03/27/2025
By Katharine Webster

The publishing journey of English Professor Maureen Stanton’s new memoir, “The Murmur of Everything Moving,” is a Cinderella story.

Stanton wrote the first draft of the memoir – a tale of falling in love, breaking up and then finding out that her ex-boyfriend had terminal cancer – while earning an MFA in creative writing at Ohio State University. At the end of summer 2001, she found an agent who was interested. But after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, no one would touch the book.

“I couldn’t get anyone interested because it was a sad story and the country was grieving,” she says.

A decade later, after publishing “Killer Stuff and Tons of Money,” her deeply reported dive into the world of flea markets and antiques, she tried again: No luck. The same thing happened after she published “Body Leaping Backward,” a memoir of her childhood, in 2019.

Three years ago, Stanton decided to “cannibalize” the still-unpublished first book for shorter pieces she could submit to literary journals and magazines. An excerpt won the Sewanee Review nonfiction contest, and The New York Times published a shorter essay, “An Engagement Ring but No Fiancé,” in its “Modern Love” column. 

Encouraged, Stanton revised the manuscript and submitted it last year for the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence – and won. Her prize: $10,000 and publication by Columbus State University Press this month.

Stanton, who teaches courses in literary journalism and literary publishing in the English Department’s Creative Writing Program, recently sat down for an interview about the book, the path to publication and why she’s spending her prize money on services provided by former students.

Why do you think this book still resonates after 25 years, and how is it different from other memoirs about cancer?

It’s a love story; it’s a story about caregiving and about how illness changes love and relationships. 

As a young person in your 20s, you think you know everything about love. Steve and I were very young and very lusty. And then you’re facing mortality, and it’s no longer a physical, bodily love; you’re not going to get married and have kids. He went through an anger phase, and then later in his illness, we fell in love in a completely different way. It’s about compassion, and what do we owe other people, too.

It’s also a working-class narrative. All the other cancer memoirs I had read – and there are some great ones out there – were about people who didn’t have a problem taking time off from work and who had the best doctors. 

Image by University of Georgia Press

Steve was an electrician, and I had my college degree, but I was working as an administrative assistant. Steve’s friend Joey was selling some of Steve’s pain pills to help pay for experimental treatments. His parents raised money from their church.

You began writing “Murmur” a decade after Steve’s death. How did you remember everything so clearly? 

I was always keeping journals when it was happening, and I started publishing short pieces about it within a couple of years, so I had that material to work with; I had details I never would have remembered otherwise. 

How are you using your prize money?

I hired former student Megan Posco ’14, who now has her own company, Posco Publicity, to help get the book out there, because small presses don’t have big marketing budgets. It’s been really fun working with Megan. She’s gotten me some reviews and interviews.

And I hired another student who’d taken my Literary Publishing class, Valentina Muñoz Roa, an English major with a digital media minor, to create a social media campaign. 

Valentina created posts for Instagram with quotes she liked from the book, including for Valentine’s Day. She created a Spotify playlist of songs that are mentioned in the book and paired them with images, and she set up a GoodReads giveaway. We’re working on TikTok now. I never could have done all that!

When Valentina graduates in May, she can add to her resume that she created this campaign. It’s just been a really nice partnership with these current and former students.