Pat McNees

Pat McNees
Helping people and organizations tell their stories

and

"Providing critical care for life stories"

Art Begins with a Story (YouTube: Pat McNees at the Writer's Center, 12-17-14)

Personal History Segment on February "Seniors Today" program (Debbie Brodsky and Pat McNees appear on Austin Heyman's "Seniors Today" program, on YouTube)

A Hairstyle of My Own (Pat McNees, lighthearted video produced by Bill Erwin). Women who have spent a lifetime trying to get straight hair to curl may chuckle in identification. Send this link to friends who struggle bending straight hair to their will. (There are plenty of people with curly hair who spend a lot of time trying to straighten it. Is this just human nature? Do men go through similar struggles or is balding their main fear?)

Jacking Up History (Michael Dolan, Washington City Paper, 7-28-95) "As McNees finished reading the second chapter, which included the line, 'Life with dirty fingernails was not for him,' the old man stopped her. 'He hadn’t used those exact those words, but he loved the process through which I developed the thought,' McNees says. However, Webster also said she had summed up his life and might as well quit right now. McNees persuaded him otherwise, chivying him through 15 more chapters.

      "And that book that was inside Warren Webster—what about it? An American Biography: An Industrialist Remembers the 20th Century is a soulful account of one company’s life, one man’s family, and the myriad tiles that make up their mosaic. Besides illuminating a technological arena about which hardly anyone ever thinks, McNees has produced a lean, swift narrative of life in the American Century, warts and all: the roar of the ’20s, the sag of the ’30s, the flowering of the arsenal of democracy, and the slow segue from post-WWII ebullience to the retracted realities of the 1990s. It is that rarest of literary commodities: a one-sitting read about business."

Pat McNees [Mancini] (Encyclopedia.com) A well-written entry that covers the basics.

Apple Pie School Murders (video, Pat McNees with Bill Erwin)

Telling Their Life Stories, Older Adults Find Peace in Looking Back (Susan B. Garland, New York Times, 12-9-16) 'Pat McNees, who conducts guided autobiography classes in person in Bethesda, Md., said getting feedback from a supportive group “gives you a perspective on your life.” For example, Ms. McNees said, someone whose family struggled with money problems but spent lots of time together may come out with a “positive take on life” when listening to another participant who had a lonely childhood because the father was always at work.'

Click on the following titles to learn more about some of Pat's books

* Changing Times, Changing Minds: 100 Years of Psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine

Read about this fascinating history here.
* Building Ten at Fifty: 50 Years of Clinical Research at the NIH Clinical Center by Pat McNees
* By Design: The Story of Crown Equipment Corporation (often cited as a model of a compelling company history, showing how a focus on stories about and the people in the company, and photos, can bring to life the story of a product like a lift truck--in this case, the BMW of lift trucks)
*YPO: The First Fifty Years. "A fascinating book that tells the story of the Young Presidents' Organization (YPO). It started when Ray Hickok, just 27 and having returned from World War II, had to take over a family business when his father died. He brought together other young men like himself and the rest is history--told by a skilled writer about those turbulent times that set in place this nation's economic dominance. Members and former members (you're out when you hit age 50) will particularly enjoy this book. Among the YPO members were people like Lloyd Bentsen, Bo Callaway, J.B. Fuqua, Sir John Templeton, Robert and Lawrence Tisch, and many others who became legendary business leaders." (reviewer Alan Caruba). Check out selections from and about the book.

Pat's specialties:

Helping people write their memoirs and organizations tell their stories.

Helping writers find their voice.

Leading workshops at the Writer's Center (My Life, One Story at a Time)

Bringing stories of medical research to life through patient stories.

Bringing storytelling and a light touch to technical and medical writing.

Rewriting reports to improve the chances of their being read and understood.

Writing executive summaries that get to the heart of the paper or study.

Editing manuscripts.

Pat McNees on writing and editing as a career

Building Ten at Fifty:

50 Years of Clinical Research at the NIH Clinical Center

Download the 148-page book Building 10 at Fifty.

In her first medical history, Building 10 at Fifty (2003), Pat wrote about the patients, the researchers, and the medical mysteries investigated in the NIH Clinical Center, better known at the National Institutes of Health as Building 10. Part research hospital, part ambulatory care center, Building 10 is the home base for clinical research (research involving human patients) of the various national institutes.

