We grow up thinking that the way we lived in our family was “just the way it was,” unaware of the many different ways families live and cope with life the positive and the stressful events and disappointments. As we write a memoir, we come to have new insights about how our family shaped us.
Category: Writing As Healing
Thanks-giving
Thanks-giving is something we need to offer ourselves every day, and offer others as well. The exchange “thank you” can be immensely powerful, a giving circle that returns and creates ever-evolving circles beyond ourselves.
Memoir and The Legacy of Mental Illness
I spoke with Victoria Costello, author of A Lethal Inheritance at the National Association of Memoir Writers member teleseminar. about the legacy of mental illness. Those of us who come from families with hidden or diagnosed mental illness feel “Other,” the ghosts of our legacies chasing us in our dreams, making us shrink down in our waking life. In…
The Power of Writing to Heal — Excerpt from The Power of Memoir
Forgiveness means letting go of the past. –Gerald Jampolsky For as long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in healing. As I grew up, I learned that I was the third daughter in my multi-generational family to be abandoned by a mother, and I was desperate to break a pattern that I’d seen cause…
Poetry and Art–Early Memoir Snapshots
To write a memoir is to embark on a long journey of the imagination and of memory. My path of gathering memories, images, and stories was first through autobiographical art–painting, collage, etching, and mixed media. But I knew that words were necessary as well, and began to capture moments through poetry. From time to time, I’ll post some of the…
Memoir Writing Workshops and your Creative Journey
By the time you read these words, the “I” that wrote them will have forgotten what it was, though the it lingers on, haunting the paper, unheard until you happen across it and your energy field activates it. –Margaret Atwood We write into the unknown, we launch ourselves onto tiny rafts of words so lacy and insubstantial that we…
Are there Secrets in your Family?
No one ever saw how my grandmother looked when she was upset—hair frizzed, lips caked with coffee stained lipstick, rage pouring from her eyes as she ranted and raved. Sometimes I would stand in front of her for two hours, afraid to move. I wondered if the neighbors heard her ranting, I found out years…
Healing through Creative Writing (It helps to get inspired by writing in Paris)
Tips for Finding the Creative Spark Within As a memoir coach, I’m blessed to meet so many people with a passion for creativity and writing. But to live that passion, we often have to conquer a fierce adversary: the inner critic! It demands perfect grammar and eloquent language. If we were “real” writers and if we were really creative, we…
Jaycee Lee Dugard—Her Memoir as Survival Testimony
Video of Diane Sawyer and Jaycee Dugard Millions watched as Jaycee Lee Dugard told her story to Diane Sawyer on national television. Diane, and perhaps most of the audience, seemed amazed and impressed at her composure, honesty and wisdom. It seems clear that the eleven year old who had to endure isolation, imprisonment, and rape found some strong coping mechanisms…
Writing as Healing–A Series
Writing and Healing, and Dr. James Pennebaker’s Studies Part One—Introduction In this series, I’m celebrating the research that started being publicized in the late 1990s about how writing helps to heal the body and the mind, and celebrating my books on this subject. One of them is a decade old! And my recent book, The Power of Memoir just passed…