This Memoir Anthology is our online magazine where we publish the best memoir stories that come to us. We have been working with writers since 1989.
In these three decades plus, we have helped bring thousands of memoirs to life—in tele-classes and workshops, in coaching sessions, and via editing and thousands more via all our resources such as the free My Memoir Education and items in our bookstore.
These writers have produced terrific stories about love and abandonment, about careers and reanimating deadend lives, about racial and ethnic diversity and conflict.
Many of these stories can serve as inspiring memoir models for your writing. In this category, we also include interviews we have done with writers and posts which they have written on their writing process.
We have conceived of the Memoir Anthology as having two functions:
~ we want it to be a repository for the hard-earned achievements that so many of the writers we have worked with and of others who have communicated with us have created.
~ we also know that writers sometimes wonder what is possible in memoir writing. If this is you, our Memoir Anthology is a place for you to read what your fellow writers have accomplished. After reading, write your stories and submit your best to us.
Whenever there is a published book from which the excerpt in the Memoir Anthology was taken, we link to it and hope that you will encourage your fellow writers by purchasing their memoir.
Our Reading “map”
Below, you will find a full list of all our anthology publications. In addition, to help you navigate your way to that part of the Memoir Anthology that would be of most interest to you, we have divided the excerpts into three sections:
~ For stories from writers with whom we have worked, click here.
~ To read what our Editors & our Associate Memoir Professionals have written, click here.
~ Friends who have come to us from many sources have also sent us excerpted stories. Click here for their contributions.
Your publication path
When you are ready, we would like to review your memoir snippet for inclusion in our anthology of great memoir excerpts. Be sure to write a note to us to tell us who you are.
~ Send us your story.
Remember: whatever you do today, write a bit on your memoir.
The Irreplaceable Memoir
People are driven to express themselves. Each of us has a story and an urge to tell it. No other style is as effective as the irreplaceable memoir. (more…)
Another Bucksport Story—An Ice Holiday
One morning, when the sun promised to be bright and the sky clear, as we sat down to breakfast at refectory tables, on a day that seemed to be a day just like every other day in January, Father Guy would announce, “Aujourd’hui, c’est un congé de glace [Today, we are having an ice holiday].” […]
Feedback on “Collect Memories at My Fiftieth Class Reunion”
Collect memories at my fiftieth class reunion Last weekend—and a warm sunny three days it turned out to be—I spent, as I had written that I would in the last newsletter, with those of my my high school classmates who could attend our fiftieth high-school reunion. Some of us had not seen each other in […]
She Loves Her, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah
Who were these Beatles, anyway? Everyone was screaming. Everyone, even Betsy, sitting next to me. Betsy was screaming her brains out. I stared at her in disbelief. But as I looked around Park Theater, the only movie theater in the Caldwells, the very green end-of-the-line little towns on the long boulevard that stretches from the […]
An Extraordinary Woman in an Ordinary World
It was inevitable that I should write Aurore: My Franco-American Mother. From early childhood, I enjoyed my mother’s stories, visualizing the scenes as she talked about her family and the past. During my teen years, I thought my mother talked too much, repeating the same stories over and over again. Whenever she was on the […]
My Family Feels the Depression
Excerpted from Business Boy to Business Man, by Robert Verreault (with Denis Ledoux). On October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed. Of course, I didn’t know that, as I was only six. Soon though, my parents, although they didn’t have stocks to crash, were beginning to feel the effect. By 1930, everyone was slipping into […]
There Goes The Neighborhood, Part 2
We had already witnessed the demolition derby over the snowy weekend between Christmas and New Year’s. We figured the upcoming motorcycle party couldn’t top that. The demolition derby started with the arrival of large trucks bearing strange cargo. (more…)
There Goes the Neighborhood, Part 1
Gunnar was mowing his field. This was odd. He never mowed his field. He was making ever-tightening circles around the knobby acre, the sweet grass and raggedy weeds falling in neat windrows behind him. (more…)
Pudgy: A Childhood Memoir
When I was ten, I ran away. I packed everything that was important into my sturdy cardboard suitcase. I left a note on the kitchen table warning my parents not to look for me at the high-tension wires, those metal electrical towers that marked the back border of our property and which were in fact […]