NEW!

Private Coaching in Personal Essay and Memoir

Location: Anywhere (all coaching conducted online or by telephone)

 Time: Set your own schedule (ideally completed within a 2-4 week period)

 Fee: $800

Apply by emailing me at meghan@meghandaum.com

For the last few years, I’ve had the pleasure of conducting weekend-long “master class” workshops out of my home in New York City. Much of the magic of the class has come from the in-person nature of the meetings, sharing meals, hosting guest speakers, and having a sustained, free-flowing conversation over the two days.

For obvious reasons, such meetings won’t be possible for the next few months. In the interim, I’m pleased to offer one-on-one coaching for writers looking to develop a standalone essay or portion of a longer project, up to 20 pages.

There’s no way to recreate the conditions of the actual class—not least of all the food and guest speakers! But for many students, this opportunity offers something just as good and maybe even better. The idea is to take the editing and conversational elements of the two-day workshop and scale them down to a two-person interaction over a period of a few weeks.

If you’ve been in my workshop you’ve surely heard me say that I view my role as a writing instructor as one that mirrors an editor-writer relationship more than a teacher-student relationship. I’m less concerned with “teaching you how to write” than with granting you permission to be the writer you already are. That means us working together to hash out ideas, grapple honestly with complex and potentially sensitive topics and, finally, unleashing those ideas and topics onto the page in order to generate the most exciting and satisfying material possible.

With that in mind, I’m offering a coaching package comprised of two readings/markups of the first and second drafts of an essay or portion of a manuscript (maximum 20 pages) and two hour-long phone calls or videoconference sessions.

The specifics can be tailored to individual needs, but the basic gist is as follows.

Step One:

Send me your work. Submit 20 pages along with a note about your editorial and publication goals for the material. If I think I can help you, we’ll get started. Payment is due in full at this time via PayPal, Venmo or some other digital means. The reason for paying upfront in full is to ensure that you actually do the revision while you have momentum and complete the whole process within 2-4 weeks. (It can be easy to blow these things off otherwise.)

 Step Two:

Within a week of getting the manuscript, I will mark up the pages with comments and email them back to you. At this time, we’ll schedule the first of two phone or videoconference sessions, lasting approximately an hour. Ideally this conference will take place within a week.

Step Three:

We talk by phone or on video, discussing my notes, your future rewrite, and any other matters of editorial relevance. As in the workshop, the conversation will likely explore not just the material on the page but the subject matter as a whole and your relationship to it. This conversation might take us to some unexpected places—this is a good thing!

Step Four:

You do a revision and send it back to me within two weeks.

Step Five:

I read the revision, send you my notes, and schedule a final phone or videoconference, lasting approximately an hour, to take place within one week.

Step Six:

Final conversation via phone or video. We will discuss my notes and anything else you’d like to address, including possible outlets to submit for publication. As with the workshop, there are no guarantees for publication or editor references, but I will try my best to guide you.

If you think this is for you, let me know. I’d love to hear from you!