#140 The Power of Words: Healing Through Memoir Writing

Transcript of Interview

Find Your Voice, Change Your Life Podcast

Podcast Host: Dr. Doreen Downing

Free Guide to Fearless Speaking: Doreen7steps.com

Episode #140 Linda Joy Myers

“The Power of Words: Healing Through Memoir Writing”

(00:00) Doreen Downing: Hi, this is Dr. Doreen Downing, host of the Find Your Voice, Change Your Life podcast. Today, I will introduce you to one of my best friends for years. What has it been? I don’t know. Seems like 30 years, 40 years. Linda Joy Myers. Because I do know Linda Joy’s history, she and I have spent many, many, many hours and trips together, so we know each other’s stories, but it’s going to be fascinating to see and hear what she gets to share today with you about not having a voice early on. 

I’d like to read a bio first. Linda Joy Myers, founder of the National Association of Memoir Writers, is the author of the award-winning memoirs, “Don’t Call Me Mother” and “Song of the Plains.”

She has two books on craft, “The Power of Memoir,” and “Journey of Memoir.” She also co-authored “Breaking Ground on Your Memoir” and “Magic of Memoir,” as well as co-teaches “Write Your Memoir in Six Months” with Brooke Warner. She has been a memoir coach for 30 years and helps writers find their voice. I’m saying that again. She has helped writers find their voice and get their story into the world. 

Linda has just ventured into novel writing land, and her first novel, “The Forger of Marseilles,” a World War II historical fiction novel, won four awards in historical fiction and is published by She Writes Press. 

Oh, Linda, those days when we sat at a hotel in Berkeley on Telegraph Avenue, or Shattuck Avenue, and shared our life stories. You’ve really accomplished so much and so have I, and it’s interesting that we both have come to use that phrase, Find Your Voice, and mine’s about speaking and yours is about writing. 

(02:15) Linda Joy Myers: It’s still about words, it’s all about truth, about the main things that people struggle with, and it’s also about getting over our own shame about how it is that we didn’t have a voice.

We used to talk about the details of some of our stories together and the pain of it. The yearning for a different vision that we could sort of almost see, but it was a long, it was like, I don’t know how I’m going to get there. There must be something different and better to aim for.

(02:56) Doreen Downing: Well, it just occurred to me now as you started talking about it and we’re both reminiscing about those moments. I think that you and I provided a witnessing and a listening to each other to validate. I mean, we both had grandma stories. So, let’s focus on you though. 

I know you have also written some of what you’ve submitted here for this podcast that you did have a difficult time finding your voice and you had a grandma story. And so whatever comes up about when you reflect back on how you weren’t seen or heard. 

(03:32) Linda Joy Myers: Well, I write about this in my memoir, “Don’t Call Me Mother.” I began writing because the story was so big and the lack of resolution was so big back in the day, 40, 50 years ago. My mother left when I was four, and then my grandmother started raising me and she was really lovely and wonderful. I lived with some other people for a while. My parents decided I should be around other children, which were truly a nightmare. 

My grandmother rescued me from that situation, so we finally ended up in a little town in Oklahoma, living near her best friend, who we called Aunt Helen and thank goodness for Aunt Helen, because she was like a mother figure that probably my grandmother needed. They were the same age, but still. 

That was in the early 50s. The good news is that I had a stable home. I knew very much what it was like not to have any home at all, and or safety. Things were good for a while, and then she—now, I realize there were mental health issues. Of course, nobody used those words back then. Speaking of words. There were no words for some of these things, but she became quite violent, and critical, and enraged, and all kinds of things about a lot of things.

She carried a lot of her own pain, no doubt, but all I knew is that if I didn’t agree or I didn’t obey, I could get hit or anything could happen. She might be yelling at me for two hours or whatever. It’s very hard to have any permission to have anything, but just survival happens under those conditions.

But I had another way of having a voice and luckily, she also offered music to me and had me taking piano lessons when I was 7 and the cello when I was 9. That’s when I met my cello teacher, who inspired one of the characters in my novel, as a matter of fact, and of course, he’s in both of my memoirs, Mr. Broniger. 

Mr. Broniger was the person who would look into my eyes and talk to me and really see me. And I’d do anything for him. We played all this music. I practiced really hard. I got into some early youth symphonies because supposedly, I had some talent. So, the music was a way I was able to play and feel something positive in myself, and my grandmother encouraged that. 

She wanted me to do all that stuff, so that was really great. But the shame of growing up in the 50s with divorced parents and a slightly crazy grandmother who mostly nobody knew, but the neighbors did, was hard. 

I was a geeky person. I had glasses when I was nine, and buck teeth, skinny. My self-image was not great either. Of course, the music helped with that, because then, anybody could be playing their instrument and making something beautiful. 

