“[I work with] people who are writing their first memoir because they feel really compelled to get their story of something big and important that they experienced or that they learned out into the world, because I believe that stories create empathy, and empathy is how we change the world.”

[EDITOR’S NOTE: With news breaking that Florida has removed The Diary of Anne Frank from its shelves, I decided it’s time to make this interview, which had been a bonus episode for the Patreon community, available to the public. It makes sense that the state removed it even though “None of them were under formal review by the district, and they hadn’t been flagged by local parents as potentially inappropriate. Parents with children in the school system even had the opportunity to opt their children out of a particular reading, without removing them from the class for everyone,” as reported by The Guardian.

As Mitchell points out later in the interview, reading a person’s true account evokes more empathy and compassion in the reader. But we are on a fast track to dehumanizing violence against people, and that’s just one reason why keeping these books in circulations is so important.]

The month of June carries a lot inside it, and so when I saw that it’s Anne Frank‘s birthday and also the anniversary of The Diary of Anne Frank being published on June 26th, it unlocked a new road into how we learn history: memoir.

The Impact of Media History on the World

Soon, we begin to untangle Media History and the direct lines between historical movements and our digital lives today, it feels fitting to begin with Stephanie Mitchell, a beautiful and incisive soul.

I love running Out Think Media, not just because of how I can connect with audiences like yourself, but also reconnect with the smartest and most inspiring people in my lives. I met Stephanie 15 years ago at Antaeus Company, where she was studying classical theatre.

It makes perfect sense to me that both Stephanie and I landed more in the writing world, and I’m just thrilled to introduce you to her!

Stephanie Mitchell is a book coach and editor who has been helping first-time writers with their manuscripts for over fifteen years. Since 2018, she has specialized in working with people to write their first memoir – whether they’ve got a published novel under their belt, a long-running blog, or no writing experience whatsoever. She runs the Memoir Writers’ Book Club on Facebook, and her course for beginning memoirists, the Memoir Launchpad, helps people with an important story to tell to navigate the process in a compassionate, supportive environment.

At storytellingthetruth.com, people can download her free workbook on how to write their memoir with confidence, knowing they’ve included all the right stories and skipped the ones they don’t need, at storytellingthetruth.com/freeworkbook

Full, lightly edited interview above. Full transcript is below.

00:00 Introduction to Stephanie Mitchell

01:28 Stephanie’s Journey into Memoir Writing

0415 The Art of Writing a Memoir

10:25 Memoirs and Their Impact on History

22:55 The Future of Memoirs in the Digital A:ge

30:07 Conclusion and How to Connect with Stephanie

Transcript

Introduction to Stephanie Mitchell

CMJ: [00:00:00] Stephanie Mitchell is a book coach and editor who’s been helping first time writers with their manuscripts for over 15 years. Since 2018. She specialized in working with people to write their first memoir. Whether they’ve got a published novel under their belt, a long running blog or no writing experience whatsoever, she runs the Memoir Writers Book Club on Facebook and her course for Beginning Memoirists.

The memoir Launchpad helps people with an important story to tell to navigate the process in a compassionate, supportive environment. Hello, Stephanie. Thank you so much for joining us.

SM:

Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m honored. This’ll be fun.

CMJ: 

Can you give us a little just a quick intro to yourself?

SM:

Yeah, absolutely. I am a book coach working with Memoirists, specifically people who are writing their first memoir because they feel really compelled to get their story of something big and important that they experienced or that they learned out into the world, because I [00:01:00] believe that stories create empathy, and empathy is how we change the world.

CMJ: 

Oh, empathy. Yeah. That is a magical word right now. Absolutely. And as someone, this will come up again, but as somebody who took the beta course, it was fascinating and I’m so glad I still go back to, yeah. I still go back to those notes to frame things, so–

SM:

that’s great to hear. I’m really pleased to hear that.

Stephanie’s Journey into Memoir Writing

CMJ: And how, so how did you begin in memoir writing and editing? ‘Cause we met in theater. Yes. 

