(Writing With Immediacy in Memoir.)

But now Grandpa—we’ve been on terms of endearment for three decades and counting—knows that my traditional Cuban father tried to ban me from playing baseball after I got my first period. That’s what you get for becoming a señorita.

I doubt my athletic exploits will stick in Grandpa’s mind. But will he be thinking about that first period the next time I visit him in Florida?

And he hasn’t even made it to the major depression I went through when our daughter turned six, the same age I’d been when we were kicked out of our home in Cuba. One night a guard arrived unexpectedly with our exit papers. We’d been waiting three years as gusanos, worms, the revolution’s term for people like us who were trying to leave the country. We suffered insults, turned over our house and what little else we owned to the revolution, and left friends and family behind we knew we’d never see again.

Will my father-in-law’s still-sharp mind focus on that part of the story or the parts where I reveal more than he and, let’s face it, even I expected? Will he think I’m weak for having suffered from depression? Stupid for telling the world how my ovaries impacted my baseball career? Will he feel embarrassed for his son and grandchildren, whose privacy has taken a hit because of my writing affliction?

I worked on Property of the Revolution: From a Cuban Barrio to a New Hampshire Mill Town for many years, off and on, and nonstop for the last three. I thought carefully about my goals for the book, what to put in, what to leave out, story structure, chapter titles, Cuban history, US politics, quotations vs italics, and, of course, commas.

What never crossed my mind was that my menstruation history would one day end up somewhere in Grandpa’s head. That doesn’t seem fair to either of us.

Grandpa isn’t the only reader I’m worried about. I have neighbors, acquaintances, and friends who are quite analytical, private, introverted, and measured. They’re also super punctual, by the way. Some of them have gone out of their way to tell me how much they loved the book. Behind their praise, I sometimes hear the faintest question: Why would you reveal those things?

No one ever told me to think about those questions prior to publication. During the writing years, I was asking other questions, like, would the book ever be finished, would it ever see the inside of a bookstore? I felt entirely alone, as if I were groping my way through an unlit house in search of something vital—a word, an idea, a memory—that might or might not even exist. Those worries kept me far from the reality of how naked I’d feel one day when the book was in front of readers—real human beings.

When I started, I didn’t even want to write a memoir. I had wanted to write a novel based on our family’s experiences as refugees and fledgling Cuban Americans. But an acquaintance with years of experience in the publishing world told me, back when the idea of writing a book first started toying with me, that a memoir would be easier to write and possibly easier to sell. She was wrong.

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I didn’t know many people in publishing then, so I set off to write a memoir. I realized early on that telling truths that I’d kept hidden from myself most of my life—not just my own truths but my family’s—and respecting historical facts were going to clobber me. I also knew those challenges might even make an author out of me, if I could pull it off.

As a journalist, I was comfortable anchoring our family’s story in historical events, the 1959 revolution, The Bay of Pigs Invasion, The Missile Crisis, the Mariel Boatlift, the Elián González controversy, etc. But I wanted readers to understand how those events impacted us personally. I wanted them to feel what we felt when the nightly news jumped out of the television set and landed on our sofa.

To bring them into that intimate space, I needed to earn their trust. I think that’s why I wrote about the dicey truths that another writer might have omitted. My reader, I hoped, would recognize the difficulty of sharing deeply personal moments and value my story even more as a result.

It’s a calculus all writers make, consciously or not. We are peeling away the layers of our soul with each word. Our ideas, our values, our mistakes and idiosyncrasies are all up for analysis, ridicule, and, with luck, appreciation for offering something that makes a reader feel human, see the world differently, or takes them somewhere they’ve never been and won’t want to leave.

That’s what some readers have told me my memoir did for them. Hearing their reactions makes the years of work, the doubts and frustrations, the sacrificed privacy, the all-nighters, the no shower days, the tears—because who doesn’t cry when they’re writing a book—worth it.

Those moments have reminded me again of the battle cry my mother taught me when I was young. Ponte guapa. Make yourself brave. I write about the motto’s impact on my life in my memoir, and I talk about the phrase when I do presentations. Recently, in a high school Spanish class, a student asked if I thought the meaning of the phrase had changed over the course of my life. Did ponte guapa mean the same thing to me now as it did when I was a young, confused, refugee surrounded by uncertainty and loss?

I know, right? He was only 17 years old. His question made me realize that ponte guapa, when I was young, inspired me to be tough, to not cry, to not look at the hard or ugly things that were happening to me, to us.

Today, ponte guapa inspires me to look at the hard and ugly things that happened to me, to us, to cry if need be, and to not be afraid of sharing any of it with readers, including Grandpa. I am a memoirist. That’s what we do. That’s how we’re brave.

Check out Ana Hebra Flaster’s Property of the Revolution here:

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In this interview, Sonita discusses the vulnerability that came with writing her new memoir, Sonita, the difference between writing a book and writing music, and more.

