So You Want to Publish a Memoir

Maybe you have drafted a handful of chapters. Maybe you have an entire manuscript sitting on your desk. Maybe you already have the photo picked out for your book jacket.

Now what? How do you put your story into the world?

Come learn the ins and outs of the nonfiction industry with two writers who have recently planned, pitched, and published their own memoirs.

Eliese Colette Goldbach and Annmarie Kelly-Harbaugh will share details from their own journeys to help aspiring writers on the path toward publication. They’ll talk about strategies for landing an agent. They’ll reveal the secrets of a winning book proposal. They’ll discuss the difficult task of marketing your work, and they’ll tackle the emotions that arise when your personal tale is suddenly available on Amazon.

As both of these authors know, finishing a memoir is the easy part. It’s then that the real work begins.

PRESENTERS
Eliese Colette Goldbach is the author of Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit, which was published with Flatiron Books in 2020. She received an MFA in nonfiction from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Western Humanities Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Best American Essays 2017. She received the Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Award and a Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant from the Ohioana Library Association, which is given to a young Ohio writer of promise. She lives in Cleveland, OH, with her husband.

Annmarie Kelly-Harbaugh is the author of Here Be Dragons: A Parent’s Guide to Rediscovering Purpose, Adventure, and the Unfathomable Joy of the Journey, a memoir about the sweet and wonderful misery of raising children with someone you love. Her writing has appeared in various online publications and NPR’s All Things Considered. She is also the host of Wild Precious Life, a podcast about reaching beyond our divisions to discover what it means to be courageous, creative, and alive. Annmarie lives in Cleveland, Ohio, with an assortment of dying houseplants and a marshmallow dog named Higgins.

Details: So You Want to Write a Memoir takes place Monday, July 12 and Monday, July 19 from 12-1pm remotely through Zoom.