Then you grow up and deal with these things however you deal with them, which means mostly for most people in the Midwest, which is very conservative, it’s still a conglomeration of confusion. That was still sort of happening when we met. I married and had children and I was in therapy—and thank goodness I had started therapy.

Eventually, I started it because something inside of me said, “You need something to help you with this.” So, that’s been a blessing. 

(07:14) Doreen Downing: Perfect. What a snapshot of early life for you. One of the things that I’m responding to is the way that you talked about the voice that comes through in the music.

You used the phrase positive feeling. To me that feels like there was something really true, something authentic, something you were tapping in. I call it the spirit or soul. But that is really wonderful to imagine you as a little one in the midst of that suffering, but to have this sweet man see it and draw it out of you or invite it out of you.

(07:50) Linda Joy Myers: I was lucky. I had male teachers mostly, and they were all just really great guys and if you’re a male music teacher, you’re already weird. You’re already different from everybody else in the world. You’re not a sports person and you’re not a He man. They were perfectly normal-looking, but there’s a tenderness that goes along with being a musician for anyone. 

And there were boys—one of whom I fell in love with—in the cello section. There were boys that played the violin or the viola. It’d be one thing to play a tuba, but if you’re playing a violin, you’re not a regular guy.

So, there’s this camaraderie that comes from being a musician and doing that together and going to rehearsal every week and playing concerts in public. So we, I suppose, in a way, we were our own family and many of us remained emotionally close for many years from time to time we’d see each other. That was a gift too. 

I definitely felt transported. Sometimes you want to talk about spiritual experiences and a few other times too, but if you’re playing Beethoven, for instance, in a symphony, for one thing, you’re working very hard to play well, but you’re somewhere else.

You’re not in the regular world. Chopin on a piano, you name it. You’re just in this world and you don’t have to talk. It’s safe to play, better not make a mistake. My grandmother was always waiting in the wings for a mistake, but it was freeing and it was some kind of expression. 

(09:27) Doreen Downing: I love that word, “freeing”. We know each other so well and just getting a deeper appreciation even right now. Tapping into those moments really moves me because I know a lot about the suffering. To remember or see you as somebody who is feeling that freedom and being seen for the beautiful soul you are early on—”Yay!” Yes. So, I know therapy is a place where we learn to face those—I was going to say, “Awful” because it was awful in some ways.

(10:07) Linda Joy Myers: Difficult. I know. 

(10:09) Doreen Downing: Say a little bit about that before we move into more about the journey, and especially, I know where you’re going to go is how writing is healing, but let’s see how you start your journey. And art too, Linda, right? 

(10:23) Linda Joy Myers: First there was the art and then there was the therapy actually. I majored in music, but I didn’t stick with it because, as a career—my grandmother gave me that gift, but she also would punish me in physical ways too. It wasn’t right. It became a scene of struggle. 

Anyway, when I was with my friends, it was all good but at home—I was marked by that. Also, she didn’t want me to do anything but play music. I wanted to dance. I wanted to draw. I wanted to do something else. You spend hours and hours a day for years and years and years only doing one thing.

I studied and I went to school. I did all that. Then I branched out into wanting to do art. I’d always wanted to do art and I was told when I was young, I also had a little talent there. So, I began to go to art school. It’s also a seeing. You’re looking like if you’re drawing and you’re really drawing carefully, you are really looking and that was interesting for me to experience.

But all along, we’re talking the 70s here, that’s when the early movement—other people were doing journal writing. It was certainly inspiring. There was the Ira Progoff method, which is self-examination. All that came forward in the 70s. There were all kinds of books. 

The 70s for me, which I might end up writing more about along the way, were a time of discovery. Then there was feminism and I’m like, these women are talking together and telling each other all these stories, what the hell is that? Not that I could do it yet, but I saw that people were doing that.

And then therapy. Therapy went from the Freudian era to all kinds of things. We have Fritz Pearls; we have all kinds of different ways of looking at human growth. It was a human growth movement. You were there too in that era and so, those of us who are asking questions beyond psychiatry—way, way beyond psychiatry, because psychiatry was a little scary—into how can you be a whole person. 

Well, I don’t know. I have no idea. What are you talking about? But I knew that I wanted to find out more about it, so along the way, I came upon a type of therapy that was a group therapy for three months. I had a very deep experience. 

One night where my life was a wreck my 2nd husband and I had just broken up. I had 2 children. I could see some of the patterns that my mother and grandmother had, which were that they failed at relationships and they had been divorced more than once. I was like, “Oh man, I’m already there. I’m already repeating this.” It just scared the hell out of me. I’m like, “No, that is not okay. It is not okay to do that.” 

So, I took that 3-month therapy, which led me to a therapist I’ve been with for 47 years. It just was a long, long process because you have to go from traumatized, fractured person, what’s wrong, but you don’t know what to do about it to a long journey of dismantling almost certainly the parts that didn’t work. 

