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Oct 16, 2024 | 
courtneymaum.substack.com | Courtney Maum |Kelly McMasters
Last week, I walked you through how I’m planning to revise my own novel (thank you for the messages of support and solidarity, they really cheered me up!). This week, I want to show you the other side to the editing work I do, which is editing other people. I first jumped into the developmental edit business with a lot of verve and positivity.
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Sep 29, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Kelly McMasters
I wrote my obituary last week. I often do so once a year; it has become a kind of ritual. I've met a few others who do the same or something similar. A teacher I know likes to start every new year by writing her obituary or what she hopes it will look like by year's end. Another friend writes hers on Rosh Hashana.
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Jul 23, 2024 | 
flipboard.com | Kelly McMasters
GUILTY CREATURES: Sex, God and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida, by Mikita Brottman Were Mikita Brottman’s “Guilty Creatures” a work of fiction, the plot would be deemed clichéd: an affair, a missing body presumed eaten by alligators, a million-dollar life insurance payout and a beautiful widow who …
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Jul 23, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Kelly McMasters
GUILTY CREATURES: Sex, God and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida,by Mikita BrottmanWere Mikita Brottman's "Guilty Creatures" a work of fiction, the plot would be deemed clichéd: an affair, a missing body presumed eaten by alligators, a million-dollar life insurance payout and a beautiful widow who quickly finds love in the arms of her dead husband's newly divorced best friend.
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May 31, 2024 | 
therumpus.net | Kelly McMasters
Sometimes, you want to get the fuck out, but you don’t know how. We’ve all been there: knowing you need to leave a job, a relationship, a house, or a state (or state of mind), but not knowing how to go about it. In my own experience, this is when I wish someone would hand me a blueprint, take me step-by-step through the development of an exit plan, or show me a crystal ball and reassure me I’m making the right choices.
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Jan 26, 2024 | 
literarymama.com | Margo Steines |Kelly McMasters
The Leaving SeasonBy Kelly McMastersW. W. Norton (2023)
There are parts of Kelly McMasters’ memoir-in-essays, The Leaving Season, that could have been written about my own life. We shared the experience of having left New York City with rage-prone, iconoclastic artists, and we both eventually had to get out of those relationships in order to maintain our selfhoods.
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Dec 12, 2023 | 
theatlantic.com | Kelly McMasters
Reading can be a powerful method to reconnect with the planet we all live on. I learned this after I moved away from home, which was next to a wildlife reserve. To anchor myself, I reached for nature as a grounding wire, and usually found it through books. Writers such as Rachel Carson, Lucille Clifton, Aldo Leopold, and John McPhee brought me into their narratives in urgent ways, and their work made understanding, and preserving, the environment imperative.
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Jun 5, 2023 | 
memoirland.substack.com | Walter Benjamin |Grace Kennedy |Nehal El-Hadi |Kelly McMasters
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter now featuring three verticals: Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. (Plus an associated quarterly reading series hosted by Lilly Dancyger.)First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “The Sound of Grief” by , edited by .
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May 31, 2023 | 
lithub.com | Kelly McMasters
On a bright afternoon this past March, I walked to the front of a conference room in downtown Seattle and sighed with disappointment. Our AWP panel, “Motherlode: The Tripwire of Writing Real Family,” had been placed in room 329, large and lovely, except for the view through the giant wall of glass that would be the backdrop to anyone looking at our table of panelists. What they would see behind us: the gaping steel and shredded plastic mouth of a high-rise under construction.
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May 17, 2023 | 
thecommononline.org | Kelly McMasters
By KELLY McMASTERS Long Island, NYInterior of a silver Volvo wagon, back door pockets stuffed with Candy Ring wrappers, pencils, and rocks; I am looking in the rear-view mirror or over my right shoulder into the backseat, my left hand on the wheel, right hand on the seat back next to me. Two small boys, both with eyes the exact color as my own, stare back at me, pleading or explaining or demanding or questioning or laughing or crying or sulking or fighting or trying to hide.
