s we enter the festive holiday season, I’m reminded of the magic of storytelling; in particular, those true tales told by friends or relatives beside a crackling fire. These are the stories that make up our lives. Whether oral or written, our personal stories and memoirs matter more than ever with the rise of AI. Today’s guest, Mary McBeth, founder and editor-in-chief of Memoir Magazine, is a fierce advocate for true stories and brave, vulnerable voices with impact.

Before I met the talented Mary McBeth, I had the pleasure of reading anonymous pieces from her memoir. It was 2017, and we were participating in Chelsey Clammer’s WOW workshop, Face Your Fears: Women Writers Anonymous. Students used pen names, so we could write about our deepest, darkest secrets without judgment. I remember being swept away by Mary’s writing, which was immersive and scene-driven and held nothing back. We both wrote about our time as young adults, struggling to get ahead in the world, and our relationships with abusive men. I fondly remember her calling me “A sister from another mother.” When the class ended, our group of five writers continued to workshop, dubbing ourselves “The Ladyballers,” because what we wrote about was fearless and ballsy—it took courage, it took lady balls. I wanted to make matching bowling shirts with our logo on it! Several of the pieces we wrote in that group were published, and we supported and celebrated each other’s achievements. Before the group ended, we shed our pen names and revealed our identities. Around that time, Mary came up with the brilliant idea to start Memoir Magazine.

Founded in 2017 by Mary McBeth, Memoir Magazine is an online literary magazine dedicated to publishing true stories and creative nonfiction essays, together with innovative work from illustrators, fine art photographers, and artists. Editor-in-Chief Mary McBeth believes that everyone’s story matters. Memoir Magazine’s mission is to be a witness to both factual and emotional truths that resonate with the human heart by supporting writers and artists in sharing their stories—whether personal, social, or political—through publication, education, and advocacy. Memoir Magazine publishes online throughout the year and accepts submissions on a rolling basis. The journal hosts The Memoir Prize for Books, an annual contest now in its fifth year, that awards memoir and creative nonfiction book-length works of exceptional merit in the categories of traditional, self-published, and previously published prose.

Mary McBeth is a writer, editor, book coach, and certified Amherst Writers and Artists Workshop Facilitator. As a memoirist, Mary delves deeply into her subjects, drawing on personal experiences of childhood, race, and immigration to produce emotionally rich work. Her short-form memoirs and personal essays have appeared in Cobalt Review, *82 Review, Argot Magazine, Awakened Voices, and others. A 2024 Rosemary’s House Fellow, her essay “The Summer of Love” is an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir The Secret Life of Grownups and was long-listed for the 2023 DISQUIET International Literary Program. She is a member of the National Association of Memoir Writers and the North Carolina Writers Network, AWP, and CLMP. A Level 3 Reiki master and certified raw vegan chef, Mary is also a polyglot—fluent in Italian, German, Spanish, and English—and has lived and worked in more than twenty-three countries. She spent twelve years in Italy as a runway fashion model, which is the subject of her current memoir-in-process entitled, Perfect. She now lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband and dog. Find her at www.MaryMcBeth.com.

I had the pleasure to chat with Mary about the Craft of memoir, what she’s looking for in submissions, Memoir Mag’s annual book contest, the state of memoir publishing, book proposals, and more. Join us for our lively chat!

WOW: Welcome to our holiday edition, Mary! I’m excited to grab a cup of hot chocolate and talk to you about all things memoir! I remember in 2017 when you announced to our writing group that you were going to start Memoir Magazine, and we all thought the idea was brilliant. What prompted the idea? Why only memoir/nonfiction?

Mary: Thank you, Angela. It’s great to be here with you. Yes, our writing group with Chelsey was epic—so full of amazing, fearless writing from the heart. I wish it never ended, and I keep trying to recreate that magic, but alas there is only one Ladyballers group! I remember feeling like I could read essays like this all day. And how much I’d love to read a magazine full of them. Then when Chelsey encouraged us to submit these essays, I started looking for lit mags to publish some of the stories and started noticing that essays on trauma or gut level experiences didn’t have as many outlets as one might expect. I remember having heard that CNF accepted like 1 to 3 percent of its submissions and asking one of their readers, “What happens to the other 97-99 percent of submissions? Are they good essays that just don’t have a home because there aren’t enough literary magazines?”