Many scientists on NIH's Bethesda, MD, campus do basic research; Building 10 is where intramural researchers from the various institutes see patients. The addition this year of an upgraded hospital, the Mark O. Hatfield Clinical Research Center, makes Building 10 the second largest federal building in the country, next to the Pentagon. It contains half the research beds in the United States and is the largest, most important biomedical research complex in the world. It is an invaluable resource for patients with rare diseases, or common diseases for which the NIH is developing and testing new treatments, and it is a key training center for clinical researchers all over the world.

The most fascinating thing about the Clinical Center is the patients who go there, who increasingly find their way to the Clinical Center through the Internet and through patient advocacy groups and the groups that form to discuss how to deal with a particular disease. (Often their conditions are difficult to diagnose, and increasingly they help their doctors find a diagnosis.)

Pat has received several awards for her history of the Clinical Center, Building Ten at Fifty. "I could write about Building 10 for years," says Pat. "I don't know who is more fascinating, the patients or the researchers. You have never seen so many brilliant, dedicated, and hard-working people in one place. Even the patients are well-informed. That's part of the mystique of the place. Pioneering work, which Building 10 is designed to facilitate, is being done on a thousand different fronts."

"If you walk out the door to my office, on the right you walk into my laboratory, out the door to the left you walk around to the ward," said Steve Rosenberg, a pioneer in immunotherapy as a treatment for cancer patients for whom standard treatment options have failed. "It's a marriage of science and clinical practice that exists nowhere else. This hospital is a jewel in the medical universe.'" The close proximity of laboratories and research beds encourages the flow of ideas from the laboratory bench to the bedside and back again, and the critical mass of expertise, dedication, and sheer intelligence creates an environment in which both basic and clinical research thrive. Pat also executive produced Michael Dolan's 15-minute video emphasizing the Center's partnership with its patients.

Building 10 at Fifty

https://www.cc.nih.gov/sites/default/files/internet-files/about/_pdf/Building-10-At-Fifty.pdf

Another of Pat's books was an unexpected bestseller for the National Science Foundation. New Formulas for America's Workforce: Girls in Science and Engineering went through its entire first printing in five weeks (plus in that same period an amazing 102,000+ downloads of the book, most of them in PDF format). Parents and teachers: Important and useful findings from 225 NSF-funded projects on how girls learn -- and learn to love (or hate and avoid) --science, engineering, and technology; on how women and "women's ways of knowing" are needed to fill national gaps in science, engineering, and technology; and on what can be done to improve science learning for girls and women. Click here to read Pat's Washington Post story, "Why Janie Can't Engineer," on how to hook girls on science.

"Pat McNees is one of my favorite writers," said Barbara Greenman, former executive editor of book development at the Literary Guild. "She put heart and soul into the project we did together, the anthology Dying: A Book of Comfort. Instead of using only her own experience helping her dying father, she researched the literature, found out (or intuited) what people facing a death or bereavement might need to read, and after finding an amazing amount of wise and wonderful material did a beautiful job shaping it into a gem of a book, which has helped many, many people. She was realistic about publishing realities, easy to work with, and knowledgeable and thorough about copyright and permissions (she teaches a course on the subject). Most important, she managed to make readers feel that dealing with a death could be a life-affirming experience. Over my 20 years here, Dying is the book I am most proud of publishing."

DYING made the 25th anniversary list of favorite books by women, compiled by the Women's National Book Association (Washington DC).

Pat McNees (both a writer and editor) spends most of her time these days helping other people write their life stories and helping organizations tell their stories in compelling ways, so that people actually read them. The life story writing workshops she leads at the Writer's Center in Bethesda ("My Life, One Story at a Time") are the most enjoyable part of her life: Participants write something about their life each week and read it aloud to the small group. "I do very little except offer writing prompts and encourage honesty and good storytelling, and somehow their writing gets better, and the group bonds, and we feel we know each other in ways even our long-time friends do not -- because the whole exercise is to dig deep and figure out what important things happened to us, and why they were important (or memorable, or moving, or funny). Too bad we don't do this early in life or with our family and friends. Maybe there is something about opening up to friendly strangers--the workshops do draw interesting and empathetic participants--that facilitates this process of self-discovery."

Here's Pat's professional life, once over lightly: She grew up in southern California, where her parents had settled after fleeing the Dust Bowl in Kansas. After graduating with honors from UCLA, Pat did two years' graduate work at Stanford University, where she taught freshman English, graded papers for Wallace Stegner, studied with Irving Howe, helped organize Arthur Kornberg's library (at the time his research fellows were collapsing helix coils), and cooked for her room and board.

