My Best Images From 2016
📷 Every year Jim Goldstein runs a blog project asking his readers to list the year's best photos. He's run this blog project every year since 2007 and each year. Here are my best in 2016. It was tough. I took a lot of images this year. Per Jim's direction, I culled these down to ten. I enjoyed the process of culling the images. I had to focus on why I liked a particular photo and also on whether I had done my best editing. It was an enjoyable challenge.
Letter 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:
Ways to support your Blog community:
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
A quick peek at nice_0e3’s 2023 recap shows how personal wins and global trends intertwined.
- Professional milestones: new projects & certifications
- Cultural highlights: indie releases & community meet‑ups
- Data flash: productivity up 12% despite remote fatigue
Key insight: intentional downtime boosted both creativity and output.
What's that? I've published a new article on my website?
All other writing has been on hold until I finished it, but my data review of 2025 is finally done 😅 🎉
I have absolutely no idea if it will be of interest to anyone else, but I love these posts. And this year's was using **even more** of my own, home-grown data, captured directly via the very site it now lives on 😁
Khürt Williams
The Brevity Blog
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