SM:

Yes. I was acting for, I. I mean, my whole adulthood until basically this year. And I was editing as a side job, as a day job, but I was never very successful as an actor, which meant that pretty much what I was doing was editing.

For most of that time I was in the like, throw me anything that you want and I will edit it. Kind of bucket of editors. I didn’t specialize at all. 

CMJ:

I remember [00:02:00] that bucket. 

SM:

Yep. And then around 2018, I had a client who sent me a memoir to edit. It wasn’t the first memoir I’d done, I’d done a few of them, but this particular client turned out to be a book coach himself, working with a really specific small community in Baltimore who all had.

Very compelling, very personal stories that they wanted to write. And he was coaching them on how to get over their sort of mindset hurdles about not having any education and never having written before to just get words onto paper and write their stories. And then after he was happy with the work that I did for him, he referred all of them to me.

So I had this string of like 25 memoirs come in in a row. All from people who really had very compelling stories to tell and truly did not know what they were doing when it came to writing them. And so I got a lot of experience very [00:03:00] quickly in what doesn’t work and how to I. Clean that up so that it does work.

And I discovered that I actually really loved this genre. And then I started reading everything I could find about how to write memoir and how to put memoir together really effectively and started editing more and more of them and coaching people who hadn’t yet written their manuscripts, which is a far better way to do it than to take a complete manuscript and try and overhaul it.

And now that’s what I do. I discovered that it’s, it’s, a far more engaging form of writing for me because of what I was saying before about this capacity that it has to really change the way that readers see something and the understanding that people have about it, a subject. And I’m just, I, I’m in love with it now.

CMJ:

Yeah. And I remember when I did the cohort with you you explained in a very much more articulate way than I could, if I could recall it exactly, but just how to make a memoir universal, which [00:04:00] I struggle with that just in articles as well. Like what is it that was my experience that is helpful or beyond me.

Yeah. But I’d love to hear about that in in a book form. And also if you have like a couple examples you could share. Yeah, definitely. 

The Art of Writing a Memoir

SM:

So all memoir. Works on two levels. There’s the plot, which is just what happened, and then beyond that, there’s a much more universal message or even argument. If you think about like a persuasive essay.

Most memoirists have something that they are trying to convince their readers of, and that’s something is going to be something that everybody can relate to and connect to, and resonates with a really wide readership. Whereas the plot, what actually happened in the memoirist’s life is very often not something that the average reader can relate to because that’s the hook of the story.

That’s the, that’s the, this crazy thing happened to me and I have to write about it. Most people [00:05:00] reading it won’t have experienced that thing, which is why it’s worth writing about. But what makes it worth reading about is the universal story underneath. So one of the examples that I, that I cite in the memoir launchpad, this is a client of mine from many years ago, possibly, actually, the first memoir I ever edited.

I. He was an older man, a retiree, and he and his wife in their retirement had decided to sell all their possessions, buy a sailboat, and spend two years sailing around the world. And neither of them had ever sailed before, and they did not realize that this was going to be hard. Like genuinely really hard.

And it’s a, it’s a very dramatic book. They faced death a number of times on the water. They got to explore all kinds of fascinating places. They met all kinds of wonderful people. That’s the plot, the universal story underneath that was about how, what, what it did to their relationship. So I would say that the argument of [00:06:00] this book, what the writer was trying to convince readers of.

Is that when you go through something really challenging with a partner, it will bring you close in ways that you could never have become close if you hadn’t gone through that challenge together. Hmm mm-hmm. That’s what that book is about, and that is a universal theme that relates to, to everyone and to, to all of our lives.

So yeah, hopefully that’s, hopefully that’s clear. Yeah, it’s great. I mean, it’s, it’s very similar. The way I remembering directing and like mm-hmm. The plot and then the story, what’s actually happening. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Because the plot, the plot may be where the excitement lies, but it’s not, the, the emotional core of the story isn’t in the plot.

