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Archive | Anthology of Memoir Writing

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.

ingrid littman

Hemingway and Dinosaurs

My pulse quickened as we walked up the white cement stairs to Ernest Hemingway’s famed Cuban home, La Finca Vigia. His presence lingered throughout the house.

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Something About the Water

The following memoir excerpt was written by Chris Madsen of Olympia, Washington. I never got used to that first splash of chilly water. It came from a natural spring concealed behind a stockade fence, so clean and pure that we all thought Mr. Trecartin should bottle it. Instead, he let the spring fill the swimming pool […]

Retiring to Memoir Writing

Applying Denis Ledoux’s Motivation Technique

Using a Motivation Technique The Memoir Network was pleased to receive this answer from blog reader Justine Kuntz in response to Denis Ledoux’s article titled “Motivation Technique for Writing:” In the spring of 2012 I decided to do what you have suggested in your entry titled “Motivation Technique for Writing.” I had concluded a memoir […]

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Giving Dad the Bird

We enjoy when our readers submit their memoir-writing samples to us! The following story is from the memoir of one of our blog readers, Lori Robinson. We hope you will enjoy this sojourn in Africa: Two kinds of people sign up for African safaris. Most, myself included, want to see “The Big Five”–-lion, leopard, rhino, […]

write your memoir

Outing to the Mine Office

An excerpt from Digging for Treasure, Two Pioneer Coal Developers in Portage, Pennsylvania by Jean Crichton My sharpest memories of Portage, Pennsylvania, date from certain Sundays before my father’s death in 1952 (when I was 8). After church and Sunday dinner at our suburban home in Westmont, outside of Johnstown, Father would suggest “a drive […]

Here to Stay: Developing Nationhood and Community in New France

Here to Stay: Developing Nationhood and Community in New France Here to Stay: Developing Nationhood and Community in New France is excerpted  from my historical memoir Here To Stay. Here I write about my maternal ancestors Bartélémy Verreault and  Marthe Quittel. As I recorded genealogical information—the births, marriages and deaths of my ancestors, I began […]

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A Franco-American Memoir: April Fool’s Day

DL—The following excerpt is from We Were Not Spoiled, the Franco-American Memoir of Lucille Verreault Ledoux as told to Denis Ledoux. My Father Learns About April Fool’s Day Moving to Howe Street also meant that I lost my friends on Jefferson Street. I could still get together with Juliette and Jeannine at school but they […]

What’s Special About Writing Your Business Memoir?

Guest Blogger: Heroic Annie Hill

She’s more than a name on the genealogy chart, although I don’t know what she looked like or the sound of her voice, the color of her hair. Her heroic character shows in census records. Her scarred and paint daubed blanket chest sits in a place of honor in my home. My great grandmother, Annie […]

My father-in-law’s 100th birthday

On February 24, 2013, I celebrated my father-in-law’s 100th birthday. Arthur Blowen has been gone now for 28 years, and the people who were his peers and friends are mostly gone. There are many family stories about him. They are told as mythic journeys, Arthur slaying the dragons that assailed him. Here’s the plot line […]