Memoir’s Secret Sauce (Hint: It’s your superpower)

Your Superpower = Your Memoir’s Secret Sauce For most of my life, I’ve straddled two worlds. As the daughter of Yugoslav immigrants, I spent my childhood moving back and forth between Chicago and Yugoslavia, never really sure of where I belonged. When I was in academia, I taught creative writing and business writing, which wasn’t the norm for most MFAs. Once I moved into the business world, my creative writing credentials were mostly ignored. Ditto for my business writing acumen when I moved back into the creative writing world. For a long time, the story I told myself was that I didn’t belong. I was outside of. But then I began to realize that was my superpower. When you straddle two worlds, you have a different perspective. You can see things that other people can’t. When I wrote The Secret Life of Grief, […]

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Birthing a Book + Memoir Writing Classes

Yesterday, one of our writers shared that she’d just landed a publisher! J and I have been working together for a few years and it took her longer than she expected to get her memoir written, so it’s especially sweet to see her so close to the finish line. After celebrating, we spoke about the challenges of writing memoir, and how birthing a book is a process. Much like birthing a baby, we can’t rush the process. As you probably know, writing a full-length memoir isn’t the easiest journey. Because of its personal nature, memoir can be a long and twisty journey, one that’s even trickier for those of us dealing with difficult material. It also isn’t the easiest journey to travel alone. And you might find that you need different kinds of support along the way. Memoir Writing Classes   Here’s the […]

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