes in ways they might not like or appreciate. Reaching out gives them an opportunity to voice their opposition, though we as authors have the final call.
Shortly thereafter, I wrote an essay about the discovery of my mother’s early Alzheimer’s symptoms during the pandemic. Though this story was less fraught than my first essay, it occurred to me that I should share it with my mother out of respect. She was in it after all. And if I was unwilling to let her see it, how could I justify publishing it?
I called her and told her I’d written an essay about the two of us, and asked if I could read it to her. She’d be delighted, she said. As I read, I paused periodically to gather myself. My descriptions of her cognitive decline, such as when she poured laundry detergent in the dryer, were particularly difficult to read, precisely because she was still present enough to understand the meaning of what I was saying.
When I finished, she was silent for a long time.
“Thank you,” she said, and then, “When did I get so old?”
The next day, she remembered me reading to her, but she didn’t remember the content. The day after, she didn’t remember any of it. But I did. I knew I brought her into a story about the two of us. I gave her the chance to share how she felt, at least in the moment.
The experience set a standard for me—I wanted most people included in my stories to know what I’d written and give them a chance to prepare, even if it was awkward, uncomfortable, or painful for me. I wanted everything out in the open before publication.
When I wrote my third essay about the way a friend’s son’s suicide rippled throughout our community and my family, I knew I had to share the essay with her.
She and I had been close friends, but I had moved away. Though we still communicated over text, we hadn’t had a meaningful conversation in years. How would I broach the subject?
I called her and left a rambling message that I’d like to talk to her about an essay I’d written. I told her it was about the effect of suicide contagion on my family, and while I’d mentioned her son’s death, I didn’t share his name or our town. I said, “If there’s anything you object to, please let me know.”
She asked to read the essay. I told her I wanted to be sure I was respectful and loving enough. She texted me that I was. She said she appreciated the chance to read it before it was published, to prepare herself.
Disclosure makes sense for the people I care about, but not everyone qualifies.
What of our villains, the people who have done us grievous harm? The people who have injured us don’t get the automatic pass. Disclosure is a practice, not a rule. I alerted Katrina to the essay, for example, but not her dad.
It takes courage to write the truth about what happened to us. It takes another kind of courage to do right by the people who appear in our stories.
________
Kathryn Smith has published fiction and creative nonfiction in Hippocampus, HuffPost Personal, and Philadelphia Stories, and twice won Glimmer Train’s honorable mention. She holds a B.S. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from UC Berkeley. She’s working on a memoir, “Stories of an Uncouth Girl.” Find her on Instagram @KathrynSmithStories.
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Closing My Eyes Made Me a Better Writer and Teacher
February 11, 2026 § 4 Comments
By Candy Schulman
“There are stories all around you,” I tell my creative nonfiction students when they’re struggling with how to get ideas. “All you have to do is open your eyes and see them.”
And then suddenly, I had to close my eyes.
It began with a night in the ER, followed by a surgeon repairing my torn retina in less than ten minutes with a laser. This procedure had a 90% success rate. Left untreated, a torn retina can become completely detached, requiring more extensive surgery and the risk of vision loss. I was grateful for health insurance and the miracles of modern medicine.
Until the doctor told me I had to stare straight ahead—for ten days.
I fretted about cancelling my class the next day; I was a college professor in mid-semester teaching my workshop, Writing the Short Form.
“No reading. No writing. No professering,” he said. “Think of staring at this.” He pointed to a circular metal bolt on the wall. “Avoid everything that causes you to move your eyes from side to side. You must look forward until your eye repair gets ‘glued in.’”
“I have a wedding to attend this weekend,” I said, still in denial.
He shook his head. “I don’t even recommend holding onto your husband’s arm, walking to a diner, and eating with your eyes closed.”
In the taxi on the way home, I kept my eyes shut, afraid to move them from side to side and ruin my recovery. “What street are we on?” I asked my husband.
“East Fifty-third.”
I could hear horns honking, but I had to picture the mazes of cabs, cars, trucks, and buses, aggressively squeezing to merge into tiny openings like jigsaw puzzle pieces that didn’t fit. In my mind I recalled the buildings on this busy midtown street, I’d seen countless times, as if painting images on the back of my eyelids.