It’s usually in the relationships or in the, the, the development that one of the characters, the main character undergoes what they learn, how they change. [00:07:00] That lesson, the thing that the person the, the, the basic plot of a memoir can usually be broken down into I didn’t know something, a bunch of stuff happened to me in which I learned it, and now I am different in x, y, z ways.

That’s what most memoirs are. And that’s also can be very universal. The, the, here’s how I’ve changed. Is a way that people can really access the core, the emotional core of a memoir, even if all the stuff that happened in the person’s life is way outside the realm of what most of us would experience.

CMJ:

Yeah. Like that kind of goes into the next question and researching for this. I heard that memoirs will split the, sometimes will split into two selves, your narrating self and your acting self. And although I didn’t, read this fully. What was the memoir? That was, I’m, I’m glad My Mother’s Dead something like that.

Jeanette McCurdy. 

SM:

I think I have not read that one, but I’m gonna add it to my mental list. 

CMJ:

Oh, I [00:08:00] heard it’s amaze like I, I, I watched a lot of reviews about it because it was about child neglect for actors like minors. Oh, right, okay. Yes. And she apparently did an incredible job of being present when she was younger.

Mm-hmm. And having and giving us that experience from those eyes. And then when she was objective and yes.

SM:

So, so all, almost all memoirs, not every single one. And these days in, in in the last like 10 years, there’s been a trend towards memoir that reads almost like a novel. And when? When you get one of those, you really only get what you’ve termed the acting self.

You don’t get the narrating self, but conventional memoirs, most memoirs do have both. Every memoir takes place in at least two times. There’s while the memoir is just writing, there’s now and then there’s whatever part of their story they’re sharing. And that’s then, and obviously it’s the [00:09:00] same person in both time periods, but especially depending on how much time there is between the two.

They could have very different sets of experiences, very different degrees of perspective. If somebody is writing a book about something that they lived through as a child, they’ve got a whole different lens on what happened to them now than they had then. But what makes a memoir compelling to read?

In most cases, certainly the contemporary style is to stay in the moment. In the scenes as they happened as much as possible. And then the, the narrating self might come in every so often and just throw in a little bit of reflection, a little bit of something that the, that the child or the earlier self didn’t know or didn’t have enough perspective on to be able to articulate properly.

I think that’s probably, probably what you’re talking about there when you talk about the narrating self versus the acting self. 

CMJ:

Yeah, that’s interesting that it’s changed. Yeah, [00:10:00] it’s very interesting to see the, the trends shift. I’m gonna put a pin in that to talk to you about something else like later.

Always. So there’s always more so going so with there. And I like that. You know, I, I like that when you were describing it, that there’s sometimes maybe that you’re being more object, that you’re being the narrating self. And tying memoirs to history. Mm-hmm. 

Memoirs and Their Impact on History

CMJ: And, and just in terms of how we know about different parts of history what do you think the memoir, and specifically Anne Frank, of course, with her diary what do you think the memoirs place could be in, in history

SM:

i think that the place for memoir in history is as this incredibly immediate and incredibly authentic lens into places and times and events that we have not experienced ourselves. So we were talking earlier about empathy. [00:11:00] There’s actually on a, on a neurological level, on a neuroscientific level, when we hear or read or watch a really compelling story our brains actually mirror the emotion that the protagonist is experiencing.

I. So we, we literally feel what they are feeling to varying degrees. Depending on how empathetic of a reader or a watcher you are, you’ll, you’ll experience it more or less. But this is a, a phenomenon of the human brain. We mirror the emotions of others when their story is presented to us in a really compelling way.

And that means that when we are reading a memoir set in a place in time, in history. We can really access the truth of those experiences so much more deeply than we would ever get them just from reading a textbook or taking a class on the subject, or even from reading, like watching a documentary. It will just never be as emotionally compelling.

