Hello Fellow Memoirists!
I hope you are enjoying the summer and your writing is going well.
Here’s what you can find in this month’s newsletter:
Member Achievements
Many members have had big achievements recently.
A big congratulations to Jelaine Lombardi for finishing the first draft of her book! We’re all so excited for Running Around Naked to be one step closer to published.
Cristina Cruciano quit her job and is on an inspiring sabatical and she finished the first draft of her book!
Sylvia Clare is working on the final round of edits on her book Travelling the Alphabet Spiritually and has been working with her son to rewrite her book about parenting titled Who Will I Become? What Children Want Adults to Understand.
I just finished reading our fellow member Diana Radovan‘s beautiful memoir Our Voices. I encourage you to read her book. She weaves poetry, family history as well as Romanian history and culture, with her own personal experiences. Her writing is deeply poignant and relateable even though many of our experiences are dissimilar. Her reflections on feeling like an outsider, searching for love, and being an expat were particularly relatable and often haunting. Besides being an interesting story that is beautifully written, Diana’s book gave me inspiration on how I might be able to structure my own memoir in a more experimental form. You can find out more about her writing and where to buy her book here: https://www.naturewriting.net/books-and-more If you are in Munich, she will be doing a reading at the Munich Readery on July 2: https://www.facebook.com/events/754388939260064/
Curtis Chen is on track to publish his book Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant with Little, Brown in 2023. He also released a documentary titled “Dear Corky”, you can read about it and some of Curtis’s impressive achievements here.
I published my first paid essay! https://herstryblg.com/true/2022/5/25/true-love-fairytales-and-george-rr-martin I have also been working with a mentor at the University of Iowa and have had some big breakthroughs in my writing. I’ve really been enjoying exploring more experiemental forms and writing in the second person voice.
If you have any upcoming events or news to share with the group, please reply to this email or email me at: xtina.howell@memoirmentors.com
Adding Member section to the website
I would like to add a section to the website where members can promote upcoming events, blogs, books, classes, or anything memoir related. Please reply to this email or email me at xtina.howell@memoirmentors.com if you have anything you would like to share there.
Author Q&A with Kristie Robin Johnson
We’re very excited to welcome Kristie Robin Johnson for an author Q&A session on July 7.
The preliminary list of questions can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1npsG82j-tuJren_skCO3eaKJWFIbyQ1vduSqHFPCuPU/edit?usp=sharing
If you have additional questions that you would like to ask her, please reply to this email or email me at xtina.howell@memoirmentors.com
https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/memoir-mentors/events/285722312/
Kristie Robin Johnson is an educator, essayist, and poet from Augusta, GA. She is the current Chair of the Department of Humanities at Georgia Military College’s Augusta campus where she is an Assistant Professor of English. A graduate of the MFA Creative Writing program at Georgia College and State University, Kristie’s writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has received other awards and recognition including the 2020 Porter Fleming Prize for Nonfiction and the 2021 Page Prize for Flash Nonfiction. Her work has been published in numerous literary magazines, journals, and anthologies. Her first book, High Cotton, was released in 2020 by Raised Voice Press and was recognized as the finalist in the memoir category for 2021 Georgia Author of the Year.
Polishing Our Pages
The Polishing Your First Pages sessions were a big hit! We had 12 people submit and comment upon each other’s first 10 pages over two sessions. Everyone who attended said that they would be interested in attending more of these in the future. We all learned a lot from each other. While we all enjoyed it, it was a lot of work to read and leave helpful feedback. Those who filled out the survey voted to have these sessions once every other month and limit the participants to six people. Things are pretty busy over here right now, so it might be a while before I get the next of these scheduled. Stay tuned.
If you’d like to weigh in, here’s the survey about the Polishing our pages session.
https://forms.gle/UatK9HAuaG9nsmkD6
Book Club Choice: Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter
August 11, 2022 – 7:00pm Munich time, 10:00am Pacific
Sign up here: https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/memoir-mentors/events/286726405/
In the Memoir Mentors Book Club, we read memoirs with a memoirist’s eye, looking for things that we could use in our writing or things we want to avoid.
We will be discussing Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter by Alison Wearing.
Alison Wearing led a largely carefree childhood until she learned, at the age of 12, that her family was a little more complex than she had realized. Sure her father had always been unusual compared to the other dads in the neighbourhood: he loved to bake croissants, wear silk pyjamas around the house, and skip down the street singing songs from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. But when he came out of the closet in the 1970s, when homosexuality was still a cardinal taboo, it was a shock to everyone in the quiet community of Peterborough, Ontario—especially to his wife and three children.
Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter is also the story of “coming out” as the daughter of a gay father. Already wrestling with an adolescent’s search for identity when her father came out of the closet, Alison promptly “went in,” concealing his sexual orientation from her friends and spinning extravagant stories about all of the “great straight things” they did together. Over time, Alison came to see that life with her father was surprisingly interesting and entertaining, even oddly inspiring, and in fact, there was nothing to hide.
Discussion questions can be found here: https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/memoir-mentors/events/286726405/
Creative Questers – Side project
My friend Stefka Spiegel and I have started a new group that is non-genre specific where we will be hosting the 100 word story project that some of you participate in, as well as fun events like collaborative story building and more. You can join us here: https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/creative-questers/
If you have any classes or event ideas that you would like to add or lead, please email us at creativequesters@gmail.com
Upcoming events
I’d prefer that you sign up through Meetup so I know who to expect and so that you know what the agenda is for the week, but if that’s too problematic, you can go directly to the Zoom link that we use every week:
https://zoom.us/j/4400465879?pwd=R0Y0RUp4YjAvdnJCODV0MkhNMXlmdz09
June 23: Write then Read: https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/memoir-mentors/events/zndcrsydcjbfc/
JUNE 30 – NO MEETING
July 7: Author Q&A with Kristie Robin Johnson: https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/memoir-mentors/events/wndcrsydchbqb/
July 14: Write then Read: https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/memoir-mentors/events/xndcrsydchbzb/
July 21: Write then Read: https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/memoir-mentors/events/xndcrsydckbcc/
July 28: Speaking Your Story: https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/memoir-mentors/events/zndcrsydckblc/
August 4: Write then Read: https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/memoir-mentors/events/bzsxssydclbgb/
August 11: Book Club (Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter): https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/memoir-mentors/events/286726405/
June 16: Write then Read: https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/memoir-mentors/events/xndcrsydcjbvb/