Explore 'Brevity'

For more than a decade now, Brevity has published well-known and emerging writers working in the extremely brief (750 words or less) essay form, along with craft essays and book reviews. Though still committed to the mission of publishing new writers, Brevity has enjoyed an embarrassment of recent riches, including the work of two Pulitzer prize finalists, numerous NEA fellows, Pushcart winners, Best American authors, and writers from India, Egypt, Ireland, Spain, Malaysia, and Japan. Authors published in Brevity include Sherman Alexie, Lia Purpura, Terese Svoboda, John Calderazzo, Steven Barthelme, Mark Yakich, Ander Monson, Caitlin Horrocks, Jon Pineda, Brenda Miller, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Robin Hemley, Lee Martin, Rebecca McClanahan, Robin Behn, Abby Frucht, Barbara Hurd, Bret Lott, Ira Sukrungruang, Rigoberto González, Judith Kitchen, Michael Martone, and Jenny Boully.

Brevity is a terrific resource for short non-fiction as well as essays about the craft of writing. To learn more, click the above hyperlinked text. To begin exploring Brevity's contents, click here. 

Interesting contest.....

We’ve launched a fine new issue of Brevity featuring fifteen brief wonderful essays. To celebrate our shiny January 2013 issue, we are launching a flash essay contest based on Philip Graham’s writing prompt in the the recently released The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction: Advice and Essential Exercises from Respected Writers, Editors, and Teachers (and reproduced in the new issue as a Craft Essay). You have one month, until February 14th, to send in your entry. (from Brevity magazine)

To learn more, click the above hyperlinked text.

Not knowing and writing

Any writer’s relationship to the state of “not-knowing” is complicated. One response is to rush in quickly and fill up the scary silence and space. And while intense, white-water sensibilities can astound (the brilliant, torrential David Foster Wallace, for example), in many other cases, writing born of this response, this impulse to fill all gaps, feels instead eager to get the job done. Such a drive, the precise opposite of Negative Capability, is often marked by an insular, fussy density, reliance on a Big Story (to the exclusion of say, lyrical lingering and curious reflection), and, very often, a forcing of pattern instead of an authentically discovered series of alignments. (Lia Purpura at Brevity)

To read more of Purpura's piece, click the above hyperlinked text.

Brevity resources

Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore, author of the new writing guide Crafting the Personal Essay, is interviewed by Writer’s Digest about the personal essay genre and nonfiction in general:

The above, at the Brevity Nonfiction Blog, links Moore's piece about personal essays.

Also, from the Brevity Nonfiction Blog:

Cellpoems, a poetry journal distributed via text message and archived online, seeks poems of 140 characters or less.