Convinced that academia (or at least eighteenth-century literature) was not for her, she moved to New York to become an editor in book publishing — first for Harper & Row and then for Fawcett. Then, after a year's sabbatical in Europe and the birth in Rome of her daughter Romy, Pat began freelancing, first as an editor and rewriter and then (after ghosting) as a writer — of service pieces, personal and humorous essays, profiles, and narrative nonfiction.

After moving to Washington, DC, she supported her writing, eating, and dancing habits by editing and rewriting documents of varying lengths — from reports and white papers to conference proceedings. She also wrote several thousand executive summaries, developing a special niche: analyzing and summarizing reports, conference discussions, and the like — for example, synthesizing stakeholders' comments about an organization's strengths and weaknesses for its incoming president. She is hired to make the unreadable readable, to bring a light touch to serious subjects, and to pack maximum information and insight into an easy five- or ten-minute read. She has written about business, economics, the developing world, women's issues, education, health, medicine, and medical research — as well as food, books, and dancing, among other topics. (Like many others, she became a writer partly to satisfy her curiosity about the world--in various forms of "paid nosiness." ) Pulling together a book about global public policy, she realized that public health policy was far more compelling than other areas and she has been writing more about medicine and health ever since.

Her report-writing workshops have taken her as far abroad as Lesotho and Myanmar (Burma) — see photos under Workshops and Presentation. At the Writer's Center in Bethesda and in libraries in Montgomery County, Maryland, she teaches a workshop called "My Life, One Story at a Time," a nontraditional workshop of short personal writing designed to help participants capture their personal and family legacy for the next generation--to examine with candor their important life choices and experiences, achievements and mistakes, beliefs and convictions. Much laughter, some tears, wonderful story-sharing, great bonding.

Her feature articles have appeared in New York Magazine, Parents, the Washington Post, and elsewhere, but in recent years she's spent more time writing books than articles. She has edited four literary anthologies and has written several life stories and organizational histories. (She has a flourishing sideline helping people write and publish their memoirs.)

Her 2003 book for the National Science Foundation (New Formulas for America's Workforce: Girls in Science and Engineering — synthesizing best practices for interesting girls and women in studies and careers in science, technology, engineering, and math — "sold out" its first printing in five weeks -- and more than 102,000 people downloaded the book in PDF format in the first two years after its publication. (You can download the book free here.) Pat then wrote stories about patients in research, drawing on her experiences writing Building Ten at Fifty (selections here), a prize-winning history of Building 10, the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health, the huge Bethesda hospital and clinic that contains half the medical research beds in the country and provide treatment free, if you qualify for a protocol (your doctor has to recommend you for it). You can read a booklet drawn from BUILDING TEN AT FIFTY here but now you can download the whole book (PDF) free here.
Her life stories for noncelebrities have included
• An American Biography: An Industrialist Remembers the Twentieth Century, by Pat McNees, with a foreword by Robert Kanigel (see website description)
• Starting Over: The Life of Herman Ernst Sheets by Herman Sheets with Pat McNees. See website description.
• Reflections on a Silver Spoon: How a Foodie Found Home by Kim Firestone (Kim wrote it, Pat coached and edited him--you can buy online at Amazon or in person at his wonderful restaurant and market, Firestone's, in Frederick, Maryland).
• Other projects, including several photo-memoirs, were privately published.

Pat's organizational histories include:

• Changing Times, Changing Minds: 100 Years of Psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine by Pat McNees.
• Building Ten at Fifty: 50 Years of Clinical Research at the NIH Clinical Center by Pat McNees ((brief writeup here).
• By Design: The Story of Crown Equipment Corporation (often cited as a model of a compelling company history, showing how a focus on stories about and the people in the company, and photos, can bring to life the story of a product like a lift truck--in this case, the BMW of lift trucks) -- or order directly from Pat
• YPO: The First Fifty Years. The early history of the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO). See selections from and about the book.

Pat has also edited several anthologies, including:
• DYING: A Book of Comfort. Healing Words on Loss and Grief, ed. Pat McNees. (You can buy new copies of the beautiful hardcover edition only directly from Pat.)
• My Words Are Gonna Linger: The Art of Personal History ed. by Paula Stallings Yost and Pat McNees, with a foreword by Rick Bragg
• Contemporary Latin American Short Stories, compiled and edited by Pat McNees, in print since 1974.

