MEMOIRIST IDOL
Announcing Our 2022 Memoirist Idol!
Right after these messages….
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What?! You’ve waited long enough, you say? Surely, you jest. (And don’t call me Shirley.)
It’s come down to this. The day is here. The moment you’ve all been waiting for. But first…! Let’s recap our season.
Round One
We had 90 amazing entries into our Memoirist Idol competition. And thank sweet baby Gertrude that our first two rounds were voted by peers, because there is no way our little judges’ panel could have narrowed them down.
Let me tell you all this. If you submitted an entry into the contest and did not make it past one of the first couple of rounds, please do not take that as a reflection on your writing. Believe me when I say that the quality of stories submitted to this contest went above and beyond what any of us expected — and we already know the level of experienced writers we have on The Memoirist.
Early entries that received high peer praise in their pay-it-forward paragraphs included Missy Crystal’s My Mother Ruined My 14th Birthday With Her Cruel Words, Adventures in A&E: Dialysis Disasters by Jade Hadfield, Running for Her Life- a Woman’s Daring Escape From Captivity by Heather Paz, and May Y. Yang’s We Were Outsiders, But We Had One Another — He Had No One. A couple of my personal favorites were Toya Qualls-Barnette’s How I Became a Jet Magazine Centerfold and Cliff Hightower’s I Am My Father, My Father Is Me.
Round Two
Voters had 13 exquisite stories to choose from. Voters had to be Medium members and writers, and they could only vote once. Although we had to eliminate votes we could not match up with Medium memberships, it did not change the top results. There was a tie for third place, so after the round two peer votes came in, our panel of judges had four stories to choose from for final voting.
Why, yes…I’ll make you wait a little longer.