As an [00:12:00] individual’s story, which is what a memoir is. And novels can do it, absolutely. Novels can do it. A good novel reliably does it, but a memoir adds just that extra level of authenticity and truth to it because it’s literally true. Assuming that it’s not a con, you know, every so often you come across a memoir that is just a con and it’s not real.

But let’s assume that these are good faith memoirs. Written by real people who actually lived through what they say that they’re living through. We get the emotional truth and we also get the literal truth. And we can put those two things together for a really meaningful understanding of what people went through in that slice of history.

So for me, memoir is actually a really useful lens on times and places that we haven’t lived through ourselves. If you wanna learn about. Pre-revolution Russia, Neal’s memoirs are a really good place to start. Like if you wanna learn about working class East End London in the 1940s and 1950s.

Call The [00:13:00] Midwife was a memoir before it was a TV series. That’s a really good place to start. You can read that book. 

CMJ:

So yeah, that’s, I’m sorry that that call the midwife that put me through so many emotions. 

SM:

Oh, I know. I mean, it’s a very well constructed TV show that’s just designed to make you cry every episode.

CMJ:

And it works. Every episode, every episode. 

SM:

The, the book isn’t quite so, isn’t quite fine tuned for manipulation in that way. But it does give you this very vivid lens into what that time and place was like. So I think that this is a really useful entry point into history via memoir. When it comes to Anne Frank, the to a diary of a young girl.

It is worth mentioning that this is not exactly technically a memoir because she did not write it with the benefit of time and reflection she was writing in the moment. But she was also editing as she went along with the view to the idea that people might read it in the future. So she [00:14:00] was going back and kind of tightening things up and polishing it a little bit and trying to, to clarify her points.

As she went the way that a memoirist would. So I think that it’s fair to class it as memoir, even though it’s a little bit of a blurred line there. . Yeah, there’s, there’s a whole, there’s a whole sub sub genre of Holocaust memoirs and that’s the only one I know of that was written by a child at the time.

And, she was having such a unique and specific experience, and she has such a unique and specific voice and such a bright and positive outlook on it all. It just, if you want to look past the statistics and zero in on the humanity of individuals who were living through this horrific time, there’s really no better way to do it than reading Anne Frank’s diary.

CMJ:

No, I, I have a very vivid memory and I’m sure I. Read it before or was aware, read some of it [00:15:00] before or was aware of it, but like in eighth grade? Well, first I was pissed ’cause I wasn’t cast as Aunt Frank as, imagine I was the sister who was great. Ah ha. But but I, I remember very clearly like, you know, we read the play out loud as a way to engage in it.

What, why do you think that her particular story has made, has been basically, to me, that was the Holocaust education until college, honestly. 

SM:

Yes. I think it’s because it’s very, it’s a very clean, sanitized, easy to read lens on the Holocaust.

So if you are teaching a. Class, a broad class of children about the Holocaust. You want to give them the facts. You don’t actually necessarily want to give them the deepest, truest lens on what that experience was for people. You don’t, you don’t want your eighth graders Reading Night by Ellie Riesel necessarily.

You can save that for a little bit [00:16:00] later. You’re not probably gonna give an eighth grader mouse by Art Spiegelman. You, you’re gonna sit on those books until people are just a little bit older. In most cases, I don’t remember what age I was when I was, I read, I was assigned both of those books. Neither of those were books that I picked up on my own, but I think I was in high school by then.

CMJ:

And Frank, I only picked up, sorry, I only picked up most saw, I saw him speak a year ago. Oh, wow. Yeah, I was, I had no idea he was the garbage pail kid guy Like he the garbage pail kids guy. Yeah. He decided those. He drew all the garbage s It’s amazing. 

SM:

I did not know that either, huh.

That’s awesome. Yeah. Very different. Mouse is very different, very different. 

CMJ:

Mouse is a graphic novel, very, very different. 

SM:

Mouse is incredible, but it’s a very hard read. And the Diary of Anne Frank is not a hard read because she was this, this vibrant, bubbling, optimistic spirit who was living through something horrific, but not by the time she was living through something [00:17:00] truly horrific.

