The Brevity BlogLetter to Our Community: Brevity Blog Turns 20
Dear Writers,
In 2006, when Brevity’s Editor-in-Chief, Dinty W. Moore, launched The Brevity Blog, he created a digital space where creative nonfiction writers could share their stories, ideas, and opinions about the writing life. The community quickly grew. Around 2013, as writers migrated to social media, some declared blogging dead. By then Allison K Williams, now our Managing Editor, had arrived bringing her dynamic voice and signature humor to the conversation. The Blog evolved and continued to expand. Twenty years later, we are proud to celebrate the vibrant conversation in essays about writing and publishing that defines The Brevity Blog today.
Each June we take stock. In the last year, the Blog had over 212,000 visitors from 199 countries. Our essays have been viewed 353,000 times and garnered 9,000 likes and 4,300 comments (thank you!).
As part of our year-in-review tradition, here’s a selection of essays from the last year that showcase the wide range of topics and the fine writing of our contributors.
Allison K Williams’ writerly wit shines in Duck, Duck, Essay: The Recipe for Writing, where she parallels her experience with making Peking Duck, a complex, hands-on process, with what it takes to draft an essay.
Jason R. James put a clever twist on a classic fiction framework in his essay, The 12 Stages of the Essayist’s Journey, showing how creative nonfiction writers are simply heroes on another kind of adventure.
Readers were moved by Kathryn M. Bowman Johnson’s poetic prose and the heartfelt story of how her grief morphed its way to the page. Her essay, When Writing Pulled up a Chair, had over 70 comments.
Mel Williams tackled every memoirist’s nemesis in her essay, How I Wrote the Story I Couldn’t Remember.
In Writing for Comfort, Writing for Truth, Mansi Bhatia learned that giving readers what she thought they needed and being brutally honest led to two different endings.
Rebecca Morrison exposed readers to just how devious publishing scams have become in her satirical essay, The Denver Men’s Book Club That Said They’d Absolutely, Positively, Not Ask Me for Money.
In The Articles We Carry: How Writing in a Second Language Shapes Thought on the Page, Etya Vaserman Krichmar showed us how important even the smallest words are to making our writing clear.
And, in his essay, Butterflies, Clouds, and Joan Baez: How Mindfulness Enhances My Writing Life, Dinty W. Moore shared his writerly wisdom: “locating that interconnectedness, recognizing the complex, seemingly infinite web of life, of nature, and of human relationship, is at the heart of what we do as writers.”
We’re proud of every essay published on the Blog and love revisiting essays, both popular and which deserve another look. So, we’ve continued with our Blog Round Ups, like this one by editor Heidi Croot, Sacred Lakes, Woo Woo, and Flopping in the Mud: A Brevity Blog Round up on Liberating Our Prose.
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As we look back on the past twenty years, one takeaway stands out, the Blog is all about connection—through the technology we tap into each weekday to read the it; through the links contributors make between their art, craft, and writing lives; and through the relationships readers and writers build along the way. We’re connected.
To keep that connection going, here are a few reminders.
How to find us:
- The easiest way to receive The Brevity Blog each weekday is to subscribe (in the box below this post). If you don’t see us in your inbox, check your Spam, Junk, or Promotions tabs, drag the newsletter to your primary inbox, and click Not Spam.
- Access the Blog’s rich 20-year archive here to scroll through the posts in reverse chronological order, or search the archive online by keyword or author name using the search bar in the upper-right-hand corner of each post.
- Find us on social media—each Blog essay is linked on Facebook and Twitter/X (and we love it when you re-share!)
Ways to support your Blog community:
- Use the like and comment buttons at the bottom of each post, or “reply” to comment from an email—these small gestures mean a lot to essay writers.
- Share the essays you love on your socials, Substack, or in your newsletter, by copying the link or using the buttons at the bottom of each post. And if you know a writer friend would love a Blog essay, do forward it to them!
We thank you for being part of the Blog’s journey and our community today and look forward to many more years of conversation.
Dinty, Allison, Heidi, and Andrea
#2025 #2026 #connection #thankYou #twentyYears #yearInReview
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