A short personal essay about farewelling my mother, published in Short Reads in November 2025. https://www.short-reads.org/out-the-front-door/
Out the front door
Author: beverleystevens
I'm a writer of creative nonfiction whose day job as a copywriter at Xero involves drinking flat whites, writing and editing. Outside of work hours, I can be found drinking wine, walking and exploring Wellington, reading and listening to classical music.
To the dance
This piece, published in Sad Girl Diaries recounts how it took me all afternoon to get ready for the fourth form social. You can read it at https://www.sadgirldiaries.com/post/to-the-dance-beverley-stevens
On the Same Wavelength
This essay about working for the BBC World Service in London in the unit that scheduled transmissions to exotic and contested places was published in the literary journal Dorothy Parker's Ashes. You can read it at https://www.dorothyparkersashes.com/work/on-the-same-wavelength
A River Runs Through My Memoir-In-Essays
This craft essay, published on the Brevity Blog, tracks some of my reading and learning about writing memoir and, in particular, references Dinty Moore's concept of the magnetic river that needs to run through a story. Read it at https://brevity.wordpress.com/2025/01/29/a-river-runs/
Not telling it all
In this article published on the Brevity Blog, I explore how much to reveal and publish about family dramas and difficult relationships in the memoir pieces and personal essays I write. Read it at https://brevity.wordpress.com/2024/03/08/not-telling-it-all/
A dreadful girl
"I didn’t like Katherine Mansfield; she was a dreadful girl", my grandmother told me. This essay, originally published in the Katherine Mansfield Society newsletter in August 2023, explores her attitude, and that of her family, to the woman who would become a highly acclaimed short story writer. Click on the photo to read it.
A proper Sunday lunch
This story of what is was like on family visits to my grandparents is published online in the Spring 2022 issue of The Longridge Review. You can read it there: the constraints on our behaviour that gave rise to anxiety and boredom, and the things that made it special. Read it at https://longridgereview.com/beverley-stevens/
Been and gone
Published online in the literary journal Dorothy's Parker's Ashes, this piece was submitted in response to a call for submissions on the theme 'mother'. My mother is seated in the bottom row, first on the left. Read it at http://www.dorothyparkersashes.com/mother/gone
Aide-memoire
This story of a phone call with my mother as her memory was going is published in Landfall issue 243. Click on the photo to read it.
Not drowning but waving
A personal essay, first published by Headland in issue 16, November 2021 and included, with some changes, in a forthcoming anthology 'Loving Arrangements: Stories about Modern Living and Loving' to be published by Rutgers University Press in 2026. Click on the photo to read it.
Fragments of an ordinary life 