This person always held for me this essence of you are not those things. You are not the brokenness. You are more than that. You are a whole being and you’ve been wounded and you also made a few mistakes along the way for sure.

But this vision—he recognized that I had an artist kind of self. Part of the trouble with having an artist self is how do you gather the threads of that creativity and make it not just work for you but be something you can evolve and develop. And you can’t always. I didn’t want to do it with music anymore. Eventually, I didn’t want to do it with art because I was in some classes where the teacher said I was a traitor to art because I didn’t do it like her. I’m like, “Okay, well, it doesn’t feel like a safe place.” 

And while I was figuring out what to do with myself, I discovered something called counseling at the San Francisco State University, where we both went. We didn’t know each other yet. We met there. 

(15:02) Doreen Downing: We met there and you were pregnant with Shannon. 

(15:05) Linda Joy Myers: Yes, I was 9 months pregnant. I started this program because something rose up in me. I was going to do a master’s in art, but I read about this counseling program thing. I swear, it was one of those moments where I was electrified.

(15:21) Doreen Downing: Yes. 

(15:22) Linda Joy Myers: Purpose. Like you need to do this. You need to learn this. Then you can take your brokenness that you know about and your process of healing, and you can help other people. That sounded like a way to turn, make gold out of some tarnished, horrible rock. It is transformative.

(15:45) Doreen Downing: Yes. 

(15:46) Linda Joy Myers: And so that’s what started me off on the therapy, becoming a therapist, and continuing the healing. 

(15:54) Doreen Downing: I remember, I mentioned earlier that hotel experience where we had our coffees, our cappuccinos, and you started reading me your journals. I remember saying to you, “Linda, Linda, if this was on a shelf in a bookstore, I would buy it and read it.” I remember that moment because—I don’t know. You must have gotten some other people telling you to develop that. 

(16:24) Linda Joy Myers: You were the first. I remember now that you’re telling me. 

(16:28) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(16:29) Linda Joy Myers: You’re my good friend. I believe you were speaking very honestly, and I remember that moment. I did have a writing class where the teacher was encouraging. This was 35 to 40 years ago, at least, but, of course, the path of learning how to write, learning how to do anything at all is long. 

But I was always reading. Reading saved me. My grandmother actually would shut up if I was reading and not keep yammering at me. She wanted me to read and I studied and read. I read a lot. Stories were a place where you could go into another world. Now, you can do it in all kinds of ways. And then not so much. I mean, occasional movies, that was about it. TV wasn’t even developed that much when I was reading a lot.

(17:22) Doreen Downing: So, entering into using writing as a healing method, that was the first book that you wrote. 

(17:31) Linda Joy Myers: Well, it came later. What led to doing Memoir in particular was an exercise in one of these therapy groups that you sometimes go to for growth and development and they had us write down something.

We just really love to think about or be involved with. And it wasn’t a real career, and it was just what you loved and I realized I loved memory itself. I love to remember it. 

I have this extended family in Iowa that my grandmother would take me to, who were generally really wonderful to me and gave me some sense of family and I would go see them and I would enjoy remembering all the past things, even after some of them died. 

So, I thought, “What is memory?” Memoir writing wasn’t a thing like it is now in the late 80s. It was not journaling. There were some memoirs mostly if you were famous. I thought, “What if I start a memoir writing group?”

By then, I think I’d gone to Mills and gotten my MFA and I had this idea of what if I combine being a therapist with being a writer. I haven’t written any books, but I’ve written a few things by then and you have to write if you’re in an MFA program, but nothing can come together yet. So, I started with 3 people from an ad in a local newspaper, and that’s where the teaching began.

The more that you’re teaching a memoir, the more that the memoir—it’s an energy that just gives back. It becomes a circle and you end up being engaged in all their stories and you want to hear more. That just eventually kept growing. That led to my 1st book, “Becoming Whole, Writing Your Healing Story,” because there’s got to be some, got to do something with this stuff because I had exercises. It was a full teaching and it did lead to that 1st book.

(19:28) Doreen Downing: For listeners, is that still available, Linda? 

(19:33) Linda Joy Myers: Yes, I think a version of it is on Amazon. 

(19:37) Doreen Downing: Yes, that would be great. Those who may want to do memoirs, which in a moment, I hope we can get to where you are about to do a whole class on memoir writing with somebody else we know, but I just want to take that breath and appreciate already the fullness of your journey, the learning journey, the alchemical process of transformation that you’ve gone through, and that just by doing it, what you learned about how to do it with others. They are now out there listening to you today, perhaps. Tell us a little bit more about memoir writing and what you’re up to today, nowadays.

(20:17) Linda Joy Myers: All right. One wonderful part of the last quite a few years, I’ve been co-teaching with my colleague, Brooke Warner, who’s also the publisher of She Writes Press. We’ve been teaching a memoir course called, “Write Your Memoir in Six Months.” You can look that up on the internet. 