Name: Sonita Alizada
Literary agent: Watermark Agency
Book title: Sonita
Publisher: HarperCollins
Release date: July 8, 2025
Genre/category: Memoir
Elevator pitch: Nearly 15 million girls, including many in the U.S., are forced into marriage each year. Each of these girls has a price tag—and a story. Sonita Alizada was almost sold twice. Her price tag was $9,000. The money her family received for selling her would pay for her brother’s wife.

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What prompted you to write this book?

What prompted me to write this book was a mix of pain, purpose, and a promise I made to myself.

I grew up in an environment where girls were often silenced and sold, and I knew that if I survived, I had to use my voice for those who couldn’t. This book is more than just my story, it’s the story of million of girls like me, whose dreams were interrupted but not erased. After some time of performing music and sharing my message through rap, I felt it was time to put it all into words, sharing my story from when I was about 5 years old until now. I wanted people to know what it means to be told you’re worthless—and what it means to fight that lie every single day. I wanted to tell some people that they should not say sorry when they hear my story, but to say that nothing is impossible, to say and believe that many other Sonitas out there could have the same or even better ending if they are seen and hear. 

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

It took me about five years to go from the first idea to the final manuscript and yes, the idea changed a lot along the way.

At first, I thought I was just writing down memories so I wouldn’t forget where I came from. But the more I wrote, the more I wanted to know/share, so I realized I was also writing for every girl who has been told “no.” I started with a focus on my personal journey from escaping child marriage, becoming a rapper, but over time, it became much more than that. I wanted to explore how music gave me power, how silence shaped me, and how resilience is not a single act but a lifelong process. The book evolved into a story not just about survival, but about transformation.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

Yes, there were many surprises and learning moments especially how long and emotional the publishing process can be.

One of the biggest surprises was how deeply involved I needed to be, even after writing the manuscript. I thought the hard part was over once I finished the draft but then came editing again and again where I had to relive painful moments and find new ways to express them with clarity and more detailed. I also learned how important it is to trust your voice, especially when others suggest changes. Another learning moment was realizing how much a good team matters like my editors, agent, and supporters helped shape the book into something far more powerful than I could’ve done alone.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

Yes, one of the biggest surprises was how hard it was to write about things I thought I had already processed.

I assumed that since I had spoken publicly and rapped about parts of my story, writing them down would be easy. But sitting alone with the silence of the page brought up emotions I didn’t expect. Grief, anger, even guilt. I also discovered that writing a book requires a different kind of vulnerability. In music, I could use rhythm and metaphor to express pain, but in the book, I had to slow down and dig deeper. Another surprise was how much healing happened in the process. Some chapters were so difficult I had to take breaks for days. But through that, I found clarity and even forgiveness, for myself and for others.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I hope readers walk away from this book with a deeper understanding of what it means to fight for your voice in a world that tries to silence you.

This isn’t just a story about me, it’s about the girls who are still hidden, still being forced into silence, marriage, or invisibility. I want readers to feel empathy, yes, but also urgency. I hope they feel inspired to challenge injustice, to believe in the power of their own voice, and to support others who are fighting to be heard. And for those who’ve been through pain or oppression, I hope they see this book as proof that healing is possible and that dreams are worth chasing, even when the world tells you otherwise.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

My one piece of advice is: Write like no one is watching at first.

Don’t worry about sounding perfect or being accepted. Just tell the truth. The raw, messy, emotional truth. That’s where the power is. You can always shape it later, but if you censor yourself too early, you’ll lose the heart of what you’re trying to say. Also, be patient. Writing takes time, not just to finish the pages, but to understand yourself through them. Some days it will hurt. Other days it will heal. But keep going. Your story matters more than you know.

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(The Art of Imagination and Finding Voice in Memoir.)

I knew all of this and still, writing Flood—a memoir that aimed to act as a house that could hold the story of my husband’s affair, the birth of our twins, and the clownish care I received in response to an aggressive tumor in my right breast—I fell prey to doubt. Doubt was delivered through other people’s opinions in writers’ workshops that I charged on my credit card and also in graduate school where earning an MFA required producing an effective manuscript. The stakes felt high. I could not fail in the telling of my own story.

The overwhelming advice I received was to write the entire memoir in past tense. But I wrote it in present tense. This isn’t happening now an advisor wrote on my manuscript with a red pen.

There is nothing more immediate than bad news about your health. Far less immediate is writing about that news and having it become a book. Or not having it become a book. What I did have were two legal-sized boxes filled with past-tense drafts. Each was a natural evolution of the one before and also not right. Immediacy—that elemental thing that keeps a reader turning pages—was missing, like a house without a foundation.

Immediacy, urgency, and pacing are sometimes used interchangeably when describing a piece of writing, but they are different. The pacing of a story is the speed in which it travels. Urgency is the engine that drives it. Immediacy is akin to prioritizing. In a moment of crisis, there is no time for reflection. There is only do this now. For me, this was whatever the moment required: couples counseling, caring for two babies, chemotherapy—crying.

