Let’s Get Published & Book Club Selection

Let’s get published!

Sunday, March 12, 2023 – 7:30pm Munich time, 10:30am Pacific

We had a great Creative Nonfiction 101 workshop with Georgia Knapp. I’ve found myself thinking about my essays in a new light, thinking more toward universality and reader experience. I’ve picked up my goal of submitting five things a month as inspired by Thea Pueschel.

Want to get your writing out there but don’t know where to start? Join us Sunday, March 12

If you already know what you need to know and want to use this time to dedicate to submitting, I’ll put you in a separate zoom room and check back in with you after the how-to session.

What we’ll cover:

• Why bother publishing for little to no pay?
• Where to find mags accepting submissions
• How to write a cover letter
• How to write an author bio
• Submission fees
• First Rights & Reprints
• Simultaneous Submissions
• How to handle rejection
• Open Q&A

This event will not cover how to publish manuscripts, but many authors (including Stephen King) have spoken widely on how important it is to get your name out there in a journal.

Sign up here:
https://www.meetup.com/memoir-mentors/events/291815897/

We have a WhatsApp group for mutual motivation, sharing opportunities, sharing beautiful writing. Join our Let’s Get Published group here: https://chat.whatsapp.com/LN8ujPNMYFCALoRyRzIXmb

Upcoming events

Book Club Choice: To Speak for the Trees by Diana Beresford-Kroeger

April 11, 2023 – 7:00pm Munich time, 10:00am Pacific

Sign up here: https://www.meetup.com/memoir-mentors/events/291816388/

We will be discussing To Speak for the Trees: My Life’s Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest by Diana Beresford-Kroeger

Canadian botanist, biochemist and visionary Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s startling insights into the hidden life of trees have already sparked a quiet revolution in how we understand our relationship to forests. Now, in a captivating account of how her life led her to these illuminating and crucial ideas, she shows us how forests can not only heal us but save the planet.

When Diana Beresford-Kroeger–whose father was a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and whose mother was an O’Donoghue, one of the stronghold families who carried on the ancient Celtic traditions–was orphaned as a child, she could have been sent to the Magdalene Laundries. Instead, the O’Donoghue elders, most of them scholars and freehold farmers in the Lisheens valley in County Cork, took her under their wing. Diana became the last ward under the Brehon Law. Over the course of three summers, she was taught the ways of the Celtic triad of mind, body and soul. This included the philosophy of healing, the laws of the trees, Brehon wisdom and the Ogham alphabet, all of it rooted in a vision of nature that saw trees and forests as fundamental to human survival and spirituality. Already a precociously gifted scholar, Diana found that her grounding in the ancient ways led her to fresh scientific concepts. Out of that huge and holistic vision have come the observations that put her at the forefront of her field: the discovery of mother trees at the heart of a forest; the fact that trees are a living library, have a chemical language and communicate in a quantum world; the major idea that trees heal living creatures through the aerosols they release and that they carry a great wealth of natural antibiotics and other healing substances; and, perhaps most significantly, that planting trees can actively regulate the atmosphere and the oceans, and even stabilize our climate.

This book is not only the story of a remarkable scientist and her ideas, it harvests all of her powerful knowledge about why trees matter, and why trees are a viable, achievable solution to climate change. Diana eloquently shows us that if we can understand the intricate ways in which the health and welfare of every living creature is connected to the global forest, and strengthen those connections, we will still have time to mend the self-destructive ways that are leading to drastic fires, droughts and floods.

Random goodies

• I just finished listening to the audiobook of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Wow! I think this is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read. It’s not a memoir but it reads like one. It’s lyrical, heartbreaking, and simply stunning. It also reads like a massive braided essay. 
  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41880609-on-earth-we-re-briefly-gorgeous 
  
• In case you didn’t read this last month, here’s Ocean Vuong’s beautiful braided essay about grief, hope, and fire escapes:
  https://therumpus.net/2022/12/20/the-weight-of-our-living-on-hope-fire-escapes-and-visible-desperation/

Classes you might be interested in:

• Writing Memoir Without Fear
  Avoiding Legal Issues, Trauma, and Your Mom’s Hurt Feelings – Allison K. Williams (February 27)
  https://www.janefriedman.com/writing-memoir-without-fear-with-allison-k-williams/
• The Ultimate Quickstart Guide to Scrivener 3 (FREE on March 8)
  https://www.meetup.com/berlin-shut-up-and-write-group/events/291530481/ 
• Writing the Taboo in Memoir (March 30)
  https://www.janefriedman.com/writing-the-taboo-in-memoir-with-katie-bannon/
• The Writers Bridge with Jane Friedman: Platform & Publishing in 2023 (Free Recording)
  https://www.loom.com/share/d3361bfbe0b340509bdb81f33b146b81