For twenty-seven years Linda Joy Myers has been a therapist in Berkley. Using this experience and her MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, Myers offers memoir writing as healing workshops around the country.
Linda’s personal memoir work has taken many forms. She portrayed her life in paintings, collages of family photos, and poetry before deciding to embark on a prose memoir. The decade long journey led to her memoir Don’t Call Me Mother and ultimately to The Power of Memoir.
Q: Tell us about your current book The Power of Memoir.
The Power of Memoir presents an innovative step-by-step program to help people use memoir writing for healing and personal transformation. Drawing upon the turning point and timeline techniques, the writer uncovers the most significant, life-changing stories to create a basic structure for the memoir. In another chapter, psychological issues are addressed such as family dynamics, roles, and rules, the psychology of writing a memoir, the inner critic, and balancing dark and light stories. Skills such as building scenes and creating the narrative arc are useful not only to write well, but to facilitate the healing process. A discussion about agents and the publishing process gives readers practical tips for taking their completed memoir to the next level. There are chapters on meditations, and affirmations, and suggestions for how therapists can use writing to help clients to heal and understand themselves better.
My inspiration for the topic of writing and healing came from the research by Dr. James Pennebaker on the healing power of writing stories. After I found the research, I began teaching therapists how they could use writing to help clients, amazed by the stories that emerged from people who were not “writers.” These stories and my curiosity about how writing helps to create change and resolve psychological issues and trauma, eventually led to my first book Becoming Whole—Writing Your Healing Story. I discovered that the concept and practice of writing to heal appealed to many people. Now that I’m traditionally published, the word will go out to even more people. It’s exciting to be sharing this wonderful research about the power of writing to heal.
Q: How did you get started as a writer?
I didn’t intend to write a memoir, a book. I just wanted to capture the stories of my mother, grandmother, and great grandmother, and other people in my life who had loved me or saved me. The thought of writing a book was terrifying. I knew stories of 19th Century life from my great-grandmother, and I’d heard my grandmother’s stories and knew only a little about my mother’s. I spent time writing fictionalized stories about them, until one day a mentor said that I should be writing my own story. I nearly fainted. What—expose myself like that? I’d been taught that children should be seen and not heard, and not to air the family laundry! So it took a long time to find myself and give myself permission to write my own story.
I’d first begun my autobiographical stories through painting and etching, then moved into poetry and prose. I realized that the deeper story was falling through the cracks of the other art forms, and prose integrated the things that were not being said. I wrote my memoir by focusing on the individual stories and chapters. My inner critic was pretty vicious, so quite a few times I stopped writing, trying to give it up, but, the darn book idea would chase me and refused to leave me alone. Finally, I faced the demands the book was making on me, and got brave enough to finish it! It was very healing for me to complete it and finally have it published. It completed my healing process.
Q: How did you land your book deal?
My first two books—Becoming Whole and my memoir Don’t Call Me Mother were self-published. Two friendS and I created a publishing company, and determined to create books that people would respect. We learned about the publishing business, marketing, and distribution. I hired people to edit my books, investing quite a lot of money for this step, as I wanted to create high quality books; I hired design and layout people to help the books come into full flower. I belonged to a self-publishing group and a forum, where I continued to learn more about the publishing business.
Last year, thanks to my continued work in the writing as healing area, and founding The National Association of Memoir Writers, an agent took an interest in Becoming Whole and wanted the ideas in it developed and published. So I wrote The Power of Memoir and it’s now published through Jossey-Bass publishers! I’m thrilled to have an agent and a publisher after all those years of doing it on my own. However, it’s useful for authors to understand how the publishing business works. All authors need to understand how their book fits into the book world so they can have realistic expectations about what happens when looking to be published and afterward. It’s a long journey that involves hard work, but I enjoyed it all. It helped me when my book was published by a large publisher to be aware of how to behave and respond to the demands of an editor, the publicity department, and other people involved in a publishing company. Publishing is a business and writers need to understand that.
Q: What is your writing process?
I have two ways to approach writing—one is the inspirational one, where I tune into what is arising in me, the ideas that beg for me to write them down. I grab my journal, an envelope, or scrap of paper to capture them! Ideas can come from anywhere at any time, and as creative artists, we need to be alert to all the possibilities. Some people audio tape their ideas while driving.
The other method is to sit down and focus my mind on writing. This does not mean the idea comes out the way I was thinking about it, but it is a draft, a place to start. An author said at one of the book readings I attended that we do not have anything to react to, nothing to develop until we have our first words on the page. I used to get stuck, feeling that each precious word had to lead somewhere meaningful and important. Once I relaxed that expectation, I found myself being even more creative. I could let go and be freer in my creative process.
Now, I totally believe in being okay with the “bad first draft” concept. When we are too concerned about every word, and edit before we even know the flow of our ideas, we block the flow of creativity. We need to discover what methods work for us. I’m used to being in tune with the creative flow thanks to my background in music and art. I also wrote poetry for several years. Journaling can also lead to useful pieces that can be edited and entered into the computer as a whole new idea or story. There are so many ways to write!
As I mentioned in the previous question, I do use an editor along the way. I have a friend who’s an editor and I’m part of a writing group that meets once a month. Each person offers different kinds of feedback, but having the group helps with deadlines.
Q: Are you working on your next project and can you tell us about it?
I’m putting together ideas for a book that will help young adults write a memoir. My agent has created a wonderful organization called “Capitol City Young Writers” that presents programs for young people to help them learn about writing and give them a head start. A long time ago, I worked I with families in crisis, and I enjoyed working with the youth in those families. I found them to be creative, awake, and turned on by life, and they were the ones who saw beyond the myths of family, something I discuss in The Power of Memoir. Young people already have lots of stories. Even a ten year old has stories. I hope to offer a foundation of ideas and skill that will encourage young writers.
And I have written a novel about World War II called Secret Music. I took the basic emotional truths from my own life and interwove them into characters and situations that interested me. In this case I wanted to learn more about the Kindertransport children, the 10,000 children who were rescued from Germany and Czechoslovakia in 1938-39 and sent to England. I’d always been interested in that era, so I enjoyed the research in the library, online and in Germany and England. It’s good to love what you are writing about, as writing a novel takes a long time. It’s different from memoir, in that you don’t know the plot yet! When the young adult book is done, we’ll see about getting Secret Music into the world.
BOOK GIVEAWAY:
Leave a question for Linda Joy in the comments section (by 5:00pm Friday, April 2nd) for a chance to win a free copy of her latest book The Power of Memoir. The winner will be selected by random.org.
By Jay Conrad Levinson, Rick Frishman, Michael Larson, and David L. Hancock