The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard had a great deal to say about immediacy. The entirety of his Intuition of the Instant from 1932 is devoted to unpicking Gaston Roupnel’s dramatic novel Siloë. Specifically Roupnel’s idea that “time has but one reality, the reality of the instant.”

The reality I was working so hard to describe was a series of instants lived underwater. But first I had to see the waves.

The following is a three-step blueprint that I developed for Flood:

1. I printed the complete manuscript and laid it out, chapter by chapter, on the floor.
2. Reading the last paragraph of chapter one followed by the first paragraph of chapter two, I asked myself are these paragraphs in conversation with each other.
3. When they were, immediacy was present. When they weren’t, I considered the penultimate paragraph of chapter one. I often found that the last paragraph of any chapter could be eliminated.

With my manuscript spilled all over the living room, I dug through a diary I’d written contemporaneously. What was remarkable was the effusion of exclamation points: Things are great! I shaved my head! The babies cried all day! I rarely use exclamation points. Their presence in the diary was like a series of red flags around a construction site.

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I excavated those exclamation points as if I was digging for the first time. Rewriting the series of medical events in present tense and letting flashbacks remain in past tense resulted in the manuscript reading organically. The wave of one event led to another. A house appeared before my eyes.

Bachelard’s understanding of Roupnel’s novel is concerned with the sensation of immediate comprehension, “a moment when we suddenly understand our own message.” It’s in these flashes of insight that we know how to behave. Why when we cut our thumb slicing cucumbers for dinner, we don’t keep slicing cucumbers but instantly determine what’s appropriate: bandage in the bathroom or stitches at the hospital.

When I adopted past tense, something vital was lost. It was as if I was writing my way out instead of writing my way in. As Roupnel wrote in Siloë, “It is in the virtue of this present alone—in it and through it—that we become aware of existence. There is an absolute identity between the feeling of the present and the feeling of life.”

As the authority on our own work—even if it means going against the advice of seasoned writers we admire and respect—we have to be willing to swim. Past tense or present tense, fast or slow pacing, sustained or relaxed urgency, all of these are secondary to the immediate.

When Flood was accepted for publication, I burned the boxes of wholly past-tense drafts in my backyard. Then the rain came.

Check out Christine Kalafus’ Flood here:

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(The Messy House of Memoir.)

I bucked any remaining social anxiety that has lingered since my son Christopher died nine years ago and set up a meeting with a woman I didn’t know, to gather up some perspective since she is further down the book publishing path. As with my grieving journey, it has benefited me to look to the women walking ahead. I arranged to meet with her at a local coffee shop. Watching her take a sip of her latte after swirling it with cream, I listened to her describe how she shifted her life’s course from being miserable in her banking career to becoming the writer she dreamt she’d become since she was a little girl. It turns out, that to write, publish, and market a book, although increasingly commonplace (in fact, I’m beginning to wonder if writing a memoir has become a rite of passage for all midlife women) throws you into a world without a roadmap.

I took a gulp of my americano and looked across at her wizened hazel eyes and recognized immediately that she too had embarked without having any idea what it would look like. I soaked up her validation as we agreed upon the importance of asking for direction and support along the way. Like me, she didn’t need her hand held but wanted help navigating the necessary, bountiful, and varied resources available to writers. Writing courses, writing communities, writing groups and partners, writing retreats, writing editors and coaches. The two of us alternatively nodding our heads concluding that writing and publishing a book demands devotion, commitment, passion, and purpose to see it through. And money. And time. And more money.

We chuckled as we homed in on the fact that the writing path asked us to adapt to unforeseen setbacks, learn to advocate for what we needed, integrate feedback, and spend more years writing than we could have anticipated. Writing my memoir took seven years of writing and crafting alongside grieving, parenting, and working full-time. And at least a year of editing and design to prepare it for print, along with jam-packed preparation to market it by discerning which suggestions to follow, getting a head shot, procuring blurbs, and trying to become technologically savvy enough to prepare to promote it on social media with flare. No wonder, I told Nancy, when I was finally ready to release my sacred work into the world, my soul laid bare, I asked myself, not for the first time, “Why am I doing this again?”

As Nancy told me she is about to market her third book, the answer to that question began to crystallize. I have developed close friendships with my writing partners whom I met eight years ago at a writing retreat. We have laughed, cried, and shared our stories of surviving trauma and heartache. I have had the privilege of getting to know a cohort of women publishing with my publisher. We have cheered on one another as each book has launched. Nancy, whom it feels like I’ve known for a lot longer than the hour we sat together, told me writing taught her to get to know herself more intimately. She writes to commune with nature and relate her observations about what getting deeply present reveals to her. Writing has taught me so much, taken me to the truth, and given me strength in my vulnerability in hopes that the tears in my words might help anyone hurting feel less alone.  

