Maureen Stanton knew from an early age that she wanted to be a writer and made writing a book one of her life goals. “But it wasn’t until I was thirty-five that I realized I was halfway into my life, and I hadn’t really made an effort toward my goal,” she admits. At that point, Maureen says she got serious, applied to graduate programs for creative writing, and earned her MFA when she was forty.
“I’m a late bloomer,” says the author whose book The Murmur of Everything Moving: A Memoir not only won SCN’s Sarton Award for Memoir but the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence. It also became a Publisher’s Weekly Editor’s Pick and was named one of the 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 by LitHub.
The book is about Maureen taking care of her boyfriend as he battled cancer and then losing him when she was twenty-seven. It was a life-changing experience for her. “There are many cancer memoirs,” she says, “but I didn’t see any written from a working-class perspective, or that told a more complicated story of the relationship.” In writing the memoir, Maureen says she wanted to explore the idea of love and how it changes in challenging circumstances, especially a young love.
This is Maureen’s third book. Her first is a journalistic work titled Stuff and Tons of Money: An Insider’s Look at the World of Flea Markets, Antiques, and Collecting, which is described as a captivating tour of the outrageous world of American antiques, jam-packed with colorful characters, high-stakes scores, and insider tips for all who seek hidden treasure.
Maureen’s second book is Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girl. Her aim in writing it, she says, was to examine why she strayed so far from her moral upbringing. “I carried shame about my actions as a teenager for decades and finally delved into answering that question. There wasn’t a simple answer as to why I took drugs and did things that harmed myself and others.” Her personal research led her to write a layered narrative that examines her own personality and behavior, the effects of divorce on adolescents, the culture of her hometown, and the zeitgeist of the 1970s.
Maureen believes memoir is an important literary form that has become more valuable these days because people are becoming less connected in personal ways. “There’s a lot of divisiveness in our culture, but personal stories can be unifying. We’ve all lost, loved, felt pain and joy, endeavored to achieve something and either succeeded or failed. In memoir, the details of one’s experiences may differ, but the underlying story can be universal. Someone coming of age in the 1970s or the 2010s in the United States or in another country will still experience similar archetypical milestones. Memoir can also connect us by bringing readers into lives and places never experienced, thus opening up our worlds and our perspectives.”
A huge fan of May Sarton, Maureen says she feels honored to be recognized with an award that carries the author’s name. “Writers often work in solitude . . . not knowing how they will be received. Recognition with a prestigious award like the Sarton is reaffirming. . . . It gives me faith and confidence that I succeeded in what I strived to do—tell an authentic true story in a compelling and artful way.”
A creative writing teacher at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Maureen says she tells her students to write for the joy of writing and that anything else, like publication, is “icing on the cake.”