Taking people through a deep Master class process, a long process in the six months, but it’s always wonderful to help people figure out where to begin and help people go—well, they ask all these questions, like, “Can I really write about real people?” All these characters in my story, they’re real people in my life. People freak out all the time. Understandably, actually. “Where do I start? I have so many memories and so many stories.”

These are the main things that stop people truly. So, I’ve been enjoying teaching about that and a lot of very deep ways. I also, along the way, started the National Association of Memoir Writers, so there’d be a place where memoir writers could meet and I can talk to them. I’ve been doing that for 15, something like that, years. I lost track. 

There’s lots of ways to teach. There’s a long way. There’s a quick class. There’s a few weeks. There’s different ways, but I am going to teach a class on The Craft of Writing a Successful Memoir, with my colleague Carly King. This is starting July 29th. 

We combined 2 models. One is a coaching hour every week, and the other is a writing group, where people post their writing with the helpful confidentiality agreement attached to not share the stories outside of that container, and just inviting people wherever they are to post their work to take that leap.

I’m there every week with Carla on these Monday coaching conversations to answer questions and to support them with their challenges and their questions. So, it’s a new model for me to do this with Carla, but we’ve already had two big conversations with people who are interested. People who—today we did an hour Q&A about memoir writing and all the questions I just mentioned and a few more were there. 

So, my sense of what people are looking for and need answers or help and support are the same. They’re always the same and understandably that people struggle with those issues.

(23:05) Doreen Downing: If somebody has the idea that their life has some meaning and they know that there’s a safe place like you and Carla’s group, and they’ve never done any writing at all, do you have to have had some writing experience necessary? 

(23:22) Linda Joy Myers: No, many people who get this urge haven’t been writing or feel that they don’t know how to write. Yes, but the thing is that once you start writing, something happens. You find that you can do more than you thought. You find out that there’s a lot to learn, but I have a story. I just have to write it, and “Oops, the grammar was bad. And that’s the punctuation.” That doesn’t matter. Those things get handled along the way. 

If you have stories that you need to get down, then the only way to do it is to jump in. Just like with learning how to speak, everybody’s scared and they have their own issues with their voice, with feeling that it’s okay. Writers are the same. Just show up and get started and see where it leads you. 

(24:15) Doreen Downing: Yes, courage is what you’re talking about. What I’m getting to, though, for listeners who may be interested in taking that step with you is the invitation. Like you just said, it’s not about getting it right. It’s just about taking that one step and being with people who will listen to it out of you in a way. 

You and I did Writing Out Loud workshops, where we allowed people to just speak because we were doing both of our expertise and they spoke their stories and realized, “Oh.” And because it was a video, they could transcribe it and they had their story. Just like that. So, the stories live within us, and you’re somebody who says, “Hello!” in there. Let me hear it. 

(25:09) Linda Joy Myers: The other thing I’ll say that something major happens when people are doing this writing, even if they’re mostly maybe a travel writer, even a business writer, when we write our own stories, we are revealing who we are, our inner life, our inner thoughts, our struggles, and when we’re in a group with other people, and they witness us. 

That’s a gift, but we witness ourselves. We’re writing from now, but we’re witnessing and writing about other parts of who we were and we get to see that through new eyes when we’re writing the story. It’s this split, two eyes. There’s the eye now and the eye then, and it’s really a miraculous integrating process that starts to happen. 

(25:57) Doreen Downing: Yes, becoming whole 

(26:00) Linda Joy Myers: Good title. 

(26:02) Doreen Downing: It is a good title. All right. Well, we’re finishing up now and want to make sure people know how to access this new class that you and Carla are doing and any other ways to contact you.

(26:17) Linda Joy Myers: You can send an email to me at lindajoy@namw.org. That’s my personal email. There are various links that get you to this class. But the title of it is—Hold on, let me just get this. I don’t have it in front of me. Sorry. 

(26:41) Doreen Downing: Well, we’ll definitely have it in the show notes. It’s good to hear it. 

(26:46) Linda Joy Myers: It’s The Craft of Writing a Successful Memoir. If you just type that in Google, I’m sure it will come up. The 1st meeting is July 29th. I really hope if you have a story, stories would tap on my shoulder and whisper in my left ear, there were funny, funny ways that it would show up. If you have any of that going on, give it a try and see what happens. Something is trying to get your attention. 

(27:14) Doreen Downing: Beautiful. Well, thank you so much, Linda. This has been fun to travel some journeys that we’ve been on before, but also hear some new things.

When you show up at bookstores and I come and sit there, I always learn something new from you. I feel like today I’ve learned something too. Thank you so much. 

(27:36) Linda Joy Myers: Thanks for having me.