Pat, who has received several awards for her writing, is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, Association of Health Care Journalists, Authors Guild, National Association of Science Writers, PEN, and the late, lamented Association of Personal Historians (for which she served as president, 2010-2011). She and her friend Kristie help organize the monthly meetings of the Washington Biography Group and the semi-annual socials; in December 2016, the group celebrated 30 years of meeting regular, and many biography friendships.

Pat lives in Bethesda, MD. Until recently, on weekends she could often be found at her favorite dance venue — Glen Echo Park's Spanish Ballroom — at the Sunday waltz, occasional ballroom dances, swing dancing, or (very, very, VERY slowly) learning the Argentine tango. Recently she's put her physical focus on zumba classes and other ways to keep her body in shape, but she's thinking of returning to Glen Echo, wondering if it will still work for an "older woman."

Anthologies
* DYING: A Book of Comfort. Healing Words on Loss and Grief, ed. Pat McNees.

     "Pat McNees is one of my favorite writers," said Barbara Greenman, former executive editor of book development at the Literary Guild. "She put heart and soul into the project we did together, the anthology Dying: A Book of Comfort. Instead of using only her own experience helping her dying father, she researched the literature, found out (or intuited) what people facing a death or bereavement might need to read, and after finding an amazing amount of wise and wonderful material did a beautiful job shaping it into a gem of a book, which has helped many, many people. She was realistic about publishing realities, easy to work with, and knowledgeable and thorough about copyright and permissions (she teaches a course on the subject). Most important, she managed to make readers feel that dealing with a death could be a life-affirming experience. Over my 20 years here, Dying is the book I am most proud of publishing."

DYING made the 25th anniversary list of favorite books by women, compiled by the Women's National Book Association (Washington).
* My Words Are Gonna Linger: The Art of Personal History ed. by Paula Stallings Yost and Pat McNees, with a foreword by Rick Bragg
* Contemporary Latin American Short Stories, compiled and edited by Pat McNees, in print since 1974, with several different covers over the years.

* Friday's Child, a collection of short stories about retarded people published in 1977, containing the following stories.
   Betts, Doris. The ugliest pilgrim.
   Beattie, Ann. Wanda's.
   Friedman, Bruce Jay. Back to back.
   Gaines, Ernest J. The sky is gray.
   Taylor, Peter. A wife of Nashville.
   Brown, Rosellen. I am not Luis Beech-nut.
   Barthelme, Donald. The temptation of St. Anthony.
   O'Connor, Flannery. Revelation.
   Oates, Joyce Carol. In the region of ice.
   Malamud, Bernard. Black is my favorite color.
   Ozick, Cynthia. An education.
   Yates, Richard. A really good jazz piano.
   Updike, John. Separating.

Personal and corporate histories
* An American Biography: An Industrialist Remembers the Twentieth Century, by Pat McNees, with a foreword by Robert Kanigel (website description)
* Starting Over by Herman Sheets with Pat McNees
• Reflections on a Silver Spoon: How a Foodie Found Home by Kim Firestone (Kim wrote it, Pat coached and edited, and My Special Book (in Buenos Aires) designed and produced the book).
• By Design: The Story of Crown Equipment Corporation
• YPO: The First Fifty Years A behind-the-scenes account of the Young Presidents' Organization's first 50 years, especially its formative and often turbulent first 25 years.
• Plus others privately published and not available to the public.

Other works
• New Formulas for America's Workforce: Girls in Science and Engineering by Pat McNees for National Science Foundation. Download or read online)
• The Beneficial Effects of Life Story and Legacy Activities (Pat McNees, Journal of Geriatric Care Management, Spring 2009, pp 15-19)
• Dancing: A Guide to the Capital Area (much of it now available on this website)
• New Formulas for America's Workforce: Girls in Science and Engineering by Pat McNees for the National Science Foundation (read online or download free here).
An unexpected bestseller for the National Science Foundation. New Formulas for America's Workforce: Girls in Science and Engineering went through its entire first printing in five weeks, plus an amazing 102,000+ downloads of the book, most of them in PDF format. Important findings from 225 NSF-funded projects on how girls learn -- and learn to love (or hate and avoid) --science, engineering, and technology; on how women and "women's ways of knowing" are needed to fill national gaps in science, engineering, and technology; and on what can be done to improve science learning for girls and women. Click here to read Pat's Washington Post story, "Why Janie Can't Engineer," on how to hook girls on science.

