From the Editor's Mouth

Kristen Elias Rowley is the Humanities Editor at the University of Nebraska Press, and she handles creative nonfiction and memoir, which is why I begged her to come speak to my graduate workshop last night.  She graciously agreed, and she spent an hour and a half with us, talking about how she came to occupy her position (unpaid internships, a masters in literature, hard work), what she does all day (does she sleep?), what she's seeing now in memoir manuscripts, and what to do and what to avoid when querying editors.

No mere human could sum up everything valuable Kristen said, but here are my favorite nuggets.

"The easiest way to lose your readers is to tell them what to think."  This, re: characterization, i.e., don't vilify people in your memoir.  Let the story unfold.  Tell a balanced, complex story, and let readers discover it for themselves.

"Anyone can have something great or terrible happen to them.  What makes a memoir is the writing."

"I like things that fill a void, topically or stylistically."

Kristen identified two key trends she's seeing (and liking) in memoir now:  short, linked, non-chronological pieces that work together as a book, and the tendency to turn the authorial I/eye outward to engage the world.  She also suggested that large trade publishers may be pressed to seek and highlight plot and sensationalism when it comes to memoir, whereas university presses (less driven by the bottom line) have more freedom to focus on manuscripts the defining feature of which is literary quality.

Great evening, with lots of great questions from the graduate students.

And writers Jon Pineda, Patrick Madden, Barrie Jean Borich, Robert Vivian, Nancy K. Miller, Lisa Catherine Harper, Tracy Seeley, and Mary Clearman Blew, your ears must be pleasantly burnt by now, because Kristen couldn't say enough good things about your work and about working with you.