I mean, in 2017, the word “memoir” was still kind of controversial, and in some literary circles, people were like, “Is this legit literature?” And I couldn’t help thinking: why should it be less profound just because it’s the truth about a real person’s life? I decided only memoir/nonfiction because I believed that’s what was needed at the time, on a sociological as well as literary level: a publication dedicated to memoir could go far to alleviate the prejudices in our society. I wanted to draw a line in the sand and be like, “Memoir is important and powerful. It changes lives and we are all in!” As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said in her Ted talk “The Dangers of a Single Story”: “When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.”

WOW: Wow, I love Adichie’s quote and admire your mission so much, Mary! I agree that there aren’t many markets that publish essays on trauma, so thank you for providing a safe space for writers to tell their deeply personal stories. Memoir Magazine is open for submissions throughout the year and publishes online periodically. Is there a set publication schedule? Typically, how many pieces do you publish per year, and what is your acceptance rate?

Mary: We try to publish one essay a week now, and like forty to fifty essays per year. We receive about forty to fifty essay submissions a month, and we publish three to seven essays. So, our acceptance rate is more like 9 percent.

WOW: That’s a great percentage rate! Writers will also be thrilled to know that Memoir Magazine accepts reprints. We also accept reprints here at WOW, but few journals do. It seems like most journals want to be first to publish for whatever reason—be it viral traffic, uniqueness, or financial reasons. And some journals will exclude personal blogs as well. Can you tell us about why you decided to accept reprints?

Mary: There are several reasons why I originally accepted reprints. The first being I was forced to. When I started looking for pieces by established writers, they weren’t immediately forthcoming. A memoir writer friend who was also a college professor seeking tenure said he didn’t believe a magazine for memoirs or one that was mainly online would work because print was prestigious, and I should only make a journal for Black people anyway. But I had come from a background of marketing and publishing a free weekly newspaper. I saw it differently than academia.

I envisioned a semi-commercial publication that would have mass appeal outside of academia too—the place I felt the results would show. I told him online was the inevitable future of journals, and it was important because the work could be promoted in a way that hadn’t previously been done—memoir was important to everyone (meaning a larger potential readership). And race is not the only bias we suffer from, nor are Black people the only people who suffer from discrimination. What about other minorities: women, LBGTQ, aging populations, and others whose experiences we can only know by hearing their own words?

His viewpoint is exactly the big problem America has that it can’t see itself—my own race has nothing to do with who would want or need to read these memoirs of others! Like people didn’t watch the Oprah Winfrey Show solely because she was Black—they watched because she was sharing stories that needed to be told. The whole point was that even stories featuring race (perhaps especially so) needed to be read by everyone to be truly effective.

He said that if I insisted, I could reprint one of his previously published works from his memoir he was trying to get published. Of course, I didn’t know if I would prevail or if anyone would submit great work. I also figured as a new magazine, it would give me a chance to choose writing that set the tone for what I was looking for. So, I took him up on his offer to reprint his essay.

Then once the piece was published online, he said he was shocked to receive so many compliments from readers he thought had already read the piece when it was previously printed in a university literary journal. Turns out, very few had actually purchased that print journal and therefore had not read his essay until it was available for free online on Memoir Magazine.

So even though he would only give me a reprint at first because he thought his writing was too important for my memoir magazine, it turns out we both won anyway, and he learned a valuable lesson about how powerful the little internet guy could be for his career (you know actually getting readers!).

Just because the school lit mag printed the essay and charged people to read it—it doesn’t mean anyone did! Prestige comes at the cost of a narrow audience, and that’s not what memoir is about. Memoir is for the people.

Turns out to have been a great decision to accept reprints, and it’s easily possible as a mainly digital magazine. Reprints enable you to broaden your audience and deepen your engagement through the benefit of a strong dynamic and ever evolving, ever-changing readership. And not everybody reads academic journals or the first time something was printed.

