In the summer of 1964, the FBI found the smoldering remains of the station wagon that James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman had been driving before their disappearance. Shortly after this awful discovery, Julie Kabat’s beloved brother Luke arrived as a volunteer for the Mississippi Summer Project. He was one of more than seven hundred volunteers from the North who assisted Black civil rights activists and clergy to challenge white supremacy in the nation’s most segregated state. From his tale, author Julie Kabat has creatad a brillaint new memoir, Love Letter from Pig, My Brother's Story From Freedom Summer, an in-depth look at the life of a history maker, a change agent, and blazing star. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars, instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Today my guest is writer, author and actor, Amy Wilson. She is the author of the memoir, When Did I Get Like This?: The Screamer, the Worrier, the Dinosaur-Chicken-Nugget-Buyer, and Other Mothers I Swore I'd Never Be, as well as the co-host of the popular parenting podcast WHAT FRESH HELL: LAUGHING IN THE FACE OF MOTHERHOOD. The author of the MOTHER LOAD, a one-woman show which toured to 16 cities after its hit off-Broadway run, she has appeared as an actor on Broadway and as a series regular on TV sitcoms. Her new book is Happy to Help, Adventures of A People Pleaser, just out from Zibby Books. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars, instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Anita Felicelli's short stories have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Midnight Breakfast, Air/Light, The Normal School, and elsewhere. She has contributed essays and criticism to the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Alta Journal, Slate, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Times Modern Love column, among other places. Her short stories and poems have been anthologized and in 2023, one of her short stories was performed as part of Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts. Her books include Chimerica: A Novel, the award-winning Love Songs for a Lost Continent and her new short story collection, How We Know Our Time Travelers, published by WTAW Press. Listen in as we discuss the benefit as a writer to being able to write across forms. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars, instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Sarah LaBrie is a TV writer, librettist and memoirist whose new memoir, No One Gets to Fall Apart, is just out from Harper Collins. Listen in as host Marion Roach Smith asks the author about the vulnerability needed to write memoir, how to find the language for defining ourselves and writing about family mental illness. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars, instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Liz Morrow is a ghost writer and collaborator for thought leaders and and industry experts. With Ariel Curry, she runs Hungry Authors, which coaches authors to publish their books. They have co-authored the new book, Hungry Authors, The Indispensable Guide to Planning, Writing and Publishing a Nonfiction Book, just out from Rowman and Littlefield. Listen in while host Marion Roach Smith interviews Liz Morrow on what authors need to know to write and publish nonfiction books. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars, instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Comics artist and writer, Teresa Wong is the author of the 2019 graphic memoir Dear Scarlet: The Story of My Postpartum Depression, a finalist for The City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and longlisted for CBC Canada Reads 2020. Her comics have appeared in The Believer, The New Yorker and McSweeney’s. Her new book, All Our Ordinary Stories, is just out from Arsenal Pulp Press. Listen in as she and I discuss the intimacy that the graphic memoir allows. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Sarah Sherbill's memoir, There was Night and There was Morning: A Memoir of Trauma and Redemption, is just out from Union Sq. and Co., and chronicles a road to redemption after her father, a beloved rabbi in an Orthodox Chicago community is also a man who abuses his family. In Sarah's role in the family, she is the secret keeper, until a secret so grave is revealed that creates the demand to write it all down. Her work, including a remarkable full-page opinion piece in the Sunday New York Times, explores redemption and it complexities. Listen in as author Sarah Sherbill and Qwerty podcast host, Marion Roach Smith, discuss writing memoir, how to wite into redemption and how to look at one family story and turn it into essays, a book and opinion pieces. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Sarah Leavitt is a cartoonist and author of the graphic memoir, Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me (2010), and the author of the award-winning historical fiction comic Agnes, Murderess (2019). Sarah is an assistant professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where she has developed and taught undergraduate and graduate comics classes since 2012. Her new book, a graphic memoir, is just out from Arsenal Press. The book is titled Something, Not Nothing, A Story of Grief and Love. Listen in as we discuss the varieties of grapahic memoirs, how to write a graphic memoir, what distinguishes graphic memor from strictly prose memoir, and so much more. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.