Without the use of peripheral vision, for the next ten days I began relying more keenly on all my senses. Often, I’ve told my students that we not only see stories. We must hear them through dialogue. Touch them with vivid description. Taste them through all layers of a gooey slice of pizza. Smell them like that intense waft of freshly baked bread when you enter a bakery.
Depending more acutely on my other four senses, I wondered if I was using them as powerfully as possible as a writer. I too “saw” my stories first. I “heard” them second with dialogue. I saved describing smells and tastes for later drafts, putting them off like an onerous chore as they came less easily to me.
The next morning I reached for my toothbrush, slowly feeling the intricacies of its handle and bristles. I tasted breakfast without looking down on my plate, yogurt dripping onto my placemat. Previously I’d blocked out sirens and other urban noise pollution; now I heard birds chirping more crisply, singing new tunes. Children’s squeals in the schoolyard across the street annoyed my neighbors, but how free and jubilant they sounded. I had tended to tune them out and not notice them.
Being told not to write, all I wanted to do was write. And so I recorded each day’s thoughts on my phone, including essay ideas to develop when I would be a fully sighted person again. In my apartment I paced laps of 36 steps down a narrow hallway and around a dark brown four-seat rectangular dining room table, clicking “record” every time I had a possible idea. I titled them “Day One,” “Day Two,” or “New Essay Idea.” My writing mentor had instilled his repeated mantra: “Write every day. Even on vacation.” Now I could add: even on voice memos when your eyes are out of commission.
Although I’d never taken to Audiobooks, now I listened to Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, admiring how she could vividly describe a character in one descriptive sentence: “Her mother appeared, singing and heavily perfumed, her face dry and bright with powder that was one shade too light.” New ways of creating description popped into my earbuds. Voice memo: share several short character descriptions as examples when I return to the classroom.
As dinner time neared, my husband, who’d been elevated into executive chef of the household, was making soup. As he stirred, I inhaled the potent smell of sizzling onions and the aromatic blast of minced garlic. I imagined lentils the color of turmeric simmering in a huge pot until they melted into the broth.
“Oh oh,” I heard my husband say. “I forgot to add two additional cups of water.”
I coached him on how to fix it as I lay on the living room couch, eyes shut.
After we ate, again he said, “Oh oh.” He’d neglected to add the fresh-squeezed lemon juice and chopped cilantro at the end, even though he’d prepped them.
His imperfect soup was a new source of a story.
My eye and I survived ten days of endless hours, restlessness, and worry whether I’d have a complete recovery. When the doctor gave me the go-ahead to ease into reading and computer work, I was thrilled to write again, amused that I’d always typed without looking. I heard the keyboard clicks like a metronome and felt the sensation of my fingers upon the notched letters. When I listened to my voice recordings, I had several new stories to write. This is the first one.
____
Candy Schulman is an award-winning essayist whose publications include The New York Times, The Writer, AARP Print Magazine and Newsletters. She has just completed a memoir about mother-daughter relationships as we age. She is a writing professor at The New School in Greenwich Village and a private writing coach.
Weaving Imagination with Fact: Using Research as Metaphor in Creative Writing
February 10, 2026 § 2 Comments
By Ethan Gilsdorf
A female octopus and a woman with an eating disorder.
Surely their experiences are too different, too divergent, to share anything at all. Water animal versus land animal. Mollusc versus Homo sapiens. Eight appendages versus four.
And yet in “How an Octopus Helps Me Think About My Mother’s Eating Disorder,” Sabrina Imbler asks the reader to make this unlikely connection. Her essay jumps directly from the true tale of a tenacious octopus guarding her brood of eggs in the ocean depths to the story of her own mother’s complicated struggle with body image:
After her eggs hatch, [the octopus] dies by her nest. So when she lays her eggs, she will never again see another place or vista, entertained only by the freer creatures that happen to pass through the icy waters. In the deep sea, these visitors are alien: fish with transparent faces and golden yellow eyes, ghost sharks, tongue-red worms.
