Memory Writers Network

By Jerry Waxler

The television show, Grey’s Anatomy, is about a group of medical interns. Their career as doctors is in its infancy, and yet this new beginning takes place at the end of a long arduous journey through high school, college, and medical school. They are reaching the pinnacle of a mountain they have been climbing their whole lives. After much striving, one of the interns wins a coveted spot scrubbing into her first surgery. She watches what appears to the rest of us like blood and guts, but to her it is the dance of life. She is training to heal a body by cutting and reorganizing those messy tissues. She floats out at the end of the surgery, saturated with this peak experience, a climax of the endless desire that brought her to this point. Turning to a fellow resident she asks “Why would anyone take drugs?” I feel the same wonder after my first year of blogging about memoir writing. It is the culmination of a lifetime of desire.

For my whole life, I’ve been intrigued by the variety of human experience. I also love to write. Over the years, these two passions persist and grow. I want to understand people, and I want to express my thoughts in writing. When I was 52, I received a Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology. After absorbing a rich array of insights into ways that people could grow, I wanted to record it, but I didn’t want to keep it in a drawer, and I didn’t think it would be a publishable work. So I wrote it on my first website, mental-health-survival-guide.com, which thanks to the magic of the internet is still out there.

I kept writing and learning about people, and became more engaged in helping writers achieve their goals. I began conducting workshops to help writers overcome obstacles. I turned this into a self-help book for writers called “Four Elements for Writers.” As I continued to explore how writing and psychology interact, I realized memoir writing combines both my passions. Writing about your life lets you turn attention inwards, where you can examine your journey. And it turns attention outward, where you shape a story that makes sense to others. This is what happens in a therapist’s office, too. During therapy people authentically share their lives and in the process increase their self-understanding. I wanted to extend this from individual therapy to include everyone who looks for deeper meaning within their lives.

To develop these ideas, I read memoir after memoir. Each one teaches me two things: what it was like being that person, and what it was like turning that life journey into a story. The lessons poured in, and I began conducting workshops on memoir writing, and again turned my lessons into a book, “Learn to Write Your Memoir in Four Weeks.” (Not that you’ll write it in four weeks, but you can learn everything you need to know in these 28 steps.)

When I first started writing my blog, I thought this would simply provide an easy way to publish my essays. The longer I blog the more advantages I discover. By receiving comments and visiting other blogs, and finding people interested in memoir writing, I was discovering as well as creating a micro-community of like-minded individuals. This has been enormously empowering. Like the radicals who printed brochures during the American Revolution seeking freedom from tyranny, I can spread my ideas, and I don’t even have to stand on street corners.

What is the revolution I am fomenting? I suppose in one way, blogging itself is a revolution, and the tyranny it overthrows is silence. Turning your individual, unique knowledge, passion, and wisdom into story and publishing it to the world is one of the neatest ways I have ever seen to incite deeper understanding. By sharing ourselves in this way, I hope we can learn about each other and in the process, perhaps promote world peace. And while we are sharing ourselves with each other, we are also being challenged to understand ourselves on deeper, clearer levels. Collecting the wisdom that has seeped into our pores, writing forces us to clarify our knowledge. Through writing we learn who we are. The revolution that interests me most is to grow, individually and collectively towards greater wisdom.

One of the most surprising things about blogging is that it’s a form of performance. I have always been shy, preferring to avoid the public. Now, as I blog, I am learning to extend myself towards strangers. Some become friends, in the new internet sense of friendship, while others remain onlookers. This means I am a performer, which is a mindboggling expansion of my social skills that I never expected to be achieving in my sixties. (I just turned 61 so I’m in the thick of it now.)

What’s next? As I learn more about life story telling, I realize that stories become powerful not just because of external events, but because the storyteller found the power inside the events. This has caused me to look more closely at situations I always assumed were mundane. What first looked messy and ordinary, like the blood and guts exposed during surgery, begins to flow with elegant meaning. I share what I discover in my blog. Over time I expect my investigation will lead in new directions. I find that aging is a spiritual experience and someday I expect to shift from seeking the wisdom in the past to finding wisdom in the future. For now, what’s next is my next blog entry. I’m on deadline every week, under pressure to learn and grow, and find words that let me share myself with the world.