My mom surprised me this week
And 5 Places to Publish
This week I published a piece that was very close to my heart.
My mother suffered severe postpartum depression when I was young.
So severe she decided it was best to let us be raised by our father.
I’d never written about it before. I didn’t think she’d want me to.
But I had a chat with her this week and—to my surprise—she was more than happy to share.
“Maybe it’ll help someone else,” she said.
Ah! She gets it. The power of stories.
I combined it with some of my own baby-days struggles into a piece about mothering.
You can read it here if you like!
Have you experienced the power of telling your story yet?
Have you shared something that readers related to?
I’ve collected up some motivation for you to share your stories:
A contest and some places itching to publish your personal essays
Writer’s Digest has a contest for up to 2000 word personal essays.
Insider has various sections looking for personal essays—from business, to health, to parenting. One of my essays is about to go live on Insider Health. Just make sure you email the right editor!
HuffPost Personal takes a wide range of essay topics (although it is competitive as they get a lot of submissions)
I’ve worked with YourTango a few times. They’re happy to hear from experienced and emerging writers.
And you can send your personal essays to me of course too! Here’s the Inspired Writer publication I run on Medium.
Let me know when you publish and post a link so I can read it to and celebrate with you.
Kelly xx
A great read, Kelly. I love your honesty. I guess we will never know whether we are good parents or not. I hope I am a good parent to my daughter. Perhaps I’ll ask her (she is 32) - an idea for my next article maybe?! We are good friends as well as mother and daughter so I think that our solid relationship is the result of being a good parent but it is an interesting question.