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Exercises in Adversity: Translating Trauma Without Sentimentality
By Barlow Adams I’d like to share a creative nonfiction exercise with you. It’s nothing fancy. It might even come across as simplistic if you’re a master of the form. Regardless, I use it time and again when I cannot produce under any other conditions. It rarely fails. It may seem counterintuitive, but you cannot…
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Adversity: On Writing Yourself As the Reluctant Villain
By Barlow Adams Invariably, my best stories are the ones that share some part of me I’d rather not, some aspect of me I wish didn’t exist at all. As a result, my “biggest” most dramatic essays are frequently the hardest for me to write. This leads to an infuriating dichotomy where I often tell…
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Adversity: Sacrificing Your Scribbles and the Six Sacred Sentences
By Barlow Adams Everyone has heard about killing their darlings, but few writers talk about sacrificing their scribbles—at least not directly. We address it in a roundabout way when it comes to drafting, but even then we tend to put a positive spin on it. We are improving. We are refining. Transferring written lead into…
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Adversity and Actuality: Finding the Right Shape For Your Truth
By Barlow Adams “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”—David Foster Wallace When people ask me for advice on writing during difficult times, they are almost always asking me how much of the truth they should tell. I’m never sure how to answer. There is a strange, nebulous…
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Adversity and The Artist: The Persistent Myth of Inspirational Suffering
By Barlow Adams There’s a certain hubris in agreeing to pen a column about writing through adversity. It’s an invitation to the powers that be to take you down a notch. Let me tell you, those bastards listen. In the months since I signed on to write this column it’s been an onslaught of death,…
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The Finch Hunter
Creative NonFiction by Barlow Adams My sister had painted the kitchen a sickly green and her meatloaf was dry. The onions in it were too big and there were too many of them. It was mama’s old recipe. It was only old now because mama died a year ago. Before then, it was just mom’s…