Memories and Memoirs Newsletter | November 2009


Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.
~Rainer Maria Rilke

Welcome to Memories and Memoirs!

There’s a lot of creativity going on these days as I prepare for the release of my new book The Power of Memoir—How to Write Your Healing Story. As I look at the text I wrote a few months ago, I’m surprised at what I read—surprised at what I discovered as I wrote the book about how writing heals, how writing our truths and our stories can change us—an idea that fascinates and inspires me. I love finding out new things about my own creativity and how the creative process works with others. It’s always shifting and changing. Do you see your writing as a learning process? How do you feed your writing life? Do you slow down to listen to your inner voice regularly, say several times a week? It's important to create a fertile place in your life and in your soul where you are able to tune into more than the humdrum of everyday life.

This time of year I reflect on the wine harvest, as I prepare for our writing retreat in Calistoga November 6-8. The wine represents the alchemy of the soil, the earth, the rains and the sun—a special brew that happens anew each year. Each year the wine has its own special flavor and balance of the elements.

So it is with our writing. Each story, each memory that we evoke is a new venture into finding out more about ourselves—how we think and feel, what we know to be our truths. Sometimes the young child within us has something to teach us—about innocence, vulnerability, and inner knowing. As I coach my online workshops, I find that as writers encounter the child within, that child has something to teach the writer now. Some people are surprised at how they continue to find new stories about the child they once were. They become curious about what that child knew, the wisdom s/he had then that is helpful and informative decades later.

As the wine grapes mature, they still retain the fresh innocence of the spring mornings, a hint of the early days of that year’s vintage. When you write, listen for the wisdom that comes from the innocent part of you, the young person that still has something to teach you. Know that the writing must come fresh from within, and then give it time to age and mature as you revise and rewrite. Enjoy the process, and be sure to tune into your inner voice every day.

Landscape as Healing

Sometimes the world and landscape outside of our homes is a safer place than the inside. As children, we may have sought the peace and natural chaos of nature for the soothing of our spirits. The landscape we experienced as children often provides a safe, comforting place in the face of discord, strife, and confusion. Outside space rather becomes a refuge where we feel protected and can recover. Writing about places of safety and inspiration reminds us of our strengths, and renews our relationship with the sacred space of our personal landscape and history.

Landscapes of Memory

In our minds and with our words, we draw upon the memory of landscapes that were a refuge and those that have healed us. These landscapes might be a moonrise, mountains, rivers, the sea, animals, a special plant that we adopted or appreciated, the shape of the land and its natural characteristics, and its history. The land remembers our steps, returning to us our history and sense of wholeness. When we deepen our experience with such places of nurturing and healing through imagination and writing, we create a healing circle and an opportunity for integration.
Through daydream and imagination we cast ourselves into this landscape.

Inner and Outer Landscapes

The natural world is
it shimmers before our eyes
breathes a wisdom we do not have,
a long, slow memory of time and its passing
beneath the noise of the world
beyond our senses
the land whispers to us
as we walk upon it and gaze with our open eyes
it remembers us
and all our ancestors
 
we must only listen

Wise Guides to Survival and Healing

We re-experience the wise self that showed us a way to heal ourselves when we were young. This remembering strengthens our feelings about who we are and how we can nurture ourselves and receive nurturing form the natural world.

Remembering our favorite healing places brings us full circle, helping us to appreciate the child within the adult, and offering compassion for the situation that existed in the past.

Close your eyes. Breathe deeply and regularly while you count down from 10 to 5, grounding yourself in the room and opening yourself to remembering. Think of your child’s body, how you looked, walked, felt, sensed the world around you.

Bring yourself to a landscape that called out to you when you were young. Think of how it is that you yearned for that place—what drew you in? Was there a sense of magic? Did you imagine fairies and other folk around you? What do you smell, taste and feel? What colors are in this place?

Mind Map

Draw a circle and write the best words that describe your feeling, your vision in the center of some of the circles. Then freely associate with branches off the main words. Create a world of vision, sense, smell, taste, and memory.

Writing Invitations

  1. Using some of the words and ideas from your mind map, write about one of the first landscapes that you remember. What colors, sense feelings do you have? It can be a poem, a string of words and associations
  2. Write what the landscape remembers of you at that time as a child. If it could speak to you, what would it say?
  3. What landscapes do you remember have stilled the turmoil you might have felt at that time? Write about what was happening in your life, and then how you were healed by the landscape
  4. Write about road trips where you came upon a magical landscape that surprised you. What state of mind were you in, and what happened when you were in the landscape?

Upcoming Events and Workshops:

Harvesting Our Wisdom: Napa Valley Writing Retreat

Join us November 6th through 8th, 2009
Schedule: Friday from 6:30 PM to Sunday 12:30 PM
28 CEU units
Location: Calistoga, CA
Fee: $625 | Add to cart

Autumn: the earth releases its fruits into harvest turning toward the silence and reflection of winter darkness. In this silence, we dig deep into our inner selves, and the poetry within.

