Kelly

McMasters

Bestselling Author

Memoirist, Journalist & Editor

Travels from: New York, NY

“One of the most beautifully written books I’ve ever read. Kelly McMasters is a literary giant.” ― Zibby Owens, Good Morning America

Kelly McMasters is an essayist, professor, mother, and former bookshop owner. She is the author of the Zibby Book Club pick The Leaving Season: A Memoir-in-Essays (WW Norton) and co-editor of the ABA national bestseller Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult). Her first book, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, was listed as one of Oprah’s top 5 summer memoirs and is the basis for the documentary film ‘The Atomic States of America,’ a 2012 Sundance selection, and the anthology she co-edited with Margot Kahn, This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, 2017), was a New York Times Editor’s Choice.

Her essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, The American Scholar, Literary Hub, Newsday, Orion Magazine, River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, Romper, and The Rumpus, among others. She holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia’s School of the Arts and is the recipient of a Best American Science & Nature Essays notable essay designation, a Pushcart nomination, and an Orion Book Award nomination.

Kelly has spoken about creative nonfiction at middle school libraries, TEDx, Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop, authors@google, and more, and has taught at Franklin & Marshall College, NYU Gallatin, and in the undergraduate writing program and Journalism Graduate School at Columbia University, among others. She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Director of Publishing Studies at Hofstra University in NY. She is at work on a book about diaries.

Kelly's Featured Titles

The Leaving Season: A Memoir in Essays

W. W. Norton & Company |

May 9, 2023

Memoir

Kelly McMasters found herself in her midthirties living her fantasy: she’d moved with her husband, a painter, from New York City to rural Pennsylvania, where their children roamed idyllic acres in rainboots and diapers. The pastoral landscape and the bookshop they opened were restorative at first, for her and her marriage. But soon, she was quietly plotting her escape.

In The Leaving Season, McMasters chronicles the heady rush of falling in love and carving out a life in the city, the slow dissolution of her relationship in an isolated farmhouse, and the complexities of making a new home for herself and her children as a single parent. She delves into the tricky and often devastating balance between seeing and being seen; loss and longing; desire and doubt; and the paradox of leaving what you love in order to survive.

Whether considering masculinity in the countryside through the life of a freemartin calf, the vulnerability of new motherhood in the wake of a car crash, or the power of community pulsing through an independent bookshop, The Leaving Season finds in every ending a new beginning.

Memoir & Personal Journeys, Nonfiction

Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town

PublicAffairs |

April 22, 2008

Memoir

Shirley seemed to be doomed from the beginning. Founded by a Vaudevillian huckster who touted it as a seaside haven despite the sand bar that blocks access to the shore, the town has been plagued by one disaster after another UFO, a childhood cancer cluster, and a mysterious federal nuclear laboratory in nearby Brookhaven that leaked toxic nuclear and chemical waste into the aquifer from which the residents unknowingly drew their well water.

This is Kelly McMasters’ account of growing up in a cursed town and loving it anyway, and of a girl’s awakening to tragedy and to a sense of mission. Told in a deliciously engaging voice, Welcome to Shirley balances the bitter with the sweet, the funny with the infuriating, in an unforgettable story of working class Long Island.

Memoir & Personal Journeys, Nonfiction

The Ethics of Writing Hard Things in Family Memoir

How to protect yourself and others on the page without sacrificing truth or agency (or ending up in court!).
Creative nonfiction offers us a way to understand our world; mothering offers us a major grounding-wire to do so. How do we keep our children and families safe while telling our truths? Pragmatic examples and craft-based discussion on topics ranging from reportage and note-taking, archival work and research, applying lyric and meditative forms, and utilizing the narrator as shield will be discussed.

The Landscape of Memory

Our identities shift based on our surroundings; the landscape is an extension of our narrator’s story. This workshop aims to make intentional use of the relationship between setting and narrator in personal work. Whether your landscape is the story, or just a part of it, we’ll work to strengthen this reflexive relationship on the page.

How Writing My Own Obituary Every Year Helped Me Live

My mother worked in hospice care when I was a kid, so the topic of death was always present at our dinner table. Only decades later, after stealing her homework assignment to write one’s own obituary became an annual practice, did I realize how this form of essay can be a beautiful monument to the work of life and a powerful motivator to change, while we still can.