The question of “Why?” will vary for each of us who contemplate putting a book into the world. But for me, my son is my reason. May “Reaching for Beautiful” honor Christopher, capture the story of his life and help his spirit shine on. If you knew him when he was here, you get to remember his brightness. If you didn’t, I get to brag about it. Writing my memoir, even had I not decided to publish it, was healing for me and ultimately needed to be shared. It connected me to my child when I entered the darkness, enabled me to express and move through every messy iteration of my grief, reflect on my firstborn’s life and reconcile every decision I made as his mom so I could make meaning of my seismic loss and survive it. Despite not knowing what it would take to get here, my writing journey has offered so many unexpected gifts beyond the healing of connecting to myself and my son. For anyone embarking on this writing journey, may you walk the winding path alongside a community of fellow women travelers.   

Check out Sally McQuillen’s Reaching for Beautiful here:

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(4 Tips for Good Adventure Writing.)

I put the vignettes away and started learning how to write in the more familiar, and what I thought would be more publishable, form of a novel. I published a collection of essays strung together as a memoir, and then a book of chick lit. All the while, I had the feeling that I was wedged into a too-tight pair of jeans. I thought, “This is how writing is, the lack of oxygen comes with the job.” I didn’t realize the lack of oxygen was from the stress of trying to make myself into something I wasn’t. I love novels, oh how I love them. But I was made to write vignettes.

It’s one thing to wear an alright outfit into public. The jeans look fine, the whole thing is passable. But when you find something that is an extension of yourself—the dress or shirt that screams YOU—other people are the ones who can’t catch their breath. In the very best way, one might go low on oxygen, of course.

Neither of the books I wrote while wearing too-tight denim did well enough to make the industry look twice. What I learned from those years and the mild heartbreak: If you’re going to fail it feels a lot worse to do it while you’re wearing your own clothes. (Pretty Woman viewers, please cheer!)

And so I returned to vignettes. Are they a hard sell? Yes. But in case no one has said this to you yet—if you aren’t a well-established author, or a celebrity with a well-established platform, everything is going to be a hard sell. In the hopes you might skip some of the discomfort of years toiling on stories that aren’t your story, here is the question that helped me through my mid-career writing crisis: Do you want to sell books or do you want to write books?

Fast forward 10 years. Imagine yourself never getting an agent. Never selling a book. Or imagine your self-published book languishing online. Do you still like writing? Do you wake up in the middle of the night with a desire to spend the next day only with your computer? If that’s the case, you probably want to write.

Now imagine yourself selling many, many books in a genre you hate. Do you feel like a sell out or do you feel like the luckiest duck ever? If you feel a quack-quack coming on, selling is probably higher on your radar. (And there is no shame in the game, this is about honing in on your goal.)

If you care more about selling books—then take the advice of my writing teacher. Find the type of novel that you think will be hot in a year, and write until you hit those blessed last two words ‘The End.’ (Which actually means, the beginning of editing, then getting an agent, then finding a publisher, but those are pep talks to be had in other articles.)

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If you’re in the game because there’s a story in you that you are going to need to uncover over the process of years, or decades, in a form that maybe isn’t even evident to you yet, welcome to the world of elastic waistbands. We aren’t the most popular crew. We don’t get the most likes. Influencers don’t know our names. But when we do write something that takes someone’s breath away—oh, the feeling of the universe aligning is thorough and complete.

The funny turn in my story is that a book of my vignettes is now getting published in May. Let me be clear that I do not tell you this because I think there’s a formula there such as, “Pursue what you love and publication will come.” This industry is too hard, cold, and cutting for that. But what I’ve described above is a different kind of formula: “Pursue what you love, sit in the comfort of knowing you’re telling your story, and what others think eventually stops mattering.”

Someone asked me not long ago if I wish I’d never taken that teacher’s advice and put vignettes away in the first place. My first answer was, “Of course.” But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I couldn’t actually say that. I am grateful for the oxygenless years, the books that weren’t bestsellers, the hard-won years of returning to the desk every day. How can we know what fits until we know what doesn’t? Is the goal to be published or to be real, dimensional people?

Check out Anna Mitchael’s They Will Tell You the World Is Yours here:

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(How to Write Your Memoir as a Thriller.)

Writing about coming of age in the face of my father’s schizophrenia, there was so much I didn’t remember about childhood memories from years ago and so much about his illness I didn’t know. How could I fill in the gaps of memory and experience to convey an honest and compelling story?

There’s a growing interest in what’s been termed speculative creative nonfiction. A way of writing into the gaps of our stories through research and using speculative language to signal that you are writing into what you don’t know, to invite the reader to imagine with you.

Research Questions to Fill in the Gaps

To convey the mystery of my father’s schizophrenic unraveling I researched every question that came up as I wrote: Cross cultural and biomedical studies helped me better understand the limits of our medical and cultural understanding of schizophrenia.

I read about the epigenetic and environmental factors. I found cross cultural comparisons of care and recovery. I learned about best practices for care: early diagnosis and multi-pronged supports. I read biblical analysis that compared prophetic writing with the DSMV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and philosophical and psychoanalytical writing on psychosis and dissociation.

