55. The Witches of Pitches on Building Platform, Creative Querying, and Stalking Editors featuring Aileen Weintraub and Megan Margulies

The Witches of Pitches are Aileen Weintraub and Megan Margulies here to share their advice about slowing scenes down, remembering that dialogue gives your memoir depth and flavor, finding the other story in your story, creative querying, what building a platform can mean, the power in companion pieces, honing your pitch, and stalking editors.

-Visit the Let's Talk Memoir Merch store: https://www.zazzle.com/store/letstalkmemoir

Also in this episode:

-kvetch sessions

-writing as a business

-being patient

Books mentioned in this episode:

The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

Bomb Shelter by Mary Laura Philpott

You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Magie Smith

Aileen Weintraub and Megan Margulies have formed a partnership from the modern love story playbook of online writing sessions. They have workshopped numerous articles, essays, and book proposals, helping writers produce top-notch material and are the Witches of Pitches.

Aileen Weintraub is an award-winning author, journalist, and editor. She began her career as a copy editor and then as a developmental editor working for both children’s and adult publishing companies. As a freelance editor she has worked with clients to help develop their books, proposals, pitches, articles, and essays.

She has written for The Washington Post, BBC, Oprah Daily, Parents, NBC, Al Jazeera, AARP, Glamour, InStyle, and other publications.

Aileen is also the author of over fifty children’s books including the middle-grade social justice book WE GOT GAME! 35 Female Athletes Who Changed the World, which was honored as A Mighty Girl’s Best Book of the Year, and the best-selling Never Too Young: 50 Unstoppable Kids Who Made a Difference, a Parents’ Choice Award recipient.

Her latest book Knocked Down: A High-Risk Memoir, is about marriage, motherhood, and the risks we take. The Erma Bombeck Workshop named Aileen Humor Writer of the Month for Knocked Down and Publishers Weekly says, “…there’s beauty on every page.”

Aileen has also created a series on marketing and platform building in collaboration with Writers’ Digest. She lives in New York but her heart is in Seville. You can learn more at www.aileenweintraub.com.

Megan Margulies is an MFA recipient, memoirist, journalist, and a 2021 Next Generation Indie Book Award finalist for her book, My Captain America. Her essays and reported articles focus on motherhood and navigating life and healthcare as a woman. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vogue Magazine, The Cut, Good Housekeeping, Elle Magazine, Parent’s Magazine, Oprah Daily, and more.

Before entering the world of journalism, Megan worked for almost ten years as an editorial assistant at Harvard University where she edited countless articles, profiles, and promotional materials for various departments and professors. It’s where she first fell in love with the Chicago Manual of Style.

She’s a native New Yorker, but splits her time between Boston and Vermont with her husband and two daughters. You can learn more at www.meganmargulies.com.

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Ronit Plank is a writer, teacher, and editor whose work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Writer’s Digest, The Rumpus, American Literary Review, Hippocampus, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named a 2021 Best True Crime Book by Book Riot and was a Finalist in the National Indie Excellence Awards, the Housatonic Book Awards, and the Book of the Year Awards. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, the Best of the Net, and the Best Microfiction Anthology, and her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ Eludia Award. She is creative nonfiction editor at The Citron Review and lives in Seattle with her family where she is working on her next book.

More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com

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More about WHEN SHE COMES BACK, a memoir: https://ronitplank.com/book/

More about HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE, a short story collection: https://ronitplank.com/home-is-a-made-up-place/

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https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/

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Background photo: Canva

Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography

Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers