Happy New Year! We hope this finds our readers well rested from a holiday break! We spent our time off catching up on reading and it seems like we received an unusually high volume of memoir submissions. This left us wondering, why is memoir so popular? Is it the transparency of the world we live in today? Is it our collective obsession with celebrity love lives that lends itself to curiosity about how ordinary people overcome extraordinary obstacles? As we caught up on emails sent over the break, we mused; is it the "me" generation's fascination with telling its own individual stories? Or maybe it is just the sheer voyeurism born out of the social networking era. Perhaps we are all just craving the story of the person behind the Facebook page or the Tweet. If Facebook is looking into other peoples' windows, is it possible that memoir is taking it a step further by sitting in other peoples' living rooms?

So what makes a good memoir? Well, we think it's a work that braids a fantastic, original voice and an unforgettable experience. A well-written memoir immerses us in a world so vivid, a place so unusual, and a plot so well-crafted that we are happy to sit in that living room for as long as it takes to truly experience the story. And what a treat when we find that magical combination!

Just about the highest praise for memoir is that is "reads like fiction" (but isn't!) because, in essence, the basic principles of all stories are the same. The unusual plot twists, the rich characters and the meaningful endings all leave us with the same sense of looking at the world through someone else's eyes. So we challenge you to embrace the voracious voyeurism that permeates our new world in 2010 and we dare you to satisfy us, dazzle us with your prose and invite us to sit on your couch with you as we all look out our windows towards a New Year.

-Wendy and Kim