Resources

Web Resources

Christina Baldwin / PeerSpirit Inc.
http://peerspirit.com
Christina Baldwin is a writer and seminar presenter of 30+ years experience. She has contributed two classic books to the renaissance of personal writing, including the well-known Life’s Companion, Journal Writing as a Spiritual Practice, revised and reissued in 2007 after 100,000 original sales. Her legacy book, Storycatcher, Making Sense of our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story, reminds readers of the necessity of story to communicate in all areas of professional and personal life.

Kathleen Adams / Center for Journal Therapy
http://journaltherapy.com
Kathleen (Kay) Adams LPC is a best-selling author, speaker, psychotherapist and visionary. Her first book, Journal to the Self, is a classic that has helped define the field of journal therapy. Kay is a beloved teacher whose innovative work has helped hundreds of thousands of people heal, change and grow.

Interviews

Kathleen Adams, a “second wave” journal therapist, who teaches, lectures and shepherds therapeutic journal writing through her Center for Journal Therapy interviewed Tristine Rainer. On Kathleen’s Journalverse podcast, she began by introducing Tristine as “one of the first-generation pioneers of the journal movement. She is the author of the classic The New Diary and its memoir companion,Your Life as Story. For many years she taught with the legendary diarist Anaïs Nin, a story told in her forthcoming book, Apprenticed to Venus. Tristine is the founder of the Center for Autobiographic Studies in Los Angeles, where she has helped hundreds of people write literary memoirs. You won’t want to miss this candid conversation between pioneering friends and colleagues.”
Right-click to download and listen to the interview >>

Advice from John Steinbeck

Here’s a quote we like from John Steinbeck to a friend who asked him for rudimentary suggestions for the beginner. It may be all you need to get you started with your memoir:

“Don’t start by trying to make the book chronological. Just take a period. Then try to remember it so clearly that you can see things: what colors and how warm or cold and how you got there. Then try to remember people. And then just tell what happened. It is important to tell what people looked like, how they walked, what they wore, what they ate. Put it all in. Don’t try to organize it. And put in all the details you can remember. You will find that in a very short time things will begin coming back to you, you thought you had forgotten. Do it for very short periods at first but kind of think of it when you aren’t doing it. Don’t think back over what you have done. Don’t think of literary form. Let it get out as it wants to. Over tell it in the matter of detail — cutting comes later. The form will develop in the telling.”