E-Book!
Memoir Writing as a
Healing Journey
 
Blanche and Lulu
1895
Call:
1-877-ememoir
(363-6647)
Or email:
linda at
memoriesandmemoirs
dot com
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Welcome to Memories and Memoirs.
We are dedicated to honoring and preserving your memories. We offer workshops, online classes, and teleseminars to help you write your stories.
Harvesting Our Wisdom- Writing Retreat
Napa Valley, California
November 7-9, 2008
This retreat offers a chance to immerse yourself in your thoughts and ideas, and explore your deepest being. Whether you write memoir, or fiction, our retreat gives you time to focus on yourself and capture the stories that have shaped you. Click here for more
New Online Classes
For more info call: 510-524-3898
Email: linda at memoriesandmemoirs dot com
Writing your memoir
 Writing a memoir is a challenge on many levels. It asks us to review our life--who we are, what roles we played in our family and with friends, and it asks us to expose ourselves deeply on the page.
We also must confront certain very real psychological issues and emotional challenges:
- What is truth?
- Will my family disown me if I write this?
- How do I get unstuck from some of my bad memories?
- Can I heal the past?
- Will anyone listen to my story?
- Can I write well enough to capture what I feel and know?
 In my book Becoming Whole and in all my classes and workshops, I address these issues and more:
- How to discover and write your truth
- The ways you can conquer or quiet your inner critic
- Quilting your vignettes into a longer story
- The psychology of family--rules not to be broken, roles that trap us, and beliefs that limit us
- How to find and free your own voice as you write
- How writing heals, transforming grief and anger into compassion
- Forgiveness: the last frontier
- Editing, finding an agent, and publishing your memoir
 My Beginnings
I think I was seven years old when I began to learn about the power of true stories. During the summers, I would lie in a featherbed beside my great-grandmother, Blanche. She was the mother of my grandmother who was raising me instead of my mother, and I loved to listen to her craggy wisdom--she was eighty and I was eight. (She is in the photo on the left with my grandmother as a baby.)
Blanche, her teeth in a jar beside the bed, whispered to me the stories of her life—crying wtih joy the first time she heard a voice on the telephone; friends in covered wagons stopping to say goodbye before setting off to settle in the wilds of Kansas.
She told me about feeding fourteen farm hands and seven children, working in the garden to grow the food to can for the long, cold winters. Her young husband Lewis died two months after the wedding when s he was twenty-one years old, and pregnant with my grandmother.
I learned how the past shapes the future. In my late thirties I began my career as a psychotherapist, tracing the threads of people’s hurt places, learning the power of their family stories. I helped them to weave together the missing pieces.
My secret dream had always been to write the stories that Blanche gave me, as well as to tell about three generations of mothers who had abandoned their daughters. Determined to learn about myself and to heal this pattern, I worked on it in therapy, and began to write what became my prize-winning memoir Don't Call Me Mother.
 Write Your Story!
Many people tell me about a small voice that whispers in their ear: "Write your story."
They find it hard to begin, or to free themselves from the inner critic. They wonder and worry about what the family will say, or struggle with guilt and shame.
We are here to help!
Sign up for our monthly newsletter
Each issue has inspirational stories, writing prompts and resources to help you begin your memoir. And when you sign up, you get a free audio download!
Call or write to me with any questions.
1-877-ememoir (363-6647)
510-524-3898
linda at memoriesandmemoirs dot com
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Matilda Butler, author of Rosie’s Daughters and owner of www.womensmemoirs.com and Linda Joy talk about women’s memoirs.
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Call or write to me with any questions.
1-877-ememoir
(363-6647)
510-524-3898
linda at
memoriesandmemoirs
dot com
|