My mother immigrated from Taiwan to Michigan in seventh grade, alone. For a year, she lived in the second snowiest city in America surrounded by tall, blonde Finns. Every day her classmates reminded her in words she could not yet understand that she was different. This was the first moment, but not the last, where my mother learned to wish beyond all belief to be as American as possible. All she wanted was to fit in, to have blonde hair like her classmates, to have their large eyes and blue overalls and long legs. She told me a few years ago that it felt like she was an alien on a cold new planet.
This juxtaposition of personal narrative and actual fact is one of the many ways in which research can be an unexpected force in our writing.
Whether you are a novelist, memoirist, journalist or poet, you likely use research, reporting and evidence from the factual record to make your fictional or factual stories feel more “true,” to deepen and to inform our writing and to prompt our unreliable memories. Verifying “truth”can give us permission or courage to recreate a moment or a scene, knowing that it’s at least partially girded by verifiable detail.
But sometimes our research can stretch the story or poem beyond the limits of the self, as Imbler’s deep dive into the natural world and the animal kingdom makes compelling juxtaposition and counterpoint. Research becomes a springboard for imagery and analogy.
In the passage above, Imbler doesn’t provide a transition between the octopus’s story and her mother’s. She simply and bravely sandwiches these two “facts” together, saying “my mother’s experience with her body is like the octopus’s experience with her body, and vice versa” without ever directly connecting that line. The reader is asked to do the work to understand the relationship, making meaning in the white space broken open by the collision of these two parts. “Fact,” write Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in their craft book Tell It Slant, can also “function as metaphor, informing the essay both on its own terms—information about the physical world the reader may need or find interesting— and as a basis for comparison for a more intangible part of the piece.”
Anthony Doerr employs a similar strategy in “Thing with Feathers That Perches in the Soul.”In this braided meditation on hope and memory, Doerr places his own experience raising a family in Boise side by side with the history of a pioneer couple, John and Mary O’Farrell, who settled in Boise in 1863. Doerr compares his relatively luxurious life to their homesteading, raising adopted seven kids in a cabin of “200 square feet with no toilet paper or Netflix or Xanax,” no “SpongeBob reruns to put on when the kids get too loud. No pizzerias to call when she can’t think of something to cook.” Along the way, Doerr includes population statistics, weather reports, and quotes from Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers.”
Facts can always be found. But it is the intermingling—the historical couple with Doerr’s fatherhood, the octopus with Imbler’s mother— that amplifies and refracts a singular story to make new meaning.
Our writing can be enhanced by field work, interviews or archival spelunking to fact check, to contextualize and provide backstory. We lure our readers in by the real. “If I am going to set a novel in a real place, in a real time, I must get all the details right,” says novelist Helen Benedict. “This matters because it has to do with keeping faith with your readers. If you get something verifiable wrong, why should they believe you when you really are making things up?”
But sometimes, the effect of our facts is beyond the factual. We can use research the same way we use figurative language—to expand our narratives into the realm of the image, to make connections between unexpected parts, to tether the personal drama to a world beyond the self, to make our words resonate
When weaving imagination with fact, we find significance and empathy in the empty gaps between the threads—in those spaces the meanings begin to echo.
________
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Esquire, Wired, Salon, Huffington Post, Brevity, Electric Literature, Witness, Poetry, The Southern Review, among others, and named “Notable” by The Best American Essays. He teaches at GrubStreet in Boston, where he leads the Essay Incubator program, and is also on the faculty of the Solstice MFA Program at Lasell University.
Ready to explore the many ways research can inform your creative work? Join Ethan for a CRAFT TALKS webinar, Using Research in Creative Nonfiction and Fiction: How Facts Enhance Creative Work, February 12 at 3pm EST ($30) and learn how to enhance your narratives with research.
Finding Beauty Amidst the Publication Chaos
February 9, 2026 § 34 Comments
THREE MANTRAS
By Jocelyn Jane Cox, Anna Rollins and Melissa Fraterrigo
Books (once published) are relinquished to the world, out of an author’s hands and into the hands of others. This is an especially scary prospect for perfectionists who frequently “go it alone.” Despite one’s neuroticism, an author cannot control the landing, the handling, and the reception of one’s carefully crafted words.
