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Personal Essay is Memoir in Short Form

If you have written your memoir, or are in the process, and it’s not shaping into what you envisioned, you could transform it into a personal essay. It might be easier, at some point, to concentrate on writing a personal essay, rather than a book-length manuscript. There are many posts on The Write Spot Blog about how to write personal essays. (Please scroll down for the how-to posts). You may be writing vignettes to satisfy your desire to write family stories. You can publish these with the help of many do-it-yourself publishing companies. If you want your personal essays to be published for public consumption, there are many opportunities for submission: Big Brick Review, Chicken Soup for The Soul, The Christian Science Monitor,  Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction and so many more places. Check the back pages of Writer’s Digest magazine. You can submit your writing to be included in…

Places to submit

Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction

The editors of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction invite you to “submit writing that is lyrical, self-interrogative, meditative, and reflective, as well as expository, analytical, exploratory, or whimsical. They encourage submissions across the full spectrum of the genre. The journal encourages a writer-to-reader conversation, one that explores the markers and boundaries of literary/creative nonfiction.” Personal essay subjects can be about nature, environmental, travel, memoir, and more. General submission dates: August 15 – November 30. Fourth Genre Steinberg Essay Prize submission dates:: January 1-March 31 Click here for guidelines.