The MFA Rejection That Led to a Book Deal
🎙️ New episode: Hannah Howard on writing "Feast," "Plenty" & lessons learned along the way
Hey Bleeders!
Of course, you don’t need an MFA to write a book—but for Hannah Howard, even applying to one changed the course of her writing life.
This week on The Bleeders, I’m chatting with
, author of Feast: True Love, In and Out of the Kitchen and Plenty: A Memoir of Food and Family. Hannah shares how an MFA rejection led to an unexpected breakthrough: the book deal that launched her career.The debut that spawned from setback
Hannah takes us through the ups and downs of writing her first memoir—Feast, a book about food, love, and the messy realities of recovery from an eating disorder—from securing a book deal (yay!) to the terrifying realization that now she had to actually write the book (yikes).
One of her best writing hacks? Breaking down the daunting 75,000-word goal into 1,000-word essays. This mental trick might just make your next big project feel a little more doable.
We also get into the nitty-gritty of structuring a memoir—why she ultimately went with a chronological approach, how revisiting painful memories was both a challenge and a necessity, and how the legal read played a crucial role in deciding what could and couldn’t stay in the book.
And, of course, we talk about the feels. Writing about personal trauma isn’t always cathartic in the moment. Sometimes, it’s downright miserable. But Hannah shares how therapy, time, and eventually talking about her book out in the world helped bring healing and perspective.
The second book struggle
You know that feeling when you think you’re writing one book, and then suddenly, it morphs into something else entirely? That’s exactly what happened with Hannah’s second memoir, Plenty, which started as a profile-driven exploration of women in the food world and ended up becoming a deeply personal story about recovery, love, family, and, ultimately, motherhood.
Hannah talks us through Plenty’s evolution, from its early pre-pregnancy proposal to its final chapter, written in a postpartum haze, and we discuss her shift from profiling big-name food industry figures to highlighting women she genuinely admired and wanted in her life—an approach that made the book more intimate and, honestly, way more fun to write.
Hannah also shares how feedback from her writing group encouraged her to lean more into the personal, how she tackled writing in real time about miscarriage, pregnancy, and early COVID, and why the second book is so much harder than the first (Elizabeth Gilbert has thoughts on this, too!).
In this episode, we also cover:
📌 How writing a one-page book summary for an MFA application helped Hannah crystallize her vision for Feast
📌 What she gained (and didn’t) from her low-residency MFA at Bennington
📌 The reactions to her candid writing about eating disorders—and how her niche is expanding into parenting
📌 Why she started leaving herself voice memos instead of journaling
📌 Behind-the-scenes of audiobook narration (yes, Hannah had to audition to read her own book)
If you’ve ever struggled with structuring your memoir, wondered whether an MFA is worth it, or just love behind-the-scenes publishing convos, you won’t want to miss this one.
🎧 Listen to the full episode now.
Happy bleeding!
Courtney
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