For many years Pat happily wrote articles, until she realized that it didn't pay well enough to provide a decent living. Links to a few (of many) articles:
• An Abnormal Reunion (The Scientist, March 2008). Pat's story about Mennonite and Brethren men and women who volunteered as normal controls at NIH in 1950s and 1960s. "In 1958, Jim Conrad, a Mennonite from Oregon, volunteered to eat the same solid foods every day for several weeks, then nothing but corn oil and skim milk for nine weeks, then a combination of coconut oil and skim milk for six weeks, and finally, fish oil and skim milk for two weeks - all in the name of biomedical science. It's the kind of experience that might turn people off of medicine. But in this case, it helped confirm Conrad's decision to become a physician.

"Last Fall, at Conrad's invitation, 25 other Mennonites and Brethren sat around long tables in the medical boardroom of the National Institutes of Health's new Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md., for an unusual reunion: Like Conrad, they had served as normal controls in NIH studies conducted between 1955 and 1970...."

• From Generation to Generation (Dara Kahn's story about Pat McNees's life story writing classes), Bnai Brith Magazine Fall 2010

• The Beneficial Effects of Life Story and Legacy Activities (Pat McNees, from Geriatric Care Management Journal, Spring 2009)
• Bag Lunches: Some innocent truths about school lunch
• The difference between a preface, foreword, and introduction
• Tips for buying caviar
• Great and unusual online shopping
• Eulogy for Eleanor (Pat's mom)
• What to do with portobello mushrooms
• Books for book groups
• The boy in the plastic bubble
• A bad heart and housemaid's knee (Marian P's experience at the NIH Clinical Center)
• Why Janie Can't Engineer: Raising Girls to Succeed
• How to buy upholstered furniture
• Starting a small business
• Selling your diamonds: fact vs. fantasy
• Learning styles
• Scared speechless? Join Toastmasters
• Cool science sites for young people
• The anatomy of medical error
• The stages of grief
• Reforming the U.S. health care system

[Back to Top]

My Words Are Gonna Linger: The Art of Personal History , ed. Paula Stallings Yost and Pat McNees, with a foreword by Rick Bragg ($19.95). Read excerpts here. Read a review here.

"At last, a collection that shows the "why, what, and how" behind memoir as legacy. Spanning more than a century, these intriguing reflections of personal as well as global social and political history are told in the unique voice and viewpoint of each storyteller."
~ Susan Wittig Albert, author, Writing from Life, founder, Story Circle Network

“This anthology sings with Walt Whitman’s spirit of democracy, a celebration of our diversity. Each selection is a song of self; some have perfect pitch, some the waver of authenticity. All demonstrate the power of the word to salvage from the onrush of life, nuggets worth saving.”
~ Tristine Rainer, author of Your Life as Story and Writing the New Autobiography

Both a writer and an editor, Pat is especially useful for

* Writing, redrafting, or heavily editing your articles, papers, books, white papers, and other documents.

*Helping YOU figure out what you need to do on something you are writing yourself but having trouble with.

* Synthesizing or summarizing long, complex documents, presenting the key messages in a voice that will not put the average reader to sleep. Usually this involves coming up with a meaningful title, providing a 25-words-or-less summary line, and an executive summary four paragraphs to three pages long (depending on the audience and purpose). Pat has written several thousand (yes, thousand) executive summaries, for clients such as the Urban Institute, USAID, the World Bank, and various medical research organizations.

* Bringing dull or dullish material to life ——generally by injecting anecdotes, examples, narrative, and other devices that make the material more dynamic and interesting.

* Bringing a lighter touch to academic writing and translating into plain English writing dense with jargon.

* Synthesizing the main conclusions or arguments made in meetings and conferences. Telling a story or conveying messages in many voices but with a unified purpose.

* Building a narrative from a collection of oral histories or transcripts of interviews. This might be a life story, the history of an organization, or the story of an event.

* Bringing a uniform tone and voice to compilations and conference proceedings and bringing intelligence, structural clarity, and good taste to anthologies (Pat's anthologies stand the test of time.)

Here’s what one client (the author of a book on the defense industry) said: “As an editor, McNees has a keen eye for restructuring an early draft of a report and a gift for shortening and improving sentences, paragraphs, and papers without distorting their technical meaning. McNees has an ability to edit a manuscript at almost any level of detail the writer needs—as a broad-brush overview, at the paragraph-by-paragraph level, right down to line-by-line blue-pencil editing.”

Pat often combines editing with coaching. Experts for whom writing is difficult often ask for her because she helps them improve their sense of audience and their ability to write more cogently, concisely, clearly, and persuasively. Having a sense of humor helps ease the anxiety most people associate with writing projects.

