Blog
Writing Memoir Is an Act of Self-Compassion
One of the hallmarks of writing memoir is making sense of your life experiences. The very act of looking back and seeing how seemingly disparate events are connected by deeper themes leads not only to insight and wisdom but also to self-compassion. Writing...
Rocks Away: The Writers We Choose Ourselves to Be
This week’s guest blogger, Lisa O’Neil, is a student in Writing Women’s Lives™ Transform Your Writing/Transform Your Life™ Mentoring Program, where she and her mother— Lorain Fox Davis, Native American Elder, teacher, and singer— are working together on...
Writing Magic: On Creating a Sacred Writing Space
I am honored to be this week’s guest writer-in–virtual-residence at Maia Toll's seasonal Witch Camp, which explores the creativity and fertility of Spring through writing and ritual. This week’s Witch Camp lesson is titled “The Sacred Life of Stuff,” and this week’s...
Writing Truth in Memoir: It Takes the Time It Takes
Recently one of my mentoring clients, who is also a yoga instructor, was thinking out loud about the length of time it is taking her to write her memoir, which she began years ago and has recently returned to. “Well,” she said during one of our coaching calls,...
The Art of Writing Memoir: “A Sound from the Heart”
This past weekend, while writing a segment in my memoir about my son in the context of my larger family history, I felt a stirring in my chest, i.e., in my heart chakra. As I wrote, the stirring became a swirl that expanded through my chest cavity. When this energetic...
Women’s Memoir Writing: Your Body, Your Voice
The voice is the creature of the body that produces it. Nancy Mairs In order to recover your voice, you have to return to your body. Indeed, writing is an embodied activity. After all, our voices are housed in our bodies. As Nancy Mairs puts it, “No body, no...
![[Audio] Marilyn Reads Her Memoir Essay “The Bruise”](https://writingwomenslives.com/wp-content/uploads/et_temp/ugt-reading-2-200x300-38264_200x250.jpg)
[Audio] Marilyn Reads Her Memoir Essay “The Bruise”
One of my many highlights from this year’s AWP conference, which I attended last week in Minneapolis, was Under the Gum Tree magazine’s reading on Friday evening. I was honored to read my memoir essay “The Bruise,” which appears in River Teeth: A Journal of...
Memoir Writing: How to Know Where Your Story Begins and Ends
One of the questions I get asked often by women writers, whether they’re writing short memoir stories or a book-length memoir, is How do I know where my story begins, and how do I know where it ends? It’s an excellent question because when we write...
Visibility in Memoir Writing: Your Presence on the Page
Nothing says visibility like video. Which is why I’ve been making a video a day for the last week. You see, after two years of wanting to make video and not doing it, I finally had to admit that my inaction had less to do with the excuse I was telling...
Write a Flash Memoir: Word Count Counts!
“The urgency of having to fit the content into an abbreviated frame is what makes it powerful.” Dinty Moore Last week’s article defined flash memoir, and pointed you in the direction of the online magazine Brevity: A Journal of Concise Nonfiction so that you...
Flash Memoir: The Benefits of Writing Short Memoir
Years ago, when I lived in Boston and worked for The Horn Book Magazine, novelist and children’s author Alice Hoffman read her work at a local bookstore. After her reading, a woman in the audience asked Hoffman what she recommended for an aspiring writer who had...
![[Audio] The Reflective Voice in Memoir](https://writingwomenslives.com/wp-content/uploads/et_temp/512px-Flower_reflection-41491_400x250.jpg)
[Audio] The Reflective Voice in Memoir
Last December I spent a lovely hour with Linda Joy Myers at the National Association of Memoir Writers talking about the reflective voice in memoir. I’ve had so many requests for the audio recording of this talk that I thought I would post it here for easy access to...
Write a 5-Sentence Mini Memoir
I’ve “found” my voice, then, just where it ought to have been, in the body-warmed breath escaping my lungs and throat. Nancy Mairs One of my mentoring clients mentioned recently that a writing teacher once told her 90 percent of writing comes down to “butt in...
Happy Valentine’s Day! Love Your Writing Self
There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our...
Author Interview: Essayist Jenny Poore on Writing and Voice
One of my favorite online literary journals is Full Grown People, founded and edited by Jennifer Niesslein. FGP publishes “essays that tackle those moments in life when you wonder, what’s next?” and, if you’re on their email list, like I am, delivers a new essay into...
Yes, You are an AUTHORity on Your Memoir’s Subject
Nothing makes my day more than to see a client’s work published. So, yes, I shouted with glee when I recently received an email from my long-time mentoring client, Magin LaSov Gregg, announcing that her OpEd piece “Community college changed my mom’s life—and...
3 Steps to Outwit Writer’s Block
Uh oh. Here it comes again. That relentless voice of doubt that snaps me out of my writing—out of my heart—and up into my head. Suddenly, the scene I was just in is miles away and I am rehearsing the old whine, “Maybe I’m not really a writer. Why am I writing this?...
Writing Truth: On Becoming a Conscious, Fear-Savvy Writer
Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth. Pema Chödrön Last week one of my new Transform Your Writing/Transform Your Life™ one-on-one clients wrote me an email in response to the 6-month mentorship schedule I’d just sent her. Uh, oh: she felt...