Finally, I simply love publishing reprints for the love of the Craft. If a piece is good the first time, then why not publish it again? Things like limited print runs make me sad. A piece of writing, an idea, a concept, or a context should not simply be erased. It is now part of history. Stopping a print run feels kind of like erasing a historical fact.

Prestige is also just another way of saying privileged. Good is good. Like this incredible reprint, “Dead Weight,” from author Claire O’Brien.

WOW: I love Claire’s piece, and that is such an interesting story about how you got started with reprints. I agree, showcasing work for free online often has a much larger readership and ongoing publicity than publishing in a print-only journal. Each journal has its own tastes and readership, so it’s great to give a piece a second chance. I’d love to get a peek into your behind-the-scenes editorial process. Do you do most of the reading yourself, or do you have a team of readers and discussions?

Mary: It’s a crazy hot mess since Covid. In the beginning, I did most of the reading myself, which was a special time for me. But all of the administrative tasks of running a magazine (as a writer myself) left me with less time to read and actually publish or explore new initiatives and relationships. It is the nature of the thing. Now I have a team of reader interns. Some great professors sent me some great students that I spend a lot of time with working one-on-one to discuss what makes a good Memoir Mag essay. The students love memoir and really have the right attitude and appreciation for what the writers are offering of themselves and the courage it takes to be so vulnerable. I still end up reading, but it’s a great process with the interns and being a part of their growth as literary citizens with voices.

WOW: Cheers to all the dedicated readers who share their time and appreciation for writers’ work! Memoir Magazine publishes memoir, personal essay, creative nonfiction, and excerpts. In submitted work, what are some key elements that leave a lasting impression?

Mary: Vulnerability is the Holy Grail. Nothing leaves an impression like the spark of recognition or when we are emotionally moved by the experience. It’s one thing to tell us that happened and yet another to reach us emotionally. Only vulnerability in the telling can do this.

WOW: Vulnerability is key! Alternately, what, if anything, turns you off right away when reading submissions?

Mary: That’s a hard question because life can be so subjective. First off, all writing is good writing because it exists in a space and time where a human soul has undergone a process of self-awareness and endeavor to express itself, and that’s beautiful and magical for sure. So, I would always protect writing as an act and encourage everyone to keep writing.

I have to say the main things that turn me off (even if the piece might work somewhere else) are submissions written in san-serif fonts, like Arial. All the letters look the same in the words, and it’s exhausting and straining on the eyes of someone who is already reading far more than the average person. There’s a reason for fonts like Times Roman—respect the job of reading! Hehe. Another thing that turns me off is vulgarity for no reason (not the same as a vulgar character), but when the writer themselves choose to have an intimate conversation with me on the page, and they curse a lot or use vulgarity a lot, and it doesn’t seem to serve a purpose in the work. Also, any kind of discriminatory writing or lack of self-awareness in the writing. Finally, writing that is using the work to prove they are right to someone about something the reader isn’t privy to, like a parent, mate, or child. There are ways to do this effectively, but that requires Craft, and/or we have to give up something to do this—some truth/secret we might not feel ready to reveal.

Memoir writing is not for the faint of heart. It’s a warrior Craft. We are more naked than we believe when we put pen to paper. Ignore the elephant in the room at your work’s own peril, but the reader won’t—so neither will I.

WOW: Memoir is “a Warrior Craft”—I love that! Creative nonfiction comes in so many forms, from the personal essay and scene-driven memoir to lyric essays and hermit crab formats and even one-sentence essays. Do you have a favorite type of essay or structure? And do you have some examples/links to standout pieces published in Memoir Magazine, and what makes them unique? I know it’s hard to choose! But I’m sure our writers would love to read them.

Mary: OMG, don’t get me started because I love it all! I love being surprised, which is why Memoir Magazine is so wide open in what it is willing to consider. I hate the idea of rules in an art form—beyond the Craft. I fear too many rules could stagnate the Craft from evolving into whatever humanity needs it to become. And memoir is a voice—too many rules can lead to silencing. Memoir must stay free to get to the heart of universal truth. That said, I am very partial to lyrical essays and humor. I also love alternative structures and short micro essays, and I will advocate fiercely for brave vulnerable voices with a big impact.