Calistoga: steam arises from ancient pools of mineral water inviting busy urban souls to relax into healing waters, to find silence in nature, to spend time with the self that is often forgotten. Join us in this bounteous place for a writing retreat. Reserve your space now–retreat limited to 10 participants!

Linda Joy Myers, President of the National Association of Memoir Writers offers a retreat twice a year, an opportunity to work with Linda Joy in person, and at a wonderful location–the heart of the Napa Valley wine country north of San Francisco.

In this retreat you get to immerse yourself in writing from your heart and exploring where your stories come from—memories, dreams, and “moments of being,” as Virginia Woolf calls them. You can think of it as a spiritual retreat, where you get in touch with that “still small voice within” or a way to connect with other writers. Perhaps you would like to write for three days without the distractions of the family, the house, and the world disturbing you.

In this retreat you can write in whatever style you prefer, whether it is a memoir, fiction, or poetry. This special retreat time invites you to focus on yourself and and tune into the inner source of the stories you want to write. Click here to learn more.

NAMW Teleseminar November 11, 2009 with Mary E. Knippel

Tap Into Your Creativity
Date: November 13, 2009
Guest Speaker: Mary E. Knippel
Times: 11 am Pacific | 12 noon Mountain | 1 pm Central | 2 pm Eastern
Cost: Free for NAMW Members
Become A Member of NAMW Today to take part in this teleseminar!

Would you like to learn how to boost your immune system and reduce your stress level without prescriptions or costly supplements? Get creative! Simple pleasures can be powerful stress busters. Scientific research has shown that when we are engaged in creative expression, the body’s physiology and brain wave patterns change. This affects every cell in the body, changing the immune system, even our blood flow, and helps to create healing.

Mary’s message is that we are all creative beings, and our creativity is a chameleon which takes many forms. Making time to play is engaging our creativity. The word “play” brings to mind sports and games, but it’s also an attitude. Opportunities to be creative surround us: trying a new recipe, taking a new route to work, watching the travel channel instead of a Mash rerun, taking a walk on the coastal trail, enjoying the sunset, arranging flowers in a vase for the dining table. [Read more]

 

November 2009 Honoring National Life Writing Month and Family Story Month

The mini-workshop teleseminar is composed of two sessions *PLUS A FREE PREVIEW*

  1. FREE PREVIEW: Nov. 3rd (FREE to ALL) (Sign Up for Free Preview Here)
  2. Nov. 10th: Session 1: Mining Your Memories and Creating Your Timeline
  3. Nov. 17th: Session 2: Building Your Memoir One Scene at a Time

Course Dates: November 10th and 17th (Enroll in Mini-Workshop Teleseminar Here)

Time: 3 PM PST | 4 PM MST | 5 PM CST | 6 PM EST

November is National Life Writing Month and Family Story Month! This is a great time for you to get a head start on the memoir you’ve been planning to write. Memoir writers wrestle with two basic challenges:

In this teleseminar lead by the president of the National Association of Memoir Writers in honor of this important month, you will learn the skills you need to find your memories, organize a running list, and learn the turning point and timeline technique. In session two, we turn our attention to the skill building aspects of writing a memoir—building your memoir one scene at a time. You will find out what agents and editors are looking for in your work, and how to use your chapters and vignettes as small publishable pieces. We will discuss elements of scene, how to use the turning points to find your plot, and how to structure a book length memoir. [Read More]

Soul-making Literary Competition

Deadline: November 30, 2009

The annual Soul-Making Literary Competition is open to everyone, everywhere and looks for original, freshly creative and finely crafted works that embrace all creative interpretations of English poet, John Keats' statement: "Some say the world is a vale of tears, I say it is a place of soul-making"**

SOUL, in general, in many religions and philosophies, is conceived as the animating and vital spiritual principle in human beings; an inner, immaterial element that, together with the material body, constitutes the human individual.

MAKING is the act of one that makes; the process of coming into being; of realizing potential.

The Soul-Making Literary Competition invites multifarious works that address soul-making in innovative and expanded expressions. Learn More

Stories from the Heart V

Story Circle Network
Fifth National Women's Memoir Conference
February 5-7, 2010
Wyndham Hotel, Austin, Texas

Stories from the Heart V will bring women from around the country to celebrate our stories and our lives. Through writing, reading, listening, and sharing, we will discover how personal narrative is a healing art, how we can gather our memories, how we can tell our stories. We welcome readers, writers, storytellers, and any woman with a past, present, and future. There will be opportunities to explore difficult or hidden issues, expand our relationships with other women, and discover different modes and media—such as art, dance, and drama—for sharing our stories. Come, learn, share, celebrate with us as we honor our stories! Click here to learn more.

Rabindranath Tagore: Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

"What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open."

Muriel Rukeyser