Like a riddle, I posed the questions I imagined I might have had as a child, the questions my father may have been ruminating on. That research became a through line sprinkled lightly into my memoir, an omniscient narrator to connect the missing pieces of the puzzle of our lives.

Write Versions That Investigate Multiple Points of View

I interviewed family members and wrote the first draft in the first person to imagine his experience of his first breakdown. It was a story I had heard many times over the years. The way he marched over to them in a paranoid haze, “The Mob was after him, had planted drugs in the turntable.”

The harrowing drive from Fredonia University in upstate NY to LI. The family believing his story. My grandmothers scribble on the back on the graduation program. “If we’re found dead it was the mob.” And the heartbreak at the police station when the officer identifies my father’s story as a fabrication of his mind. But how could I relay my father’s experience, his own memories stolen by a lifetime of medication and electro-shock therapy?

I intuitively used the technique Alex Marzano-Lesnevich articulated for Imagining Histories. I wrote into my lost experience with “measured imagination” what absolutely could have happened?  I wrote the scene; first from his POV and then combined what others told me using language that signals the ways, as writers we sometimes have to imagine, wonder, and suppose.

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Use the Setting and Characters to Access the Emotional World of the Self

What experiences gave the reader the most insights into our story?

I open the story at the drowning of my half-sister because this public tragedy is the view most people have of mental illness. I wanted to tell the story beyond the headline. Partly I needed to understand what brought my father to drive off that pier blocks from my childhood home, how the stigma, isolation, and self-medication had brought him to this point.

Also, I wanted to show his paternal dedication despite or maybe because of the profound nature of his illness. I used that scene and setting to face off the danger I may have felt as a child, to humanize our lives. I mined our trauma, what Alex Marzano-Lesnevich coins the shadow archive, to give voice to what often remain invisible narratives?

I started my memoir when my children were asking questions I didn’t have answers to. When did Grandpa first know he had schizophrenia? Did Grandpa really think he could fly like a bird to get closer to the sun? What was real and what was imagined, and how were both a part of who their grandpa was?

My father’s illness was so much his own, the voices he heard, the meanings he attached to the signs and symbols of our life went unspoken and unexamined. It felt as if he was protecting me from his demons and I think he was. The inheritance of the child of a schizophrenic is a story without words, a fable without a moral. Sometimes these are the stories that need to be told.

Check out Natasha Williams’ The Parts of Him I Kept here:

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In this interview, Craig discusses the evolution of an essay-driven documentary into his new memoir, Ginseng Roots, his hope for readers, and more.

Name: Craig Thompson
Literary agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit
Book title: Ginseng Roots
Publisher: Pantheon
Release date: April 29, 2025
Genre/category: Memoir; documentary
Previous titles: Blankets (2003, Drawn & Quarterly), Habibi (2011, Pantheon), Good-bye, Chunky Rice (1999, Pantheon), Carnet de Voyage (2004, Drawn & Quarterly), Space Dumplins (2015, Scholastic)
Elevator pitch: Ginseng Roots follows the author’s childhood laboring on ginseng farms in rural Wisconsin to the many tangled threads of this medicinal Chinese root; the trade relationship between China and the U.S., class divide, child labor, immigration, corporate agriculture, environmentalism, plant-based healing, and holistic healing for the global economy.

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What prompted you to write this book?

In an age of environmental crisis, I wanted to write a book with a plant at the center of the narrative. Ginseng is a medicinal root prized in Chinese medicine that initiated the trade relationship between China and the U.S. during the birth of our nation in 1784.  But it was also my very first job, working 40 hours a week during my summer vacations when I was 10 years old, being paid a dollar an hour, which in my young mind translated to “one comic book an hour.” We were a poor, working-class family; and without ginseng work, I wouldn’t have been able to afford the comic books that influenced my future career.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

14 years between inception and publication! Ginseng Roots began with a research trip to China in April 2011, distracted for years by other projects, resumed in 2017 with a book tour in South Korea, and the first International Ginseng Festival in my hometown, Wisconsin. What was initially intended as an essay-driven documentary with a plant at its center expanded to a memoir, a sequel of sorts to Blankets, exploring my childhood and dynamics with my family, my hometown, and the work that I do, then and now.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

The biggest learning curve was serializing the book as 12, 32-page pamphlets, the first time I worked in this traditional comic book format during my 25-year cartooning career. Then, when the series was complete, realizing it lacked a narrative thread to tie all the individual issues together, I added 70 narrative pages to the final book. These focus on my own personal health crisis and the rapid degeneration of my drawing hand, which began with an injury in China, led to years of treatments—including radiation, and culminated with Chinese Medicine and ingesting ginseng.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

The book begins with my personal recollections of working in ginseng agriculture but expands to interviews with nearly 80 people—from my earliest employers to the current mega-growers with gardens 1,000 times the size I worked on. I interviewed growers, buyers, distributors, Chinese Medicine practitioners, Hmong farmers from refugee camps, retailers in South Korea, and wild ginseng hunters in Northeast China.