In her first medical history, Building Ten at Fifty, Pat wrote about the patients treated, the researchers funded, and the medical mysteries investigated in the NIH Clinical Center, better known at the National Institutes of Health as Building 10. Part research hospital, part ambulatory care center, Building 10 is the home base for clinical research (research involving human patients) of the various national institutes.

Many scientists on NIH's Bethesda, MD, campus do basic research; Building 10 is where intramural researchers from the various institutes see patients. The addition of an upgraded hospital, the Mark O. Hatfield Clinical Research Center, made Building 10 the second largest federal building in the country, next to the Pentagon. It contains half the research beds in the United States and is the largest, most important biomedical research complex in the world. It is an invaluable resource for patients with rare diseases, or common diseases for which the NIH is developing and testing new treatments, and it is a key training center for clinical researchers all over the world.

The most fascinating thing about the Clinical Center is the patients who go there, who increasingly find their way to the Clinical Center through the Internet and through patient advocacy groups and the groups that form to discuss how to deal with a particular disease. (Often their conditions are difficult to diagnose, and increasingly they help their doctors find a diagnosis.)

Pat received several awards for her history of the Clinical Center, Building Ten at Fifty. "I could write about Building 10 for years," says Pat. "I don't know who is more fascinating, the patients or the researchers. You have never seen so many brilliant, dedicated, and hard-working people in one place. Even the patients are well-informed. That's part of the mystique of the place. Pioneering work, which Building 10 is designed to facilitate, is being done on a thousand different fronts." Read an excerpt published for the Center's 50th anniversary.

"If you walk out the door to my office, on the right you walk into my laboratory, out the door to the left you walk around to the ward," said Steve Rosenberg, a pioneer in immunotherapy as a treatment for cancer patients for whom standard treatment options have failed. "It's a marriage of science and clinical practice that exists nowhere else. This hospital is a jewel in the medical universe.'" The close proximity of laboratories and research beds encourages the flow of ideas from the laboratory bench to the bedside and back again, and the critical mass of expertise, dedication, and sheer intelligence creates an environment in which both basic and clinical research thrive. Pat also executive produced a 15-minute video emphasizing the Center's partnership with its patients. You can read part of Pat's history of the Clinical Center (in a program for the employees' celebration) online--or click on "Bench to Bedside and Back" and watch the video online.

       Another of Pat's projects was an unexpected bestseller for the National Science Foundation. New Formulas for America's Workforce: Girls in Science and Engineering went through its entire first printing in five weeks (plus an amazing 102,000+ downloads of the book, most of them in PDF format). Important findings from 225 NSF-funded projects on how girls learn -- and learn to love (or hate and avoid) --science, engineering, and technology; on how women and "women's ways of knowing" are needed to fill national gaps in science, engineering, and technology; and on what can be done to improve science learning for girls and women. Click here to read Pat's Washington Post story, "Why Janie Can't Engineer," on how to hook girls on science.

"Pat McNees is one of my favorite writers," said Barbara Greenman, former executive editor of book development at the Literary Guild. "She put heart and soul into the project we did together, the anthology Dying: A Book of Comfort. Instead of using only her own experience helping her dying father, she researched the literature, found out (or intuited) what people facing a death or bereavement might need to read, and after finding an amazing amount of wise and wonderful material did a beautiful job shaping it into a gem of a book, which has helped many, many people. She was realistic about publishing realities, easy to work with, and knowledgeable and thorough about copyright and permissions (she teaches a course on the subject). Most important, she managed to make readers feel that dealing with a death could be a life-affirming experience. Over my 20 years here, Dying is the book I am most proud of publishing."

DYING made the 25th anniversary list of favorite books by women, compiled by the Women's National Book Association (it doesn't appear to be online anymore).

MY WORDS ARE GONNA LINGER: THE ART OF PERSONAL HISTORY ed. by Paula Stallings Yost and Pat McNees, with a foreword by Rick Bragg,\
"This anthology sings with Walt Whitman’s spirit of democracy, a celebration of our diversity. Each selection is a song of self; some have perfect pitch, some the waver of authenticity. All demonstrate the power of the word to salvage from the onrush of life, nuggets worth saving.”
~ Tristine Rainer, author of Your Life as Story and Writing the New Autobiography

"At last, a collection that shows the "why, what, and how" behind memoir as legacy. Spanning more than a century, these intriguing reflections of personal as well as global social and political history are told in the unique voice and viewpoint of each storyteller."
~ Susan Wittig Albert, author, Writing from Life, founder, Story Circle Network