The Power of Your Story: Memoirist & Writing Coach Explains

 Lorna Garano sent me this article:

THE POWER OF YOUR STORY

Linda Joy Myers is a therapist, writing coach, and memoirist who has taught countless writers how to tell their story. In her books and work she shares the secrets of healing and transformation through writing.

As a therapist, Linda Joy Myers knows how healing telling your story can be. As a long-time teacher of memoir writing, she knows how necessary craft is to writing evocative prose and bringing the pieces of your story together into a coherent whole. And as an award-winning memoir writer,  (Don't Call Me Mother: A Daughter's Journey from Abandonment to Forgiveness) she understands how healing it can be to tell your story in a way that satsifies readers. "Writing a memoir turned out to be the path to a greater and deeper healing than I would have ever thought possible. 

Writing my story and translating it from imagination and memory into words on the page allowed me passage from victim to healing, taking the separate bits and pieces of my history-my thoughts, feelings, regrets, and hopes-to weave myself whole again," she says. Now, Myers is on a mission to help others on the healing journey of telling their story. In her books THE POWER OF MEMOIR: HOW TO WRITE YOUR HEALING STORY (2010) and most recently, JOURNEY OF MEMOIR: THE THREE STAGES OF MEMOIR WRITING (2013, SheWrites Press) she gives you everything you need to create a memoir that helps you put unresolved conflicts behind you, heal past wounds, and find meaning, value, and inspiration for your life.

Myers is available for interview and can also provide excerpts and short articles for your site or publication.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Linda Joy Myers, Ph. D., President of the National Association of Memoir Writers, & Co-President of the Women's National Book Association, San Francisco, is the author of Don't Call Me Mother: A Daughter's Journey from Abandonment to Forgiveness; The Power of Memoir: How to Write Your Healing Story, and a new workbook The Journey of Memoir: The Three Stages of Memoir Writing. She co-teaches the program Write your Memoir in Six Months with Brooke Warner. She also coaches writers, and offers teleseminars and workshops nationally. Myers  is a blogger on the Huffington Post.

Linda has won prizes for fiction, memoir and poetry, including the First Prize, Jessamyn West Fiction Contest; Finalist, San Francisco Writing Contest for Secret Music, a novel about the Kindertransport; First Prize, poetry, East of Eden Contest, and First Prize Carol Landauer Life Writing Contest. She received First Prize in the Jack London Writing Contest and the Bay Area Independent Publishing Association Gold Medal Award for the first edition of her memoir, Don't Call Me Mother.

In addition, Linda is a therapist with a private practice in Berkeley, CA.

Visit her at: memoriesandmemoirs.com; dontcallmemother.com; namw.org.