The two biggest surprises are that my tiny hometown, population 1,200, was the largest producer of American Ginseng in the world when I was kid. Equally surprising was that the biggest producer of Wisconsin Ginseng is now China, grown from Wisconsin seed, but in Chinese soil, on endless acreage of corporate farms.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

The book illustrates the way one agricultural crop can connect opposite ends of the earth, and a huge diversity of people and lived experiences. More importantly, I hope my memoir allows readers to access their own memories of family, where and how they grew up, and the meaning and value of our labor.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Always, my advice is simply to finish something. In my youth, I used to start many projects and abandon them after 10 or 20 pages. The first book I completed (Good-bye, Chunky Rice in 1999) finally kick-started my career momentum. Now, in mid-career slump, I found myself starting and abandoning books again, at least three different projects, before finally sticking with Ginseng Roots. It was the most strenuous book of my career, but emerging on the other side, I feel like I truly survived something.

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I commonly hear this among my Asian American communities and my Pacific Islander cousins.

A piece of me is missing because I will never know—these stories were never passed down.

I wonder why there is such a low representation of Asian American and Pacific Islander authors in narrative nonfiction. Or at least I used to wonder.

(How My Historical Fiction Novel Has Become Real Again.)

Being able to trace your genealogy is a privilege. Speaking your ancestor’s native tongue is a privilege. Knowing your family’s stories is a privilege. A privilege that many of us don’t have because of trauma. Trauma from war. Trauma from colonization. Trauma from immigration. Trauma from parents who experienced their own trauma, therefore, could only be a fragment of the parents they could’ve been. We children only got “they tried their best.” Parts of our parents were left behind in their homelands and those parts were buried in the soil of their countries.

I work at a community college. Anecdotally, I have heard that English Language Learners departments in our community college system are dominated by white women who have studied another language through formal education or study abroad. I remember shaking my head sadly when I heard this. Because this is a privilege; a privilege that many in my Asian American and Pacific Islander communities cannot afford. We didn’t have the financial resources or we had to care for family members instead of intensely studying the language of our home countries. I have heard the same about religious evangelicals, who go to school to learn the languages of our countries to effectively convert us. White women and white evangelicals, it would appear, would have more understanding of our ancestral languages than we do. I can’t explain it well, but it feels stolen. Maybe because as long as these languages are not sitting with their rightful owners, it doesn’t belong to them.

I recently wrote a book about feeling misplaced as a Korean American woman in this country. And through it, I accidentally found myself. A girl who didn’t grow up hearing any of her ancestor’s stories somehow found a personal narrative to fill a book. And more. By looking into the void, leaning into the absence of story, I found an interpretation of what that silence meant. Silence meant trauma. Silence meant loss. Silence meant death. Silence meant paying the high price of immigrating to a country that penalizes Perpetual Foreigners who don’t fit into what it means to be American or more accurately, as white as possible. My mother lost her dignity when she came to this country. And that is how indignance became my permanent state of being.

Once I started researching the history of my land, I found that Japan colonized Korea between 1910 and 1945. Our language was banned, our books were burned, and hundreds of our women were stolen by Japanese soldiers to become sex slaves. “Comfort women,” as they called it. These are my ancestors.

Now, a skeptic could look at this example and ask, “How do you know one of your direct ancestors was taken?” My answer? It doesn’t matter. What happens to one happens to us all. To my fellow Asian Americans, this part is important: We belong to a group identity. I encourage you to put down the idea that we don’t have any of our ancestral stories. What happened on our land is our stories. Because we are all so profoundly interconnected. Adopt the stories of our land and take ownership of it.

I know that Korean American Day, a holiday celebrating the first wave of immigrants arriving in Hawaii, occurs annually on January 13. The Korean government had an agreement with the sovereign nation of Hawaii to help Koreans escape a war-torn country. For that, Hawaii always has a special place in my heart. When I used to visit regularly, I would pray thanks to the ‘Āina for being a place of refuge for my ancestors. I don’t know if my direct descendants ever touched the shore that day in 1903. And it doesn’t matter. They were my family.

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I also wonder if this openness in my heart invites in a different kind of interaction with my Hawaiian cousins. It has gotten to the point of phenomenal; the number of times a native Hawaiian I have never met, would gaze adoringly at my face and say, “I feel like I know you.” They recognize something in me. And I recognize something in them as well. And I believe it is because our ancestors intersected at some point in history.

I know you.

Invisible String Theory states that we are connected to those we love—outside the confines of time and space. It is not bound by the literal understanding of “to know a person.” And this can also be the start of building a personal narrative around our group experiences. Because of the great injustice many of our families experienced—unable to carry over our ancestors’ stories as a result of trauma and colonization—it is up to us to fill in the space.

