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Beautiful Things: Writing & Publishing Miniature Essays

Home Events WordShops 2026 Beautiful Things: Writing & Publishing Miniature Essays

1:00 pm to 4:00 pm

In this nonfiction session, we’ll look at a handful of published examples from a weekly journal of micro essays I edit called Beautiful Things – River Teeth’s online daughter magazine – and think about specific strategies we can play with as writers to identify the images, locate the voice, build the structures, and sculpt the language that will help us to craft our own real-life material into miniature essays that “[magnify] some small aspect of what it means to be human” (Bernard Cooper).

We’ll reserve time for a writing exercise, sharing, and some publishing tips specific to short nonfiction.

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© Ella Neely

Jill Christman is the author of The Heart Folds Early: A Memoir (released March 2026 from the University of Nebraska Press). Christman’s other books include If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays (2023 Foreword INDIES Silver Winner), Darkroom: A Family Exposure (winner of AWP Prize for CNF), and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood. Her essays have appeared in magazines such as Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Iron Horse Literary Review, Longreads, and O, The Oprah Magazine, and in many anthologies, including Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad Means to Us (Eds. Martha Bayne and Sonya Huber), The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction (Eds. Zoë Bossiere and Dinty W. Moore), and Not That Bad: Dispatches from a Rape Culture (Ed. Roxane Gay). A 2020 NEA Literature Fellow, she teaches at Ball State University and serves as co-editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative and Beautiful Things (a weekly online magazine of micro nonfiction). Visit her at JillChristman.com, RiverTeethJournal.com, and on Instagram @jillchristmanwriter.