The three of us – Jocelyn Jane Cox, Melissa Fraterrigo, and Anna Rollins – are recovering perfectionists who released memoirs this past season. The content of our work describes varying manifestations of perfectionism (in figure skating, body image, and motherhood, amongst other places). And, unsurprisingly, we have all approached the craft of writing with degrees of perfectionism, too. Sometimes this led to meticulous attention to craft or structure. And other times, this resulted in writer’s block. Perfectionism, after all, often leads to performance anxiety.
Though performance anxiety has the potential to be crippling, with the right mindset, it can be channeled into fuel to help writers put forth their best work on the page, energizing the writing and publishing process.
Together, we’ve found it helpful to revise our own self-talk in the publication process, to shift our internal monologue’s insistence on achieving higher and more to something more aligned with curiosity and self-compassion. Part of the way we’ve fostered this mindset shift is by expanding our notions of success through the use of mantras. Such mantras have helped us unpack underlying beliefs and care for ourselves in the vulnerable process of publishing memoir.
Here are three mantras we’ve used during our book release session to help us move from tight-fisted perfectionism to open-handed release in the publication process:
1. Lead with fun
Whether you’re trying to pull together your social media posts or you are planning your book tour, try to lead with FUN. The reality is that there is no one way to sell books and what works well for someone might not work well for someone else, so at the end of the day, do what feels right to you and bring a sense of fun and enjoyment to the endeavor. People are going to sense what you’re enjoying and what you aren’t. If something is filling you with a ton of anxiety? Skip it!
2. No one cares about you
This might sound negative – but internalizing this belief can bring great relief! No one thinks about you as much as you think about you. So, if you feel over-exposed or silly or ugly in the midst of book promotion, just remember: you’re the center of your own universe, and everyone else is the center of their own. People probably aren’t having nearly as many negative thoughts about you as you might imagine. They’re probably not thinking about you at all! They’re most likely thinking about themselves. This should give you a great deal of freedom moving forward.
3. You do you–but you don’t have to do it alone
It’s vital for writers to create support systems before and during the publishing process in order to learn how others are creating their own boundaries and to keep in mind how every writer’s limits and priorities differ. The three of us are all part of a group of female writers with books published during the same window. We meet monthly over Zoom to discuss our triumphs and pain points, and to share best practices. It has made the siloed element of publishing less lonely and allowed us to discover our strengths during the vulnerable process of publishing memoir.
Finding solace in community
Something all of us love about writing is how through our words we can engage with others, and the publishing process offered this as well. As we read each other’s books and discussed how to launch our books, we connected closely with each other’s different forms of perfectionism. As we wrote and revised our manuscripts, our understanding of our projects deepened–as did our understanding of ourselves, but ultimately, we didn’t know exactly how others would respond to our work–and so the book release, similar to the writing process, became one of discovery. Every day of a book release looks different, all kinds of unexpected things can occur, and you don’t know if anyone is going to show up to your in-person event or your panel. Joining forces with other writers engenders bravery.
For each of us, perfection helped us finish our manuscripts, revise them relentlessly, and find the stamina to pursue publication. But book launches, like life, contain endless opportunities for unexpected outcomes, both joyous and disappointing. As we birth our books into the world, we have relinquished some control. Though it hasn’t been easy, letting go a bit has been essential to managing the complex emotions and anxiety brought up by the process. We dare say, this approach has actually been pretty thrilling.
_____
Jocelyn Jane Cox lives with her son and husband in the Hudson Valley of New York. Her debut memoir is Motion Dazzle.
Anna Rollins’s debut memoir is Famished. She lives with in West Virginia with her husband and children.
Melissa Fraterrigo’s debut memoir is The Perils of Girlhood. She lives with her husband and twin daughters in West Lafayette, Indiana.
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When an Author Refuses to Tidy It All Up: A Close Reading of Hazlitt, Dillard, and Didion
February 6, 2026 § 19 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.
____
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.
________
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.
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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.
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.
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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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