Desirée Magney, along with co-presenter Emily Rich, will give a breakout session: Finding Your Memoir Voice. We asked Desirée a few questions about her involvement with HippoCamp this year.
HM: Tell us a little about your involvement in HippoCamp this year.
DM: I’ll be running a workshop with my friend and fellow memoirist, Emily Rich. Emily and I teach an eight-week course of the same title at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. For this HippoCamp workshop, we will encapsulate the most salient points about how to turn true stories from draft to craft.
Why do you love true stories?
I hate clichés, and if I find them in a draft I will ask the writer to find another way to express her/himself, but it is true that “fact is stranger than fiction” or at least it can be even more interesting because what the memoirist writes about really happened. I love the relate-ability of memoir. While you or I may not have had the same experience we read about in a memoirist’s story, typically, we can usually relate to it on some level.
What made you decided to submit a proposal and, ultimately, participate in HippoCamp as a speaker?
I am honored to participate, teaching the thing I love to write! I want to encourage people to tell their stories and to tell them in such a way that others will be drawn in and mesmerized.
Attendees can learn more about you on our speaker’s page, of course, but there’s more to you than that bio! Share a fun fact with us, something we may be surprised to know.
I love ice hockey and my husband and I have been season ticket holders for 40 years. He bought the tickets the year we started dating. It’s a sport we share with our son and daughter, who both played. Even when our kids studied overseas in college (in China and Jordan), we’d text each other about the games. So, when the Washington Capitals won the Stanley Cup this year, our entire family was thrilled.
Aside from preparing for HippoCamp 2018 (of course!), what are you working on? Any upcoming or recent projects you can share?
As Publisher of the literary journal, Little Patuxent Review (LPR), I’m always overseeing the publication of our magazine and writing blog posts for our website. In June, we had the launch reading event for the Summer 2018 issue.
I’m also working on a book about a woman who was orphaned and abused as a child, who came to see men as her saviors and women as unloving and cruel. She then married a man, who cheated on her, and proceeded to have four daughters, whom she adored. She was my mother.
I explore how I came to understand the ways in which her childhood shaped her entire life, while caring for her in the last years of her life as she suffered from Parkinson’s and vascular dementia.
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Thank you, Desirée! We’re excited for you to help our attendees find their voice.
And, reader, register to reserve your place today.
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