Q&A With Sonja Livingston, Winner of the 6th Annual WD Personal Essay Awards

Sonja Livingston's personal essay, "How to Read Your Work Aloud: A Ten-Point List" won the 6th annual Writer's Digest Personal Essay Awards, guest judged in 2025 by William Kenower. Here is a short Q&A with Sonja Livingston and read her winning essay here.

I was invited to teach at a writing conference in Vermont last summer, which meant I’d also be expected to read an essay aloud. I’ve read my work many times, but, for some reason, last summer I couldn’t get excited about the reading. My writing tends to address tough topics like poverty and broken families. While those topics are still important to me, I wanted to share a piece of writing that allowed humor or “space” to penetrate those heavy topics. The result is this essay, which still contains sobering material but a fair share of light too. Formatting the essay as a list allowed me to move around in time, to include elements of humor and to remind myself why sharing our work with each other matters.

This essay took less time than usual—probably because I was writing it specifically for a reading a week or two away. I wrote a draft in a week, then revised (maybe 4 or 5 more drafts) during the next week. Finally, reading it publicly at that writer’s conference helped reveal places in need of smoothing.  

This timeline is pretty unusual! I normally take much longer to write, but the “How To” format (and numbered list) allowed me to keep things segmented and associative, versus linear and neatly woven together. It might be a good form for other writers to use for a first draft and for getting your ideas down.

The really wonderful thing about reading our work aloud is that it often helps us gauge how others respond to the work. Sometimes I love a piece of writing but it falls flat when read aloud. In this case, I wasn’t sure about the piece (it was still a draft, it seemed) but I felt the audience respond and understood that I’d tapped into something others could relate to. I looked for a place to send the essay and found the Writer’s Digest annual competitions listed on Submittable. I’ve always admired Writer’s Digest and though I knew it was a long shot, I decided to enter the essay.

I started the Memoir Café because I’ve appreciated the way other writers and the writing community have supported me over the years. I feel immense gratitude and hope anytime I get asked to share my writing and have been wondering what I could do to be part of the larger community. I’m not very technical and some of the interviews and prompts are very rough(!), but I try to interview authors with new books and offer writing prompts as I’m able to. It’s a small project, which I let go for the past few years because I’ve been so busy.  But then when I stopped posting, I heard from a group of ladies in Texas who asked me to post another video, as they used the prompts for their group. That inspired me to start again this winter and reminded me that we never know who our words and work will reach, which is part of the magic of writing.

Teaching new writers demands staying open to the ever-evolving styles and possibilities of writing. Younger writers tend to express themselves in styles and forms that are new and sometimes even challenging. They’re not afraid to broach topics that others might find uncomfortable. Maybe, most importantly, new writers are still learning the almost miraculous power of writing—to express ourselves, but also to connect meaningfully with each other, especially with people who seem different from us on the surface. Good writing breaks us open, in the best possible ways. Teaching keeps me tuned into and thankful for that.

I find fiction writing much more challenging than nonfiction, but I’ve been working on a novella set in Niagara Falls, New York. I’ve also just finished a collection of essays that combine research and imagination to explore the lives of ancestors, from the time of European colonization to the present day. The essays begin in my very strange and broken family tree, but have become portraits of working class and immigrant America.

The advice I give most often is to try to let go of all the questions and worry about where to publish and how to get started, and so on. You’ll figure that all out in good time. For today, just get some words down on the page. It doesn’t matter where you begin; only that you begin somewhere.

As for centering a competition, I say to go for it! If I thought too long or hard about the essay I submitted, insecurity about its style or content might have kept me from sending it in. But contests can be a wonderful way to get your work out there, and into an outlet like Writer’s Digest, that you might not otherwise think is an option.

About Sonja Livingston

Sonja Livingston is the author of four books of nonfiction, including the award-winning memoir, Ghostbread. She’s also the author of the craft workbook, 52 Snapshots: A Memoir Starter Kit.

Awards include a New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, an Iowa Review Award, an Arts & Letters Prize, a VanderMey Prize and a Virginia Faulkner Prize for Excellence, and an AWP Book Prize.

Sonja is an associate professor of creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University and teaches in the postgraduate program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.  She divides her time between Richmond, Virginia and Rochester, New York.