Craft: Rethinking Freewriting in the Age of COVID
“Blerg blerg blerg blerg blerg,” I write over and over again, “nothing to say, nothing to say, nothing to say.” The world is chaotic, but my life has shrunk to the size of board games, Skype, and (worst of all) my own brain. With nothing coming in, I’ve been unable to put anything out.
—Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, 2020
Craft: Writing Biography as Creative Nonfiction
The way historians are trained to think and write is far closer to the essayist than to the narrative-nonfiction writer: rather than follow a story from beginning to end, we approach an overarching question or problem from many different angles, trying to weave these pieces into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
—Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, 2019
The Rules of Shipoopi
Of course we all learned lessons about what girls should and shouldn’t do, and how we would be treated if we engaged in certain behaviors, from Monica Lewinsky: how easy it was for girls to transgress the logic of shipoopi and become the butt of the joke.
—Drunk Monkeys, 2019
Found Wanting
It seems that he wanted them to eat until they were so full that they couldn’t feel the pain, until there was no room for pain, or until the sensation of their distended stomachs was the only pain they could feel, and they couldn’t get out of bed even if they wanted to.
—Feminine Collective, 2019
Dream Boy
What I notice watching his early films now is how pretty he was. With his long, highlighted hair, smooth skin, and full, rosy cheeks and lips, he appears almost feminine. Why did so many young women love this pretty young man? Was he safe, as an object of desire?
—Weird Sister, 2017
The Scribbling Women Complex
I have to believe the Gilmore Girls folks knew that women Rory’s age watched the 1994 version of Little Women and thought that this was what it meant to be a writer, knew, perhaps, that Rory’s much-heralded specialness would be confirmed for viewers through her association with Jo.
—Avidly, 2017
On Seagulls
I left Method acting because I grew disillusioned with its dependence on pain. But I left theater because I was truly terrible at acting. I had always imagined that acting could be compensatory, that I could express in theater the feelings that I could not express elsewhere. This was a lie.
—Footnote, 2017 (print)
Dramatis Personae
When we engaged with feminism, we were usually acting it out. It wasn’t about authentic selfhood, but rather the glee we felt in trying on and remixing identities, the freedom we felt in those moments to stop being Nice Girls. We were performers, trained without even knowing it to be skeptical of anything outside of the act itself. But how was that any different from the so-called real thing?
—Hotel Amerika, 2016–17 (print)