It’s Time to Dust Your Memoir Off and Submit
Every writer has a folder of at least one piece they’ve completed and have been sitting on, in some cases, for years. Now’s your chance to dig it up, polish it off and share it with the world.
As writers, we’re often shelving stories we’ve written with the hope that we’ll come back to them another time. We sometimes work endlessly on a project or a piece before a budget gets cut, a magazine folds, we chicken out in sharing our secrets with the world. Sometimes it’s simply that no publication seems to be quite the right fit for the words we’ve labored over endlessly. I have a folder on my laptop called “Stories Without a Home” with a few essays and even a reported piece or two that never made it out for one reason or another — but with a little work, perhaps they could. Lisa Williamson Rosenberg has a folder of sorts like this, too. And last year, ahead of the 2024 Narratively Memoir Prize, she tapped into it. Spoiler alert — she ended up winning the grand prize! Here’s what Lisa had to say about the experience herself:
“A year ago, I recreated an essay I’d written — and lost — from a very specific, very humiliating childhood memory. I was in a memoir cl…