Memoir Refresh:
New Memoir Writers to Read & Learn From ($79/$99)
We all recognize The Liar’s Club author Mary Karr as a foremother of the genre and who hasn’t been told to grab a copy of Bird by Bird? But in the last several years, there’s been a memoir explosion but where to start? Who should you be reading? How has the genre evolved as these new writers have emerged on the scene? Reading new writers gifts us the opportunity to imagine new possibilities for our own writing by expanding on what we thought we knew about the genre. In this seminar, Minda Honey will share excerpts from memoirs and personal essays by writers like Kiese Laymon, Carmen Marie Machado, Terese Mailhot, and Alexander Chee, discuss the craft element at play, and make reading recommendations based on skills you’re interested in strengthening. There will also be a writing exercise so you can try your hand at growing your craft.
Minda Honey’s (she/her) essays on politics and relationships have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Oxford American, Teen Vogue, and Longreads. Her work is featured in “Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger”, “A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South”, and “Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown's Cult Classic.” She is the editor of Black Joy at Reckon — the newsletter has nearly 60K subscribers. She was the director of the BFA in Creative Writing program at Spalding University, a relationship advice columnist for LEO Weekly in Louisville, Kentucky, and founder of the capsule project, TAUNT, an alt-indie publication for Louisville that elevated the voices of the unaccounted during the height of the pandemic and ended in late 2021. Her debut memoir, THE HEARTBREAK YEARS (Little A, October 2023), is a hilarious and intimate portrait of a Black woman finding who she is and who she wants to be, one bad date at a time.