WHERE TO PUBLISH PERSONAL WRITING
If you’re thinking of writing a book about your experiences, helpful sources abound: a few examples include Victora Costello’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Memoir, D. Patrick Miller’s How to Begin Your Memoir, William Zinsser’s (ed.) Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, and Brenda Peterson’s Your Life Is a Book: How to Craft & Polish Your Memoir. In addition, Writer’s Digest Magazine has a very helpful website, including opportunities for relatively inexpensive online courses with agents and editors. Since some features of the website require a subscription, it might be worth finding out whether your local public library has a group subscription that you can access for free from home.
If you’re interested in publishing short essays rather than a book, online venues for health-related personal writing include
KevinMD (focuses on physicians but accepts essays from others)
Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine (encourages a wide range of perspectives)
Folks (emphasizes stories by and about patients and caregivers)
Bellevue Literary Review (encourages a wide range of perspectives)
Blogs by and for physician assistants
Blogs by and for paramedics and EMTs
In addition, many medical journals and medical humanities journals publish personal essays by physicians, health care professionals, and others.
If you’d like to read and/or publish personal stories not related to medical care, an online search will turn up many publications that specialize in personal essays on a broad range of topics. As an example, a list of 19 such publications appears in The Write Life, and Beyond Your Blog recommends a few that are particularly friendly to new writers.