Memoir essays that are alternative, micro, or just plain hilarious:
“An Ephemeral Experience of Permanence” by Amanda St. Claire
“Redacted Relationship” by Keith Hoerner
“Avocado” by Sophie Trevitt
“@clotheslinetimeline” by Maud Kelly
and
“Courting Miss George” by Garnett Cohen
or
“My Korean Therapist” by Joan Sung
“The Peppermint Kid” by Jeff Veazey
“The Question of Spilled Milk: A Short Parable” by Tracy Ross
“Memoir of a DREAMer” by Magda X

And memoirs that play with viewpoint to create an even greater universal connection, such as “Hypostasis” by Amy Bailey.

Memoirs that explore literature and life: “Iris on My Mind” by Odeta Xheka. Or combine food and longing, such as: “Sourdough, Ancestors, and Other Recipes for Time Travel” by Edvige Giunta, or “Strawberry Mud” by Shizue Seigel.

The things that cause embarrassment, but are just a part of life, like wishing our parents were someone else and then realizing that’s just not a thing...
“Drowning” by Natasha Williams
“How 90 Day Fiancé Helped Me Tell My Story as the Child of a Mail Order Bride” by Katya Suvorova
“How I Discovered America” by Sharmila Voorakkara

Essays that are unique in their vulnerability and truth, full of history, confession, and revelation, such as:
“Going to Find” by David Hensley
“Hearts Are Public” by Lola Kelly
“Waiting on the Stair” by Jonathan Odell
“Ashes of American Flags” by Justin Florey
“Beautiful, Disturbing, True” by Heather Caliri
“Finding Satan on the Road to Damascus” by Spencer Soule
“Healing Through Storytelling” by Melissa Zook

WOW: That’s an amazing list, and I look forward to diving in and studying them all! Is there anything you’d like to see in submissions that you currently aren’t receiving?

Mary: I’d love to see more science memoirs, more spiritual awakening memoirs, and more memoirs about the calamity of aging—something that we can read and make our own and get valuable wisdom and insight into the processes that are coming for us all—but most importantly, a third of the world population in a very short time. For the first time ever, the majority of the population will be elderly and/or grappling with what is true factually and individually/subjectively because of current trends toward blind acceptance of influencer interpretations of facts. And we are going to need a lot of documentation on this social phenomenon that is unique in all of history. I would, of course, also like to keep receiving stories of unique experiences or reactions to commonly documented experiences and stories that dispel myths about reality for those that think they understand it.

WOW: CNF writers, you heard it! Let’s see if we can make Mary’s wish list come true. I know there are plenty of WOW writers who write about the calamity of aging and the other great topics you mentioned. You’ve also created special editions that focus on important topics—#MeToo, #GunsandPeople, and #Recovery. I love that you give writers a safe space to share their stories. What are some tips you can share with our writers for writing powerful essays for social change?

Mary: Go for vulnerable and universal. Trust that your readers are smart, that we will learn new things and the stakes, just by you showing up and sharing your experience in a sincere and open way. Oh, and it never hurts to be funny! More than what happened to you, we want to know how it felt, and how you dealt with or did not deal with it.

WOW: Great tips! Memoir Magazine hosts the annual Memoir Prize for Books, now in its fifth year, which is an innovative contest for memoir and creative nonfiction book-length works in the categories of traditional, self-published, and previously unpublished—and awards $5,000 in prizes. There aren’t a lot of book contests, and this is an amazing opportunity! Can you tell us a bit about your judges, judging process, how many writers typically enter, how many winners are selected (I know there are quite a few!), and what you’re looking for in submissions?

Mary: About 350 writers entered the memoir prize last year, and fifteen or so make the final selection. Books make it through three rounds. The first round of readers evaluate and rate the book one to five, and the second round is me evaluating those books and preparing them for the third round with the final judge(s) who usually are made up of one or more winners from the previous year. We are looking for memoirs with the power to change lives and the way we look at the world.

WOW: That’s great! Speaking of book-length memoir, when we were in our writing group together, you were working on a memoir about an intense time in your life working as a model in Milan, Italy. Have you finished your memoir, and are you in the process of querying or submitting? Please share a bit about your book with our readers.

