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.
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 class at the time and took the opportunity to polish the essay until I felt it was ready for submission. Then, I saw a post about Narratively’s Memoir Prize on the final day of the contest and went for it. Because, why not? To my surprise and delight, my essay, “Black Girl, Blue Leotard: How My Ticket to Belonging Broke My Heart,” was awarded the grand prize. AND it was also chosen for The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2025 anthology, an enormous honor. To think I’d been just hours from missing the deadline!
“I know you have one: a memory, a lost relationship, a moment of deep shame, fear, or wonder, an obstacle that you defied against crazy odds. An experience that changed you. The magic of memoir is when you can channel the deeply personal into something universal that someone, a total stranger with an entirely different background, can read and say, ‘That’s me too.’ If you’ve been working on a piece like that, wondering if you should submit it to the 2025 Narratively Memoir Prize, all I can say is: Why not? Just do it. Someone out there is waiting for your voice.”
We truly couldn’t have said it better than Lisa! So…do you, too, have a memoir essay taking up space on your laptop; a piece printed out from an old workshop in a physical folder somewhere with just a few edits left to tackle, or maybe none at all? If you do (we know you do!), it’s time to give that piece a chance to shine.