A peek inside the lives of writers

FreshYarn.com offers an outlet for highly personal (and sometimes embarrassing) literary non-fiction

By Gabrielle Moss
Published: April 12th, 2006 | 8:33pm

Kate Flannery has something to tell you. In 1993, she had a tempestuous affair with a '70s TV boy-bander. Lauren Tom ruined a silk couch in the middle of a job interview. Paul Feig was a teenage Ronald McDonald. Their hilarious confessional essays about these experiences are part of FreshYarn.com, the all-personal essay Web site created and maintained by Hillary Carlip. Subject matter like this — the humorous, frequently embarrassing, and sometimes unexpectedly touching incidents that make up our daily lives — are more often the stuff of drunken party conversation or diary entries (or the occasional church confession) than literary non-fiction. But the honest and vividly personal have found a welcoming literary home at Fresh Yarn.

Carlip, a veteran multi-media writer and performer whose new book, Queen of the Oddballs, is forthcoming in May 2006, was motivated to create Fresh Yarn by her involvement in the Los Angeles spoken word performance scene. “What struck me was the overwhelming reception from the audiences”, she says. “I saw how much people love self-revelation”. She also saw how few outlets there were for personal essays in traditional lit zines and Web sites. Inspired, she founded Fresh Yarn in April of 2004, and has posted a new set of six essays every three weeks since.

Showcasing the personal essays of well-known writers and performers such as Francesca Lia Block, Jill Soloway, and Annabelle Gurwitch, as well as many new writers publishing for the first time, Fresh Yarn has had a very positive response, not just from readers, but from the writers themselves. Many Fresh Yarn contributors work professionally as film or television scribes, and feel invigorated by the chance to work in a new form and rediscover their passion for writing. “I found the personal essay a beautiful vacation from writing screenplays”, said writer/ director Lisa Cholodenko (High Art, Laurel Canyon) , author of the Fresh Yarn essay “Toasted”. “I felt free in a way Final Draft refuses to let me be.”

A genuine labor of love, Fresh Yarn is produced almost single-handedly by Carlip, who handles tasks from selecting and editing the essays to designing and coding the site. “It’s always been really important to me to support and encourage writers”, says Carlip, whose first two books, Girl Power and Zine Scene, focused on empowering young women by telling their own stories. “And I plan to continue doing that with everything I do.” Future plans for the site include an anthology book series and, of course, more issues.

More than just a literary website, Fresh Yarn nurtures a community. Acting as a kind of internet outpost for the Los Angeles spoken word scene, it gives permanence to many pieces that would typically be performed live but never committed to paper. “As phenomenal as the spoken word events are, and as popular as they’ve become”, says Carlip, “they are still only in a few cities, and reach maybe100 people per show at most. The Web is a place to reach millions”.

Reading each essay on Fresh Yarn is like finding a diary — the thoughtfully written, completely absorbing diary of a fascinating stranger you’ve never met. And that kind of raw disclosure can elicit a lot of different reactions. “There's something really attractive about people telling the truth about themselves in a humorous way”, says playwright and contributor Ray Cochran. “I've often scrolled through the list of past contributors on Fresh Yarn and wondered what they'd all look like naked.” Sounds like a great subject for an essay.