by Melanie Brooks | Oct 2, 2019 | All Posts, Meet Our Memoirists
It takes a special kind of person to lean in to other people’s stories and help them untangle the knotted threads at their centers. It takes a special kind of person to lean in to her own story and give it voice with the hope that others in similar circumstances...
by Lisa Ellison | Sep 4, 2019 | All Posts, Heart Speak
Dear Lisa, I am writing a memoir about growing up feeling unloved and unwanted by my mother. My oldest son is a writer too. Originally, his MFA thesis was a fictional piece about a group of churches we encountered. Recently, he changed genres and presented his work as...
by Laura Robbins | Aug 14, 2019 | All Posts, The Craft Column
“I have no doubt in my soul that you will write a story that bares your soul. The story that broke your heart and mended it. Your words have the power to heal and to make readers heard. The story you choose to write will be one that only you can write, that can...
by Melanie Brooks | Jul 25, 2019 | All Posts, Meet Our Memoirists
On the first night of HippoCamp: A Conference for Creative Nonfiction Writers in 2017, I sat in a darkened back corner of the lower level “Commons on Vine” space of the Lancaster, Pennsylvania Marriott Convention Center and listened to a handful of...
by Lisa Ellison | Jul 10, 2019 | All Posts, Heart Speak
Dear Lisa, My memoir is about growing up in a family where the default position in any dispute was to totally cut that relative from our lives. It resulted in me growing up in a bubble with no extended family. As a child this seemed quite normal, but as I grew up, I...
by Dana Mich | Jun 26, 2019 | All Posts, The Craft Column
I am in the middle of writing an essay that spans a full twenty-nine of my thirty-two years of life. It hinges on an event that happened three Thanksgivings ago, but reaches as far back as my third birthday and as far forward as—well—now. And it is here, half-way...