She wasn’t keeping the diary anymore, right? So we don’t, we don’t have her words about being in the camps and on the marches. We have her words about being in the annex, and that’s it’s just a much more child friendly lens on that story. So I think that’s probably why. That is, yeah. I, funny.

SMJ:

Like I, I, these are all things that probably we’re in subconscious, but I love just like really thinking about this and teasing it out. , Do you remember the impact that it might, that it had on you or any time through your. Life.

SM:

So by the time I read diarrhea of a Young Girl, I was very familiar with it already. I think that I, I think that my first ever audition monologue when I was like nine was an excerpt from the play.

But, but I hadn’t read the whole play, but I was familiar with it. I’m Jewish, so I learned about the Holocaust really young. I think, I think I first learned about the [00:18:00] Holocaust when I was six. Because there was a, a memorial ceremony at my synagogue during Hebrew school and just all the kids were there.

And I remember going out after the ceremony and saying to my mom, what’s the Holocaust? ’cause it’s Holocaust Memorial Day. And we just had a whole thing about it. And I have never heard of this. And she was like, why are they introducing my 6-year-old to this concept? Which is a very fair response. But it did mean that by the time I was assigned.

The reading at maybe age 13 or so. I, I was very familiar with the story. What I hadn’t expected was how immediately relatable her voice was and, and her, just her personality on the page. It was like she, she was somebody I could have known. And I was very like her as a young kid. If you wanna, if you want to look at Anne Frank’s diary as a, as a memoir and try and identify what her argument is, I would say, she actually says it point blank at some point, sort of halfway through.

She says, I still believe in spite of [00:19:00] everything, that people are really good at heart. And I think that that’s gave me chills ’cause I’m struggling with that. Yeah, yeah. I think that. You know, we, we grownups often do. But at 13, she was prepared to hold onto that belief and try and convince potential readers of it through what she was writing.

Trapped in an annex and being helped by friends and sometimes by people she didn’t know as well. And, you know, people, people were risking their lives for her and she was taking a lesson from that rather than from everything else that was going on around her. And for me at age 13 or however old I was when I first read it, that was my lens on the world as well.

I really believed that. And it, it was, I saw myself in her so clearly that like this could have been me if I’d been in that place and in that time which of course was very, was very powerful for me. [00:20:00]

CMJ:

 Yeah. There was something else in there that. Oh do you mind if I ask? ‘Cause I grew up and going to Catholic school for 12 And I re , is there a different reception or a different. Impact of her diary. If you are Jewish, like is, I mean, I know that seems like a really kind of weird question, but does it have a different place in, in your own culture or childhood?

SM:

That’s not a weird question. I don’t know. I think, I think the way it would have a different place. In my experience, I can’t speak for everyone. I grew up in a moderately religious family and with a lot of Jewish education I was in, out outside of school. I, I didn’t go to a Jewish school growing up, but I was in religious education three days a week for most of my childhood outside of school.

[00:21:00] So I, I was really steeped in it. So for me I had a lot of Holocaust education outside of the Diary of Anne Frank for a lot of years. It was far from being the only Holocaust education that I got. What I got was ever increasing depth of Holocaust education. So I got like bare, bare bones from my mom when I was six and then.

Maybe at age eight I was given a little bit more information, and at age 12 or 13 we read the Diary of Anne Frank. And then when I was a little bit older, we were reading other things and I knew some survivors and nobody in my family was a Holocaust survivor. But some of my friends had survivors in their families and people had very personal stories of how their grandmother had escaped or how their grandmother had survived or how their grandfather had not survived.

So for me it was one story among a great many which, if anything, may have lessened its impact. I also grew [00:22:00] up learning about other times that that Jews had faced a lot of danger just for being Jews in various parts of the world. I didn’t see the Holocaust as. An isolated incident. I saw it as part of a long history of other people trying to wipe us out.