Mary: You have a great memory, Angela! And thank you for asking. I have been approached by a couple of TV writers to adapt my memoir, The Secret Life of Grownups. The writer I am most aligned with is now waiting for me to get a book deal, so she can sell the story “like the next day” as she puts it.

I am currently querying agents for the completed first memoir in a series of three books called My 10,000 Lives that includes my growing up and running away to Italy with $160 in my pocket to escape a drug dealer and ending up a runway fashion model for thirteen years. Everyone loves that story and those essays you are talking about, but I have lived such a Forrest Gump life that it quickly became evident the model years are just part of a much larger story, like what kind of person even gets on a plane at age sixteen with a one-way ticket to a foreign country? So, the first memoir is the story of this little unicorn of a Black girl who is born with gifts that nobody seems to know what to do with, and there is no one at the information desk to direct her on this journey. The first memoir is about how I gained the education to survive the next three memoirs.

The modeling in Milan, Perfect, is the second book in the series, where I go from homeless dropout to runways with super models, and what it costs for a natural born scholar to achieve and maintain society’s ideals of beauty. The third memoir, My 10,000 Lives, is about how I escaped domestic violence by going abroad and my two years on the run from the FBI with a breastfeeding infant. I go through five countries, change identities, and live in the jungle of Costa Rica.

I am hoping to find an agent who can guide my career through the film and TV process as well since the cinematographic nature of my life and writing is making film work inevitable.

WOW: Your memoirs sound incredible, Mary! It’s such a joy to see how much work you’ve done with your life stories over the years, and writing three memoirs is an amazing feat! I am sure you will find an agent soon. What are you working on now?

Mary: Query and submitting several parts of the book have gotten me into exciting workshops and anthologies. Right now, I’m working on an essay for an upcoming anthology. Here is an essay I’m proud of. It was first published in The Nervous Breakdown, which folded during Covid, so I reprinted it in Memoir Magazine: “Main Street Madness.”

WOW: That is one of my favorites for its strong sense of place and insight into your family dynamics, and I love the collective use of “we.” I remember you started it in our writing group, and it’s a joy to see it fully developed!

You also compiled and edited the Black Memoirs Matter anthology to chronicle the global Black Experience through memoir and explore universal truths. While chatting with you via email, you mentioned the anthology was completed, and you were actively submitting it to publishers and that you’d written a book proposal. Wishing you the best of luck in the submission trenches! It’s an important project, and I can’t wait to see it published. I imagine you wrote a proposal for your memoir as well. For so many writers, book proposals can be intimidating, and writers have asked us for tips. Do you have any advice you’ve learned while writing your proposals that you can share?

Mary: Wow, proposals are a big subject that so many hugely knowledgeable people, like Jane Friedman, are offering powerful insight into. I guess I can say query and proposal writing never felt safe until after many rigid attempts, it clicked for me, and I began to see the proposal as really being a basic conversation between the writer and the publisher or any potential person who might be considering coming along for the journey, like agents or publicists. A kind of casual conversational business plan for your book, like assume the sale—that sort of thing.

If you are just starting out it can be difficult to see all the practical ways you have of contributing to the hard work they would be doing to sell your book. Understand a brag is just meaningless unless its details can contribute to selling books. For example, my son is a musician songwriter in Los Angeles who goes by the name NoMBe. His songs have had over 700 million streams across streaming platforms, and he has over 60,000 fans, and many of them are Blue Check friends of his (with millions of their own followers) who all know and love me (his posts about me are some of his most popular). It never occurred to me to mention that he is my biggest fan and would be promoting my book to his loyal fans who already are my fans by proxy! He is even the reason I was approached by a filmmaker friend of his in the first place who had heard parts of my story from another friend at a dinner party! So that is something I maybe should have mentioned in earlier proposals because it is a definite asset to my future sales. But at first, I thought it would be uncool to mention it, like they might think my writing was not good or that I was using my son instead of letting the work speak for itself. Once I added it to my proposal, the anthology gained interest from two publishers right away!

