Social Media Ideas for Personal Essays

But What Do They Want?!? Write Publishable Essays by Analyzing Published Essays

By Allison K Williams A writer friend had an essay rejected fourteen times. It dealt beautifully with the journey of her abusive father’s dementia, and recognizing that her now-car...

Power Of The Pen

​There is a profound, almost sacred space that exists between a wandering thought and a blank page. For many of us, writing begins as a simple school exercise—a string of rhyming w...

Whose Story Is it Anyway?

Strategies to protect people we are writing about and to protect ourselves By Lynette D’Amico When I started writing my memoir in essays Men I Hate, it didn’t occur to me to consid...

Send Us Your Personal Essays!

Call for Submissions – The International Amy MacRae Award for Memoir By Alison Wearing In May 2019, a small group of women met at a writing retreat in the south of France. Among th...

The Writer-Reader Relationship: A Brevity Blog Round Up

By Andrea A. Firth As a writer, your relationship with the reader is inherent. You come to the page to explore a question, process an experience, or make sense of something difficu...

Through My Lens: The Accidental Archivist of ‘90s Howard University

A personal essay about the importance of capturing history for others to see.

Living Room Confessional.

Thoughts on self-revelation. The post Living Room Confessional. appeared first on Magpie by Jen Shoop.

An Unusual Relationship- A Writing Challenge

For most of my life, writing was my guardian, friend, mirror, and voice long before it became my profession.Continue reading on Pen With Paper »

At the Threshold of a New Story

Leena Wilde Ryan hadn't written anything she felt proud of in years. An old life burned down and a new life still rooting, words seemed held hostage by questions of their worth in...

A Confession: Nature That Nurtured

Author's Note: While this essay is rooted in memory and personal experience, it emerged from the same concern explored in a companion piece on environmental responsibility in Kashm...

Why We Write

Heard someone talking about my grandfather today and i just remembered his last moments everything related to him how he used to smile how he used to pull out jokes on my grandmoth...

Eli Raphael on Identity, Outsiders, and Creating Accountability in Thrillers

My freshman fall at Dartmouth, I spent many late nights on eBay. What I was looking for, specifically, was a Barbour jacket, the waxed canvas kind, olive green. It seemed like ever...

The Stories I Couldn’t Bring Myself to Write

Why the fear of being seen can silence our most honest words.Continue reading on No Time »

My Faith in Lit Mags—Restored

I Had an Offer with a Glossy, or Did I? By Regina Landor My heart flipped over when I saw the email. My highly personal and sensitive piece of writing had been accepted by a new, g...

The Words We Choose and the Connections We Make

I Glimpsed My Future at a High School Speech Tournament

Original Oratory by James Davis In every speech kid, I see a version of myself that I love with frightening intensity: 14 years old, a closeted freshman at Liberty High School with...

What Kind of Memoir Should You Write?

You can choose from among several types of memoir that reflect who you are and what your story is, whether compiled from essays, vignettes, or a unique personal mixture.

The Articles We Carry: How Writing in a Second Language Shapes Thought on the Page

By Etya Vaserman Krichmar I learned English the way a child learns to walk, by repeatedly falling in public. It was not because I was careless, but because the ground kept shifting...

Who Am I, You Ask?

How to create a “Person on the Page” when that person is you By Dinty W. Moore I’ve been teaching memoir since dinosaurs roamed the planet (maybe an exaggeration) and one consisten...

Great American Memoirs Worth Returning To

These tales of resilience, grit and hope each reflect part of the American experience.

Rachel Aviv on Writing About Moms

A new collection of essays explores the particular contours of the maternal bond.

Memories of Growing Up on Long Island

A guest essayist wrote that Long Island produced “more than its share of villainous, dead-eyed jerks.” Readers offer their perspectives. Also: Honor at Stanford.

BEFORE YOU WERE EVERYTHING

The author grew up in her grandmother’s home on Jackson Avenue in San Jose, California; it was a relatively small physical universe, but one that fueled an imagination “not bound t...

The Diary Entry I Couldn’t Explain Ended Up Becoming My Reality…

There are some incidents in life that refuse to fit into logic. No matter how many years pass, they continue to sit quietly in a corner of your mind, asking the same unanswered que...