So the idea of having to go into hiding, like it wasn’t just Stan Frank who did that. Jewish families have been going into hiding for a couple thousand years now, every so often. So for me, I guess the difference was that it was part of this broader tapestry of information that I had. Rather than being spot lit in quite such a clear way.

CMJ:

Hmm. That’s so interesting. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. Of course. Thank you for asking. We are, we are gonna jump a little bit. No problem. I know we’re starting to run low on time. 

The Future of Memoirs in the Digital Age

CMJ: It also, ’cause, you know, this is, I don’t think media is really about [00:23:00] digital literacy when it comes down to it.

But I’m curious too with with memoir and flogging, which is so like the whole.

Evolution of vlog, vlogging, video blogging [00:24:00] on YouTube, but on all those other channels too. It, it’s been such a journey and I wonder if you feel like, how you feel like that might be changing diaries or memoirs, you know. I suggested a, a girl I know keep a diary while she was in London actually, and mm-hmm.

SM:

She was like, a, what, what, what? Yeah. I don’t know if, I don’t know if the young, I don’t know if the kids these days are, are keeping diaries because they’re, they’re doing it all publicly, right? They’re chronicling everything publicly, but I would argue that. This is a very separate thing from memoir, and we have yet to see whether it will impact people’s desire to write memoirs in the future.

I’m guessing that it won’t because the thing that drives you to write a memoir is very different from the thing that drives you to [00:25:00] keep a vlog or to show up on TikTok. One is processing your experiences in the moment, and the other is processing your experiences in retrospect and when you have the, the whole arc of the story that you are wanting to tell when you can see, I.

What that story even was, because in the moment you don’t know what story it is that you’re telling. The first job of a memoirist, when you first sit down to write a memoir is to figure out which bit of your life you even wanna talk about. ’cause you don’t talk about your whole life. Your, your whole life doesn’t relate to this argument that you’re making.

You only need the bits of the story that relate to that argument and that have to do with that plot of, I didn’t know something, I learned a bunch of stuff, and here’s how I’ve changed. Whereas what people are doing when they’re just sort of live streaming their lives isn’t curated in that way at all.

It’s a, it’s a completely different type of processing of [00:26:00] experience. So I’m guessing that those same people who are vlogging now. In 30 years, when they look back at their lives, some of them will have something they wanna say and will they sit down to write it or will they present it in some other form?

I do not know. But the process of curating their experiences and framing them into a narrative arc that tells a story with a meaning, that’s not gonna change. I don’t see how it could Thank you.

, One thing that I did wanna just raise, especially since since your work is actually mostly about media literacy, is that, and talking about primary source material is that we are now in a world where primary source material is getting a little less reliable. And so when people, what.

I said thank you. Yeah. So, so when you, 

CMJ:

I’m kind of having a mental breakdown about it, to be honest with you. Yeah. 

SM:

This is kind of, yeah, of [00:27:00] course. Like, it’s, it’s it’s, it’s an extremely big deal. So it just, just as that applies purely to memoir, which obviously it applies to. It’s gonna affect everything in our lives and in our understanding of reality.

But narrowing it down to how it affects memoir, when the memoirists of 30 years from now are doing their research for their books, and they’re going back to the primary sources of now and of 10 years from now, they’re gonna have to know how to work out what they can believe. Versus what might be a deep fake versus what might just straight up be somebody just lying, which is, you know, a slightly different thing versus what’s got some kind of narrative spin on it that’s makes it an unreliable source.

So yes, I’m glad that there are people like you out there doing the extremely good work of helping people break this stuff down because it’s gonna affect everything, perhaps least importantly, [00:28:00] memoir, but also memoir. Well, I mean, memoir are, they’re so it can be so important. 

CMJ:L

I just read it was, it was a memoir of a Shari Franke, whose mother just got arrested.

She was a, she had a, a pass, a YouTube channel called 8 Passengers. And to make a very, very long story short, she was, she and her business partner were arrested for neglect and abuse of her two youngest kids, which as soon as it happened, all these YouTube video commenters were like, here’s the receipts.

