Pat McNees, writer, editor,
personal historian

After graduating with honors from UCLA, Pat McNees did two years' graduate work at Stanford University, where she taught freshman English, graded papers for Wallace Stegner, studied with Irving Howe, helped organize Arthur Kornberg's library (at the time his research fellows were collapsing helix coils), and cooked for her room and board.

Convinced that academia (or at least eighteenth-century literature) was not for her, she moved to New York to become an editor in book publishing — first for Harper & Row and then for Fawcett. Then, after a year's sabbatical in Europe and the birth in Rome of her daughter Romy, Pat began freelancing, first as an editor and rewriter and then (after ghosting) as a writer — of service pieces, personal and humorous essays, profiles, and narrative nonfiction.

After moving to Washington, DC, she supported her writing, eating, and dancing habits by editing and rewriting documents of varying lengths — from reports and white papers to conference proceedings. She also wrote several thousand executive summaries, developing a special niche: analyzing and summarizing reports, conference discussions, and the like — for example, synthesizing stakeholders' comments about an organization's strengths and weaknesses for its incoming president. She is hired to make the unreadable readable, to bring a light touch to serious subjects, and to pack maximum information and insight into an easy five- or ten-minute read. She has written about business, economics, the developing world, women's issues, education, health, medicine, and medical research — as well as food, books, and dancing, among other topics. (Like many others, she became a writer partly to satisfy her curiosity about the world.) Pulling together a book about global public policy, she realized that public health policy was far more compelling than other areas and she has been writing more about medicine and health ever since.

Her report-writing workshops have taken her as far abroad as Lesotho and Myanmar (Burma) — see photos under Workshops and Presentation. At the Writer's Center in Bethesda, she teaches a workshop on Life Stories and Legacy Writing, a nontraditional workshop of short personal writing designed to help participants capture their personal and family legacy for the next generation--to examine with candor their important life choices and experiences, achievements and mistakes, beliefs and convictions. Much laughter, some tears, great bonding.

Her feature articles have appeared in New York Magazine, Parents, the Washington Post, and elsewhere, but in recent years she's spent more time writing books than articles. She has edited four literary anthologies and has written several life stories and organizational histories. (She has a flourishing sideline helping people write their memoirs.) Her 2003 book for the National Science Foundation (New Formulas for America's Workforce: Girls in Science and Engineering — synthesizing best practices for interesting girls and women in studies and careers in science, technology, engineering, and math — "sold out" its first printing in five weeks (and more than 102,000 people have downloaded the book in PDF format). Pat is now writing stories about patients in research, drawing on her experiences writing a prize-winning history of Building 10, the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health, the huge Bethesda hospital and clinic that contains half the medical research beds in the country.
She is also beginning work on a history of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Pat, who has received several awards for her writing, is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, Association of Health Care Journalists, Authors Guild, National Association of Science Writers, PEN, STC, and the Association of Personal Historians. She lives in Bethesda, MD. Weekends she can often be found at her favorite dance venue — Glen Echo Park's Spanish Ballroom or its second dance floor, the "repurposed" Bumper Car Pavilion — at the Sunday waltz, the monthly LaSalle dance (to ballroom music of the 20s and 30s), swing dancing, or (very, very slowly) learning the Argentine tango.

New from Personal History Press:

My Words Are Gonna Linger: The Art of Personal History , ed. Paula Stallings Yost and Pat McNees, with a foreword by Rick Bragg ($19.95). Read excerpts here. Read a review here.

"At last, a collection that shows the "why, what, and how" behind memoir as legacy. Spanning more than a century, these intriguing reflections of personal as well as global social and political history are told in the unique voice and viewpoint of each storyteller."
~ Susan Wittig Albert, author, Writing from Life, founder, Story Circle Network

“This anthology sings with Walt Whitman’s spirit of democracy, a celebration of our diversity. Each selection is a song of self; some have perfect pitch, some the waver of authenticity. All demonstrate the power of the word to salvage from the onrush of life, nuggets worth saving.”
~ Tristine Rainer, author of Your Life as Story and Writing the New Autobiography

Both a writer and an editor, Pat is especially useful for

* Writing, redrafting, or heavily editing your articles, papers, books, white papers, and other documents.

*Helping YOU figure out what you need to do on something you are writing yourself but having trouble with.

* Synthesizing or summarizing long, complex documents, presenting the key messages in a voice that will not put the average reader to sleep. Usually this involves coming up with a meaningful title, providing a 25-words-or-less summary line, and an executive summary four paragraphs to three pages long (depending on the audience and purpose). Pat has written several thousand (yes, thousand) executive summaries, for clients such as the Urban Institute, USAID, the World Bank, and various medical research organizations.

* Bringing dull or dullish material to life ——generally by injecting anecdotes, examples, narrative, and other devices that make the material more dynamic and interesting.

* Bringing a lighter touch to academic writing and translating into plain English writing dense with jargon.

* Synthesizing the main conclusions or arguments made in meetings and conferences. Telling a story or conveying messages in many voices but with a unified purpose.

* Building a narrative from a collection of oral histories or transcripts of interviews. This might be a life story, the history of an organization, or the story of an event.

* Bringing a uniform tone and voice to compilations and conference proceedings and bringing intelligence, structural clarity, and good taste to anthologies (Pat's anthologies stand the test of time.)

Here’s what one client (the author of a book on the defense industry) said: “As an editor, McNees has a keen eye for restructuring an early draft of a report and a gift for shortening and improving sentences, paragraphs, and papers without distorting their technical meaning. McNees has an ability to edit a manuscript at almost any level of detail the writer needs—as a broad-brush overview, at the paragraph-by-paragraph level, right down to line-by-line blue-pencil editing.”

Pat often combines editing with coaching. Experts for whom writing is difficult often ask for her because she helps them improve their sense of audience and their ability to write more cogently, concisely, clearly, and persuasively. Having a sense of humor helps ease the anxiety most people associate with writing projects.

Coming in early 2009:

MY WORDS ARE GONNA LINGER: THE ART OF PERSONAL HISTORY,
Edited by Paula Stallings Yost and Pat McNees

Foreword by Rick Bragg (Personal History Press)

“This anthology sings with Walt Whitman’s spirit of democracy, a celebration of our diversity. Each selection is a song of self; some have perfect pitch, some the waver of authenticity. All demonstrate the power of the word to salvage from the onrush of life, nuggets worth saving.”
~ Tristine Rainer, author of Your Life as Story and Writing the New Autobiography

"At last, a collection that shows the "why, what, and how" behind memoir as legacy. Spanning more than a century, these intriguing reflections of personal as well as global social and political history are told in the unique voice and viewpoint of each storyteller."
~ Susan Wittig Albert, author, Writing from Life, founder, Story Circle Network