Attention All Life Experience/Memoir Writers

I’ve been brainstorming how to increase the visibility of my writing in the published world outside Medium.

In my past life as a professor, I have a pretty decent publication history, even outside those in the academic research journals. The way this happened was I was part of anthologies that focused on specific topics. For example, a woman I knew was editing a volume on what it is like being from lower classes while attending college and graduate school. It is called, Reclaiming Class, and it has a series of short chapters in it.

Then, I contributed to another anthology about the lived experience of having privilege especially race, gender, and class privilege. I wrote as a poor person and the process of coming to terms with having white privilege under those circumstances. This book, Explorations in Diversity: Examining Privilege and Oppression in a Multicultural Society, is in its 2nd edition.

Finally, I published a chapter in an book on mental health, The Handbook of Serious Emotional Disturbance in Children and Adolescents, that focused on my area of expertise of the mental health of college students.

All of this background is meant to convince you that it is a viable path to publication in a topic area of your expertise. Including your area of expertise — your life. Recently, I have seen a great number of people on Medium who have cross-over in their life experience/memoir expertise. You’re strong writers vying for attention on topics ranging from eating disorders or other mental health topics to overcoming parental absence to losing a loved one.

I just read about how the internet, the world, is reaching “peak content.” As a writer in this era, you emerge into a time when the marketplace of ideas is flooded. The glut of writing makes it especially challenging to bring attention to one’s own unique contributions. I think producing chapters on life topics is one of the strategies for bringing your work to the forefront.

Here’s my proposal: Who would be interested in meeting on POMQA’s Slack account (for more on this, see this Medium article) to discuss possible topical anthologies? For example, I would like to write in an anthology focused on people who have eating disorders that aren’t the traditional stereotype of the well-to-do, white girl. As another example, I would like to find other former foster children who were taken from their parents because their parents couldn’t find jobs. Or because their parents were mentally ill. It’s kind of blurry for me, because both were true.

If you’re interested, I’m [email protected] and dmegivern on Slack.

Some of my Medium articles can also be found at www.deborahmfoster.com in a more searchable format with more added daily.