Yeah. We saw it happen on screen. , The oldest daughter wrote a memoir and I just bought it as soon as possible because yeah I, just a support in that situation. Absolutely.

SM:

I, I think that one of the key functions of memoir and maybe something that we don’t always think of when we think about the functions of memoir is for activation to, [00:29:00] if you have a cause. You can bring people on board for your cause by writing about it compellingly and especially in the form of memoir.

And if you have been through something like that and you want people to know that that is happening so that they change their behavior around their media consumption or even so that they change their behavior around how they are creating media with their children. Writing your story like that for the broader public to read can be a really powerful way to actually make a small or bigger amount of societal change.

So this is one another. One of the reasons that I really, really love memoir and working with Memoirists is because people can affect change through it. And it sounds like this might be somebody who’s found a way to do that as well. 

SM:

I think so. And if you need a new subgenre, the children of loggers are growing up.

Absolutely. So [00:30:00] there’s, yeah, there’s gonna be a whole stream of them. But thank you. 

SM:

Oh my gosh. Thank you so much. This is so fun. 

Conclusion and How to Connect with Stephanie

CMJ: And I know that we mentioned your, the course that I took with you, but. Tell us more about how people can get in touch and if there’ll be another course and whatever you’d like them to know.

SM:

Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you so much. The pleasure has absolutely been mine. And, and thanks for inviting me to, to, to invite people along into my little, my little corner of the internet. I don’t have a course running at the moment, but I’m expecting to relaunch a new version of it towards the end of the year that is geared a bit more towards people with a little bit of writing experience.

I’m finding that most of the people I’m working with have done some writing, so this is gonna be adapted for people with a little bit more experience. But I will also have a much shorter course available for brand new writers who want some help finding their voice as a creative writer.

And in the meantime you can find me on my shiny new website, [00:31:00] storytelling the truth.com which is specifically for my memoir business. You can find me on Facebook or Instagram at Storytelling the Truth in both places. And if you are interested in writing a memoir yourself, come along and join my book.

Club on Facebook, the memoir, writers Book Club. We are reading a different memoir every month, and I am showing up at the moment more than once a day, but I’m hoping that’s gonna tone down a little bit, like showing up all the fricking time, pointing out specific examples of what the writers have done that made their work.

Good. Like why is this publishable writing? We’re reading, we’re reading books that have been conventionally published by authors who were not famous in their own right. So they were published just on the strength of their book rather than on the strength of their name to see what makes them work, what makes them tick.

So come on and, and join us. I’d love to have you, and if you wanna work with me one-to-one you can find me via storytelling the truth.com. [00:32:00] 

CMJ:

And I’m not gonna say how long I’ve known you, but having, having spent a lot of time in libraries and theaters and different spaces, Stephanie’s one of the, the, I think most incisive people I’ve met incisive.

SM:

Oh, thank you so much. That’s really kind. , 

CMJ:

Thank you so very much and I’m sure we’ll find a reason to bring you on again. 

SM:

Oh, it would be an absolute pleasure. 

CMJ:

Thanks again and we’ll talk soon.

Stephanie Mitchell is a book coach and editor who has been helping first-time writers with their manuscripts for over fifteen years. Since 2018, she has specialized in working with people to write their first memoir – whether they’ve got a published novel under their belt, a long-running blog, or no writing experience whatsoever. She runs the Memoir Writers’ Book Club on Facebook, and her course for beginning memoirists, the Memoir Launchpad, helps people with an important story to tell to navigate the process in a compassionate, supportive environment.

At storytellingthetruth.com, people can download her free workbook on how to write their memoir with confidence, knowing they’ve included all the right stories and skipped the ones they don’t need, at storytellingthetruth.com/freeworkbook

Learn more about teaching digital literacy to kids

Read more: No Perfect Parenting

Listen & Watch more in our Patreon community.

Read our Fair Use Disclaimer