Voice on the Page: Writing Fearlessly

To speak loudly on the page requires holding all your fear and shame tightly to your chest, staring it square in the face, and then releasing it into space. In order to write fearlessly, one must understand and accept what we are truly afraid of (and it usually is not the thing we think!).
Other topics discussed: The connection between empathy and voice; the difference between voice block and writer’s block; how to erase fear and move forward on the page.

Writing Women Who Leave

After years of being dismissed and derided, the “divorce memoir” is now being positioned and recognized in a new way, one that has a great deal to do with women’s autonomy in a culture that is rapidly reducing it. In the last 10-15 years, stories of women who leave have become increasingly literary, taking more risk with style and form as we work to invert the long-dominant marriage plot. Recognizing logistical considerations off the page (emotional, economic, legal), while primarily centering with the craft of balancing the movement inherent in moving on, this talk will engage such questions as how nostalgia, grief, and landscape play across cultural contexts, geography, sexuality, and the forbidden identities of divorcees or women who spurn marriage all together. Classic story structure calls for a beginning, middle, and end; in leaving, an inherent rupture explodes the expected arc, especially when leaving is not “the end.” This talk will reflect on the increase in how seriously this sub-genre and its audience is being taken in the marketplace.

Storytelling & Activism

How to build a storytelling practice into social justice initiatives to bring readers into the fold.

Food & Memory

Food is a writer’s magic wand for accessing sensory memory. From Proust’s famously transportive madeleines to Yiyun Li’s nostalgic Orange Crush, food can function on a writer’s page as a way to explore politics, nature, labor, gender, the body, community, faith, family, and more. Through short readings, generative exercises, and observation, we’ll work together to use food as a lens to build our worlds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRdw3ssYZVk&t=1443s

“Kelly McMasters was a master of both the topic and the presentation of it. She seemed to understand what our questions would be and answered them without any of us having to ask. Kelly’s exercises were also great and got my mind thinking. I loved it and would enjoy attending a session with her again.” — 2024 Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop participant

“Kelly McMasters is a skilled speaker, and her presentation was the best I attended. I took more notes in her session than any other and will put her ideas to work. Her samples and writing exercises were outstanding. Also, I bought her new book, The Leaving Season, and consider it the most finely crafted memoir I have read.” — 2024 Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop participant

Kelly’s Essays

Kelly’s Events

Honors, Awards & Recognition

● THE LEAVING SEASON: A Memoir-in-Essays (W.W. Norton, May 2023)
o Zibby Book Club Pick
o Zibby Magazine’s Most Anticipated Books of 2023, Publishers Weekly’s Most Anticipated Parenting Books of Spring 2023
o National and regional events and media attention, including excerpts and coverage in Good Morning America, The Sh*t No One Tells You About Publishing podcast, The Atlantic, Oprah Daily, Literary Hub, Romper, The Common, The East Hampton Star, Book Reporter, CSpan’s BookTV, and more.

●WANTING: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult, Feb 2023), co-edited with Margot Kahn.
o National Bestseller on the ABA Indie list
o Featured in Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Essay Collections of Spring 2023, Electric Lit’s Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Books of 2023, Zibby Magazine’s Most Anticipated Books of 2023, NPR’s All Things Considered, among others.

● THIS IS THE PLACE: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, November 2017), coedited with Margot Kahn.
o New York Times Editor’s Choice
o Featured in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, BUST Magazine, The Portland Book Review, Newsday, The New York Journal of Books, The Sante Fe New Mexican, The Toronto Star, Town & Country, WPR’s The Morning Show with Kate Archer Kent, and WGBH’s Under the Radar, among others.

● WELCOME TO SHIRLEY: A Memoir from an Atomic Town (PublicAffairs, April 2008)
o Orion Book Award Nominee
o Featured in O Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post Book World, The Boston Globe, The Onion’s AV Club, Ms. Magazine, Dan’s Papers, The Brooklyn Rail, extensive blog coverage, and WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show, among others.
o “The Atomic States of America” (9.14 Pictures), a feature-length documentary based on the book, was a 2012 Sundance Film Festival selection.