So, about proposals, it is a social journey. Don’t be afraid to be real and vulnerable and share social information because you feel like it might be out of context!

WOW: Excellent example and tips, Mary, and I didn’t know that about your son! You must be proud, and I will definitely check out his music. It’s wonderful one of his friends offered to adapt your memoir!

Memoir is definitely my favorite genre to read and to write, and I believe personal stories are more important than ever, especially in a time of AI. So I’m always trying to keep up with memoir publishing trends, and earlier this year, Allison K. Williams and Jane Friedman published an article on Brevity: “The Hard Sell: Why Memoirs Get Fewer Book Deals,” which states that in the past twelve months on Publisher’s Marketplace, there were only 267 memoir deals, and many of those were celebrity memoirs. Considering all the writers I know who are currently trying to shop their memoirs, that’s a sad number! I admire your advocacy for memoir and how you give memoirists a platform to share their stories. What are your thoughts on the current marketplace for memoir?

Mary: Thank you, Angela! I love memoir and admire memoir writers! 267 mostly celebrity memoir deals is a sad number indeed!

This was a good article. I am so happy that Allison spoke about the need for genres in memoir because that is something I have been strongly advocating for through the Memoir Prize and categories on the website.

I think it could be helpful to have baseline categories of memoir, such as Commercial memoir and Literary memoir and Heritage memoir and then go on to genres from there.

Memoir is unique in that there are career writers, and there are people with a story. Some people are both, and some are people with a story who are willing to become writers and learn the Craft to tell it, and some are not. This is not an indication of their story’s worth or their worth as human beings. Only that Craft is concerned with the reader’s experience.

It’s definitely time to rethink distribution methods for memoirs in the Heritage and Literary categories. Like Jane says, “Fiction has genres, and genres have fans,” and “We don’t need agents to send our work to university and literary presses; and plenty of memoirs sell to the small, specific audience who need to hear that story ... Finding that audience means doing research in advance and promoting our own work, and many authors balk at the idea of ‘doing the publisher’s job.’”

While it’s certainly helpful and empowering for many of us to think of research and promotion as a choice on our own terms. That we can choose to “work hard to appeal to the masses necessary to attract a Big Five publisher; or work hard to discover who our readers are and get our books into their hands.” And this is certainly a big part of how far our book can go.

I am fortunate to come from a marketing background, and so I believe that’s always been true and never was a “choice.” Whether we know it or not, from the age of one, every day we are already always selling some idea, reputation, or product, and therefore behooves us to do the research and be as aware as we can of our audience and outcome of our efforts. And writing is no different. Doing research in advance and promoting our own work is not just “publisher’s work.” That’s like insisting the success of your child’s education is your partner’s job or solely a teacher’s job. It’s a damaging delusion to think so.

Successful writers aren’t just lucky—they do the work, too. They show up, and reach out, whether that means doing interviews, teaching, publishing essays, or posting on social media—somehow they all give back, and are strong advocates of their own work. I mean, who can love your work more than you do? It’s just good solid sense to know your audience and engage with them, and if you get a Big Five publisher—all the better! But do it anyway! Why? Well, for one thing, it will make you a better writer, and some writers get Big 5 publishers and then do not even make back their advances because they never did the work. Who knows how much this might have contributed to fewer memoirs deals with Big 5s? We must get over this romantic notion that someone else will do “the work” for us if we want our ideas to be heard. The sooner the better.

Today, writing is more like 10 percent writing, 30 percent revision, 10-20 percent reading, and 40-50 percent engaging and self-promotion! Do we wish to spend all our time writing? Sure! I bet tennis stars also want to just play all day, but they have to do career maintenance stuff, like pose for magazine photoshoots, attend galas, do charity work, give interviews, critique others, and teach salons to give back too. I bet they find all the ways to even learn to love it, and so could we! It’s all part of the practical process of becoming and keeping the coveted GOAT role. And maybe we still might not ever be the GOAT, but my motto is “Reach for the stars and land on a cloud.”

