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Good morning. I’m told I need to celebrate wins. So here’s a quick thread on my essay in this anthology (and an ill disguised sales pitch):
“When We Played” was one of my first submissions, sent to @brevitymag, and started as a prompt delivered by the unparalleled Sherry Simpson in the first semester of my MFA.
The prompt: from Alice LaPlante’s wonderful @wwnorton tome:
I think I counted 37 passes at the essay over about four months. Brevity has a 750w limit. Sherry and I tried to make every word count, to the point that I was second guessing articles and deciding whether sentence fragments would work better than full ones.
Along the way, I struggled to find an essay that I could draw inspiration from. The closest I could find was Eula Biss’ “The Pain Scale,” which, again, I found in this amazing Lex Williford + Michael Martone anthology:
After a few months, I got word: (the) Dinty Moore wanted to see a better ending to my original submission. So I found a way to circle back to the beginning of the essay. It passed muster and ran in Issue 50 a year later.
When Dinty and @zoebossiere reached out about a year and a half ago about including the essay in a Brevity anthology, of course I said yes. I was tickled to learn that @RoseMetalPress would publish it, because I’d wished I’d had this one when I tackled the essay:
Anyway, “When We Played” never made any lists or reviews of the Brevity anthology, so it’s not like anyone’s banging down my inbox to ask how I did it. But it’s really important to recognize the outsized role anthologies played in my process.
So, if you’re a nonfiction teacher, can’t recommend this new one enough. Pick one up; your students will thank you for it.