There is a poem called “Oral Traditions,” by Travis Kaululā‘au Thompson and William Nu‘utupu Giles. They write, “…in ancient Polynesia, children with the best memory skills were chosen to be the culture keepers, storytellers, handpicked to be poets weaving today’s events into yesterday’s lore practicing immortality in breath.” This is a common practice amongst other Indigenous groups outside of Polynesia. Do you think the children were “assigned” to learn only their own direct ancestors? Unlikely. These children carried the stories of their community; it was shared ownership.

If you are ready to write your personal narrative, begin researching your land. And most importantly, listen to how your body reacts; listen to what your body is trying to tell you. The first time I read about genetic memory was in Stephanie Foo’s book, What My Bones Know. And it set me off into a revelation. Genetic memory is when an individual experiences trauma and their genetic makeup is forever altered as a result. And they pass that trauma onto their offspring, and so on and so forth. We also understand this to be “intergenerational trauma.” However, it reveals a deeper implication: That even without our ancestral stories, we would still be passing on trauma. That our bodies store the stories. This makes me think of adoptees, who perhaps were never told a single story of their families, but would still carry past events in their genetic makeup. I wonder, how many stories we could regain if we listened to our bodies.

There is a well-known book titled The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk. Kolk explains how trauma lives in your body from a more scientific perspective. How we physically react when we are triggered is indicative of how trauma manifests in the body; other physical manifestations like heart palpitations, tremors, sweating, etc. By this science, we could perhaps read events or accounts of what occurred in our home countries and hopefully gain something if our bodies react. From personal experience, I have witnessed my own body react in this way, such as when I read about the Korean sex slaves taken by the Japanese. I felt my body click into place in understanding.

When it comes to memory, ancestral stories, even family…I encourage Asian American writers to embrace holistic knowledge. Trust our connections to one another. To my fellow Asian Americans, we carry the stories of our communities—of our people. And these stories survive outside the confines of time and space. And to my fellow Koreans: The stories that I know with certainty are my direct ancestors? I welcome you to use them as your own to fill in the blank spaces in your own stories. They are yours just as much as they are mine. Because I don’t know where I end and where you begin. Because…

I feel like I know you. 

Check out Joan Sung’s Kinda Korean here:

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In this interview, Keeonna discusses the healing experience of writing her debut memoir, Mainline Mama, her hope for readers, and more.

Name: Keeonna Harris
Literary agent: PJ Mark (Janklow & Nesbit)
Book title: Mainline Mama
Publisher: Amistad Press
Release date: February 11, 2025
Genre/category: Memoir
Elevator pitch: Mainline Mama is a story of love and motherhood under unexpected circumstances—a teen mom raising children with an incarcerated partner that stay together out of love. In trying to navigate the carceral system, I found self-love, resilience, joy, and community.

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What prompted you to write this book?

I was tired of hiding who I am—the criminal justice system has been such an integral part of my life, it became like a family member. But my shame kept me from fully talking about it with anyone outside of my closest inner-circles. In building community with other people, I realized I was not alone or exceptional. It was time to share my whole self, to let everyone know it’s OK to talk about these experiences.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

It has taken almost eight years for Mainline Mama to go from idea to publication. It took me a long time to finally admit that I wanted to write, and I wanted to write this story for everyone to read. With the PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship in 2018-2019, I felt like I finally had a sign that this was something I needed to write. When I actually got the fellowship, I finally started to think about myself as a writer, and it put me on folks’ radar for the potential of my story. I started talking to people, drafting a book proposal, and collecting my stories into something that I started workshopping with other people—starting with my husband, and then other writers I love and respect. A few months after I finished the book proposal and went through some drafts and lots of revisions, I found an agent and got on the path to publication. The story was always there, but the scope and the presentation shifted; making some narrative choices as a writer about how linear or chronological it might be, what specific stories I want to tell, and all that. It was important for me to tell my story in a way that readers could understand me and see my heart, to really grapple with why I made these choices and wound up where I did.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

The biggest learning experiences for me were first, how crucial an agent is to publishing. Getting an agent was so important, I thought it would just be a professional kind of coworker thing, but this person is your advocate, and they have to get you in a way that’s not scripted. The agent has to love your story like you love it. The other was how much revision goes into the writing process. I thought editing on my own and working back through drafts before sending to other people was enough, but the amount of back and forth—with my agent, with my editor—just when I think a sentence is perfect someone points something out that makes it better, or asks a question that makes me rethink how it’s said or where it’s situated in the text. Even now I’ll see an old draft and laugh about how I thought I was done.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

Tons of them. I learned a lot about myself. Memoir, I thought, was just telling my story to other people, but to write it down I had to work through so much stuff in my own life. I thought I was healed, or over so many of these stories, but there would be times I write a line and then have to wrestle with myself. Feelings would pour out onto the page and all the emotions would come back up in my head. I didn’t realize I was still angry, or sad, or even still felt shame about some things that I kept second guessing “should I really say that?”