Also, we need to give way more space to the idea that writing is all about The Process—something AI cannot take away from us. So much happens when we write that is not spoken of enough. Many people wouldn’t even try to write a memoir if they knew how truly arduous (and deeply rewarding) The Process was beforehand! Ha! Seriously though, (to quote Dana Carvey’s Biden character on SNL, “I’m being serious, folks! And another thing!” Hehe) I think AI is only forcing us to see memoir writing in a more inevitable millennial way—write, tell story, rinse, and repeat.

I think the problems with memoir sales are a result of bigger problems or changes overall. For example, college professors are noting that young people are losing a reading culture and reading fewer and fewer books. Professors are basically teaching poetry, excerpts, and essays at this point (I am delighted to share that many use Memoir Magazine as parts of their curriculum!). Our beloved librarians are in trouble, and my latest visit to a Barnes and Noble bookstore was mystifying, if not sobering. They didn’t even have a section called “Memoirs” on the main floor! They just put an advertisement placard over the heading sign for that section and attempted to coolly extend current events and nonfiction tomes, like Freakonomics in with celebrity memoirs (and a few non-celebrities), which then became the Classic Fiction area! I’d say I was witnessing a process that hasn’t yet found its final version. But the majority of the space was reserved for the fantasy, YA genres, and perhaps as much as 70 percent of the store was devoted to novelty gift items.

Does this tell me people are not reading memoirs? No. And certainly, the majority of readers are not sci-fi fans or eager to relive the trials of high school. But these just might be the readers that still show up for that new ink paper smell. It only tells me that the role of bookstores is still evolving in our modern times. And that big commercial book chains are not the only places people get their books today, that people may be getting their memoirs from other places, in other forms of distribution, and maybe in other packaging. We must tell our stories, but the way we do that is fast changing. The past is gone. We must adapt or die. But authentic true stories aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. We need them too much to help our traumatized selves to evolve. So, whatever you envision is hard or going to be hard about your memoir or the future of the memoir genre, it’s all totally worth it!

WOW: Amen! Smart answer, Mary, and you’ve given us a lot to digest. I really appreciate you answering all my tough questions. Let’s end with a lightning round of fun holiday questions! What is your favorite:

• Holiday
• Drink
• Tradition
• Movie
• Song

Mary: 

• Holiday: I like every holiday. I think that the USA doesn’t have nearly enough holidays, and I think we could easily use ten more. We could make Monday into Holiday Day and move to a four-day work week!
• Drink: Hot chocolate—I have tons of different types.
• Tradition & Movie: Watching holiday movies from childhood, and my favorite movie is Elf with Will Ferrell. I’m not the sort to put lights on my house that I have to take down a few weeks later—I would just end up leaving them up all year, which might prove dangerous or costly!
• Song: My favorite songs are “Simple” by KD Lang and the Holly Cole version of the “Waters of March.”

My thanks to our intelligent, passionate, and generous guest, Mary McBeth, founder and editor-in-chief of Memoir Magazine! I had a blast chatting with her, and I hope you had a blast reading.

For those in our readership who have written a book-length memoir (whether it’s traditionally published, indie published, or unpublished manuscripts), consider submitting it to The Memoir Prize for Books before the deadline of February 28, 2025!

For shorter memoirs, up to 3,000 words, Memoir Magazine is open to submissions year-round here: https://memoirmag.com/submit

Wishing everyone a safe and joyous holiday season!

***

 

Angela Miyuki Mackintosh is an artist living on a ranch in the Sequoia National Forest, California. Her creative nonfiction has been published in a number of literary journals. Most recently, her essay about her Okinawan mother and growing up mixed race, “Sayonara, ai,” was published in Under the Sun’s 2024 issue and nominated for a Pushcart Prize! A big thank you to Under the Sun’s dedicated readers and editor Cindy Bradley, who helped her shape the piece, as well as editors Martha Highers and Nomi Isenberg! Angela’s essay about sex trafficking, “The Recruit” was published in Exposition Review’s “Lines” issue. Her work has been nominated four times for a Pushcart, three for Best of Net, and once for Best American Essays. Angela is an editor at WOW! Women on Writing. When she’s not writing or editing, she enjoys oil painting, trail running, watching horror flicks, and snuggling with her three rescue cats and Rottweiler.