MEMOIR EDITING IS AN ART and a science. Memoir editing should make your work better. It should make good memoir. I understand what that is because I write, publish and teach memoir. I do not give prompts, assignments or exercises. I do not coddle or give you gratuitous advice. What I do is to teach you to write with intent. And, as a result, my clients get published.
As a former staffer at The New York Times, commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered and an author of four mass-market books, I am well-versed in how to work hard and how to get published. I may be the best editor for you, though then again, I may not.
To meet the demand of our writers, as well as to give them the quality editing they deserve, we currently offer the services of a variety of editors with whom you can work. Their skills range from developmental editing and content editing, to coaching and copyediting. We will connect you to the very best person for your needs.
Memoir Editing Services
All of our editors (profiled farther down the page) are talented, capable and experienced. Their rates vary. Our editorial assistant meets with Marion once weekly to match new editing applicants with the right editor.
To work with Marion, you must first take the full curriculum of our courses. These include Memoirama, Memoirama 2, and The Master Class or Your Memoir Project. Marion now only reads manuscripts from Master Class graduates. Marion charges $1697 per 100 pages, or $375 an hour for anything under 100 pages. There is currently a waiting list for her to read full manuscripts. To get on the waiting list, email us at mroachsmith [at] gmail [dot] com when you have completed the classes mentioned above.
Memoir Coaching Services
We now have skilled coaches on the team to guide you through the work of writing memoir. Get in touch with us at mroachsmith [at] gmail [dot] com to be referred to one of them. Our editorial assistant meets with Marion once weekly to match new coaching applicants with the right expert.
Op-ed Editing
An editor is now available to work with anyone who completes our class on How to Write Opinion Pieces. The edit includes a first read, a one-hour live phone conversation, and a second read and edit. He will suggests places for you to submit your op-ed. Be in touch at mroachsmith [at] gmail [dot] com for more information.
Editing FAQS
Our Editing Team
Diane Cameron
Diane is a well-published author whose work centers around recovery. She maintains a series on social media called “Sober Money.” Her columns and essays challenge readers to think about culture and community from a new perspective. Diane presents at conferences, faith communities, and at corporate and community events. As a creativity coach, she works with writers and artists to begin, complete and market their work. As a spiritual director she helps people find meaning, perspective and encouragement–especially those identifying as “spiritual but not religious,” atheist, agnostic, and people who are in recovery. See more on her here.
Bill Patrick
William B. Patrick is an award-winning writer whose works have been published or produced in a number of genres: creative nonfiction, fiction, screenwriting, poetry, and drama. His most recent book, Metrofix: The Combative Comeback of a Company Town, was published in December of 2021. He has also written The Call of Nursing: Voices from the Front Lines of Healthcare; Saving Troy: A Year with Firefighters and Paramedics in a Battered City; We Didn’t Come Here for This: A Memoir in Poetry; These Upraised Hands, a book of narrative poems and dramatic monologues; Rescue, a radio play commissioned by the BBC; Rachel’s Dinner, an ABC-TV teleplay starring Olympia Dukakis and Peter Gerety; and a novel, Roxa: Voices of the Culver Family, which won the 1990 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for the best first novel, among many other works. Mr. Patrick has taught in Fairfield University’s MFA Writing Program for the last 14 years, and a variety of his book excerpts, magazine articles, and dramatic writing can be found at his website. He lives in Schenectady, New York with his wife, Carmel, and his golden doodles, Vincent and Rockwell.
Baron Wormser
Baron Wormser is a well-published poet. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts. He has a long history as an excellent editor of non-fiction. He earned his BA from Johns Hopkins University and did graduate work at the University of California-Irvine and the University of Maine. His many collections of poetry include The White Words (1983); When (1997), which won a Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry; Subject Matter (2003); Scattered Chapters: New & Selected Poems (2008); Impenitent Notes (2010); and Unidentified Sighing Objects (2015). His works of prose include the collection of biographical essays Legends of the Slow Explosion (2018), the novel Teach Us That Peace (2013), the short story collection The Poetry Life: Ten Stories (2008), and a memoir of the years he and his family spent living off the grid in Maine, The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living off the Grid (2006). With David Cappella, Wormser has written two books on poetry and pedagogy: Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves (1999) and A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day by Day (2000). He has taught at the University of Maine-Farmington and, since 2009, in the MFA program at Fairfield University. He served as poet laureate of Maine from 2000 to 2006. Along with the Guggenheim Fellowship, his many honors and awards include a Frederick Bock Prize and fellowships from Bread Loaf and the National Endowment for the Arts. He founded the Frost Place Conference on Poetry in Franconia, New Hampshire, and continues to work in schools.The photo is from CavanKerry Press.
Jill Smolowe
Jill Smolowe is the author of the memoirs Four Funerals and A Wedding and An Empty Lap, and co-editor of the adoption anthology A Love Like No Other. An award-winning journalist, she clocked 35 years as a foreign affairs writer for Time and Newsweek, and as a senior writer for People. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, Reader’s Digest, More, Money; in several anthologies; and on numerous websites, including PBS’s Next Avenue. She has been editing memoir manuscripts for more than 20 years.
Mike Welch
Mike Welch is a writing teacher, editor and tutor living in Albany, NY. His work has appeared in the Crime Writers’ Chronicle, 50-Word Stories, the Albany Times Union, and he has written a feature sports column for the Binghamton Press and Sun Bulletin. He has read his work on WAMC/National Public Radio and at the Arts Center of the Capital Region’s Bookmark’s Series.
Michael White
Michael C. White is the author of seven novels, including Beautiful Assassin, which won the Connecticut Book Award for Fiction; Soul Catcher, which was a Booksense and Historical Novels Review selection, and A Brother’s Blood, which was a NY Times Notable Book. The founding editor of the fiction anthologies American Fiction and Dogwood, he also founded and was the director of Fairfield University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. His webpage.
Joseph Dalton
Joseph Dalton has covered the Capital Region arts scene for the Times Union since 2002 and won writing awards from the New York Associated Press and ASCAP. In 2018 Rowman & Littlefield released his third book, Washington’s Golden Age: Hope Ridings Miller, the Society Beat, and the Rise of Women Journalists, a biography of the midcentury society editor who was his cousin. Dalton is efficient, good humored and economic in both writing and editing.