Martin County Genealogical Society - Membership Meeting

Take It as It Comes: Transforming Family History into a Compelling Book

Have you ever wanted to turn your family’s stories and history into a printed book for future generations—and perhaps a wider audience?  Drawing on her experience as an indie-publisher, writer, researcher, family folklorist and fifth-generation Montanan, Sonja Mongar, MFA will discuss the strategies, process, and challenges of gathering family stories and shaping them into a book.  She will share her 88-year-old mother’s beautifully designed hybrid book, Take It as It Comes: A Montana Oral History (2025,) which combines oral history, memoir, narrative photography, and family folklore as a model.  She will also introduce the self-publishing process.

Sonja Mongar, MFA is an indie publisher with Paradise Alley Publishing, an award-winning novelist, and a published essayist.  A retired tenured Professor of English, she has long specialized in memoir and life narrative, helping writers turn lived experience into powerful personal stories.  Over the years, she has guided students in creating and publishing numerous family folkloric writing projects in both digital and print formats. 

Sonja currently teaches in the Western Connecticut State University Low Residency MFA Program in Creative and Professional Writing and leads workshops through the IRSC Fielden Institute for Lifelong Learning and the Martin County Chautauqua South arts and education series.  Her current project is a book based on her great-grandmother’s 1907 diary, written when she was a fourteen-year-old rancher’s daughter in Central Montana.

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