Self-publishing carried a stigma back in 2008when the traditional New York publishing house W. W. Norton published my first book, Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table. What a difference sixteen years, and a whole lot of technology, made in the publishing world. In the current market, anyone with a story to tell and access to a computer and a bank account can publish a book and find an audience. Authors like me come to self-publishing for many reasons. In her (self-published) workbook, The Publishing Workbook for Independent Authors: Your Step-By-Step Guide to Professional Book Design, Production, and Distribution, self-publishing guru Carla King lists six possible reasons for self-publishing, and all of them resonate with me.
Straitjackets and Lunch Money by Katya Cengal is a memoir written in two voices: the voice of Katya as a ten-year-old girl hospitalized at the Roth Psychosomatic Unit at Children’s Hospital at Stanford as treatment for self-starvation; and the voice of Katya thirty years later, as a journalist researching her own story from that time to better understand what she went through, and to bring the reader’s attention to other children at risk of going unseen and unheard.
Carole Wagener recently self-published her first book, The Hardest Year: A Love Story in Letters During the Vietnam War. Her husband, William, who wrote roughly half of the letters in the book, shares author credit.
This past Friday morning, I took a solo field trip ninety minutes southeast of where we live in California to see the spectacular superbloom of wildflowers at Carrizo Plain National Monument. (See photo above—it was tough to choose just one.) As I wound and rolled through the velvety green, flower-dusted hills between here and there, grateful to be on this side of an unusually wet winter, I processed the emotional effects of last week’s big project: a batch of gumbo z’herbes, or green gumbo.
Photographer Dorka Hegedus and her family are on the road this year, traveling the world. She shared a cache of images from their travels, which I’ve interspersed throughout the following Q&A. Dorka answered my questions in writing.
In The Daughter of Vladimir Lenski: Memoir of a Child Prodigy Violinist, Kathie examines the pieces of her extraordinary life, the smooth pieces and the jagged pieces, the pieces she chose and the pieces forced upon her. Read on for a conversation during which we discuss what Kathie discovered about her writing voice, how documenting her stories helped her process some of the more painful parts of her life, and what working with Kindle Direct Publishing was like for her.
Memories on the Page is a place for current and aspiring life story writers, memoirists, and writers of autobiography to find tips, writing prompts, and occasional interviews with fellow first-person narrative storytellers.