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

To me this is a love letter to women who have had to learn to navigate the carceral system—whether that’s incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, or mainline mamas like me that are just trying to keep a connection to a loved one. I want them to know they are not alone. There is joy, connection, and community in the world. For everyone else, I hope it softens hearts and builds understanding. It’s so easy to fall into the “tough on crime” cliché and treat people who might have wronged somebody as disposable or not worth a second look. I want people to begin conversations about incarceration about shared humanity. Life is hard enough without us turning on each other.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Believe in yourself. That’s damn near the biggest thing, because if you don’t believe it, it just makes it harder to do it. And it’s always going to be hard. We’re all out here trying to do the best that we can.

The post Keeonna Harris: I Was Tired of Hiding Who I Am appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(How to Write a Memoir That’s Personal and Deeply Researched.)

My writing journey began in my late 40s when I was sent for a breast biopsy. I could not have predicted that that singular event would lead to a late-in-life writing career, one focused primarily on memoir. Much like the story I felt compelled to write, the path that led to choosing memoir was one fraught with impediments and detours.

My twin sister and I were adopted during the closed adoption era. Rigid state laws prevented us from knowing anything at all about our family background or medical history. But the threat of breast cancer spurred us into action. Suddenly, we were compelled to know what medical conditions ran in our bloodlines. This meant gaining access to sealed adoption records then locating and establishing contact with birth relatives. A daunting task.

Armed with only two pieces of information: the name of our adoption agency and redacted birth certificates, my twin sister and I forged ahead. Crossing the finish line consumed five years and involved a search agency, PI, confidential intermediary, judge, social worker, and a genealogist. And each time I related to someone where we were in the saga—an experience replete with headaches, hurdles, rejection, reunion, setbacks, and uncanny synchronicities—the reply was always the same. “Incredible. You should write a book.”

Should I? Could I? And how?

Even though I had always loved to write, my previous career in computer education had ill-prepared me to chronicle a highly personal account. Determined to learn how best to compose my adoption search and reunion story—and discern if it merited publication—I researched creative writing programs. Curriculum offerings posed the first major decision points in putting my story on the page.

What would serve the story best: a work of fiction, biographical novel, or memoir? And since my material was highly sensitive, could writing under a pseudonym protect me and the people I’d need to characterize?

In thinking about genre, I got caught up in a dilemma: Should I write the truth as I saw it unfold or some variation that protected the characters, real people whom I cared about and did not wish to harm? I was sensitive to my birth mother’s painful journey as an unwed mother, the searing loss she endured by surrendering twin daughters, and her efforts to maintain that secret for a lifetime. How would she feel about me writing about her, us, our chaotic movie script-like search and reunion journey? I felt the same hesitation regarding my adoptive parents’ situation, their displeasure with me bringing the other mother into our lives, and the subsequent rift we still struggle to resolve.

In my first draft, I chose to develop my story as a novel. I assumed that fictionalizing the plot and characters would ease my concerns and give me the greatest creative leeway. I changed peoples’ names and identifying information, embellished and expanded my characters’ worlds, but kept much of the original plot points because they were already crammed with incredible conflict. I was entertained by the process of creating fiction, but even though I received positive feedback from colleagues and instructors, something was amiss in the manuscript for me. In giving the story creative distance, I realized two things: What I had created wasn’t my story anymore, and that sharing my story exactly as it had unfolded had become essential to me.

As I considered the shift to memoir, another goal came screaming to the forefront. I wanted—no, needed—my work to benefit a specific audience: the adoption triad, a group made up of adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents. The struggles, missteps, successes, and failures I had endured were lessons I wanted “my people,” the triad, to consider in their own relationships and adoption searches. To achieve that end put me right back where I had begun: putting the privacy of people I cared about in jeopardy by directly and honestly sharing my story.

I argued with myself. The inner child me feared the backlash of angering both of my mothers. When I deliberated about asking them for permission to write the true story instead of a fictionalized account, the inner adult me was indignant. “This is your story to tell!”

Writing memoir is not for the faint of heart. A memoirist must meet certain challenges: Write the truth to the best of their ability, but not in a vengeful manner; and honor the privacy of those involved, but only to the extent that it also meets the needs of the story. In the end, the family members I chose to include in the final draft were given advance copies to review. To accommodate their wishes, some names and details were adjusted. By so doing, I skirted legal risks, and in my case, the relationships I wanted to nurture fortunately remained undamaged.

Memoir has the potential to hurt, but it also has the power to heal. For the writer, the greatest reward in revealing a personal journey is sharing our reaction to the events and how those transformed us, changing the trajectory of our lives. And if our creative work inspires, informs, and educates not only the audience we intended to reach, but those beyond, then we have met the challenges inherent in crafting memoir.

Check out Julie Ryan McGue’s Twice the Family here:

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The post Why I Decided to Write a Memoir—And How I Did It appeared first on Writer's Digest.