It’s Time to Dust Your Memoir Off and Submit

Every writer has a folder of at least one piece they’ve completed and have been sitting on, in some cases, for years. Now’s your chance to dig it up, polish it off and share it with the world.

Collage by Yunuen Bonaparte

As writers, we’re often shelving stories we’ve written with the hope that we’ll come back to them another time. We sometimes work endlessly on a project or a piece before a budget gets cut, a magazine folds, we chicken out in sharing our secrets with the world; sometimes it’s simply that no publication seems to be quite the right fit for the words we’ve labored over endlessly. I have a folder on my desktop called “Stories Without a Home” with a few essays and even a reported piece or two that never made it out for one reason or another — but with a little work, or even in one case, possibly no work at all, perhaps they could. Lisa Heyamoto and Laura Green-Russell did precisely that: They tapped those folders and set their work free. As a result — spoiler alert — they won Narratively’s 2023 Profile Prize and our 2022 Memoir Prize, respectively.

Lisa started working on her piece, “The Greatest Game Ever Played Behind Barbed Wire,” 12 years ago when she was preg…