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...

Living Room Confessional.

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

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.

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...

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...

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 »

The Words We Choose and the Connections We Make

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 »

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...

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

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

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...

Taking Yoga Teaching Training? Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Use AI for Your Personal Essays.

Authenticity still matters. The post Taking Yoga Teaching Training? Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Use AI for Your Personal Essays. appeared first on Yoga Journal.

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...

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...

Why You

A self is a story of why you are you — a selective retelling of the myriad chance events between the birth of the universe and this moment: atoms bonding one way and not another, p...

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...

Create a Memoir Depicting Current Times

Today’s events are packed with images and events that can become memories to treasure. By recording these and incorporating your feelings, you'll have a memoir in the making.

The Knicks, Memes, Family Secrets and Clavicular: The Winners of Week One of Our Summer Reading Contest

For our kickoff week we’re honoring two videos and two short essays from 634 teen submissions.

Close, but No Acceptance (Or, What is the Universe Trying to Teach Me Right Now?)

By Rae Pagliarulo This year, I applied to more writing opportunities than I have in a while, having been in recovery from a self-induced (or cosmically induced) writing slump. For...

Memoir as Medicine: Writing to Heal

Writing our stories can be healing, especially if we've encountered trauma. Writing your own emotional truth is important.

COZETTE ANNEMARIE CALDERON: College Blues

I wasn’t driving, even though my dad’s knee was a bruised balloon. My job was to converse. We talked about Nebraska’s only good quality: sunflower fields for miles. We laughed, pre...

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...