Linda Joy Myers, PhD, MFT, is president and founder of the National Association of Memoir Writers. Her memoir Don’t Call Me Mother: A Daughter’s Journey from Abandonment to Forgiveness was a finalist for the Foreword Book of the Year Award and a finalist in the Indie Excellence Awards and won the BAIPA Gold Medal award. She’s the author of three books on memoir writing: The Power of Memoir: How to Write Your Healing Story; Journey of Memoir; and Becoming Whole. Her new memoir, Time Present and Time Past: A Daughter’s Search for Truth, will be released by She Writes Press in 2017. Myers writes for the Huffington Post, and her passion is to help people capture their stories through coaching, editing, and nationwide online workshops. She co-teaches the program Write your Memoir in Six Months with Brooke Warner, and is the coauthor of Breaking Ground on Your Memoir.

Ever since she was a child, Linda Joy Myers felt the power of the past. As the third daughter in her family to be abandoned or estranged by a mother, she observed the consequences of that heritage on the women she loved as well as herself. But thanks to the stories told to her by her great-grandmother, Myers received a gift that proved crucial in her life: the idea that everyone is a walking storybook, and that we all have within us the key to a deeper understanding of life—the secret stories that make themselves known even without words.

Song of the Plains is a weaving of family history that starts in the Oklahoma plains and spans over forty years as Myers combs through dusty archives, family stories, and genealogy online. She discovers the secrets that help to explain the fractures in her family, and the ways in which her mother and grandmother found a way not only to survive the great challenges of their eras, but to thrive despite mental illness and abuse. She discovers how decisions made long ago broke her family apart—and she makes it her life’s work to change her family story from one of abuse and loss to one of finding and creating a new story of hope, forgiveness, healing, and love.

The Magic of Memoir is a memoirist’s companion for when the going gets tough. Editors Linda Joy Myers and Brooke Warner have taught and coached hundreds of memoirists to the completion of their memoirs, and they know that the journey is fraught with belittling messages from both the inner critic and naysayers, voices that make it hard to stay on course with the writing and completion of a book.

In The Magic of Memoir, 38 writers share their hard-won wisdom, stories, and writing tips. Included are Myers’s and Warner’s interviews with best-selling and widely renown memoirists Mary Karr, Elizabeth Gilbert, Dr. Azar Nafisi, Dani Shapiro, Margo Jefferson, Raquel Cepeda, Jessica Valenti, Daisy Hernández, Mark Matousek, and Sue William Silverman.

This collection has something for anyone who’s on the journey or about to embark on it. If you’re looking for inspiration, The Magic of Memoir will be a valuable companion.

“I wanted to tell the secret stories that my great-grandmother Blanche whispered to me on summer nights in a featherbed in Iowa. I was eight and she was eighty . . .”

At the age of four, a little girl stands on a cold, windy railroad platform in Wichita, Kansas, watching a train take her mother away. For the rest of her life, her mother will be an only occasional—and always troubled—visitor who denies her the love she longs for.

Linda Joy Myers’s compassionate, gripping, and soul-searching memoir tells the story of three generations of daughters who, though determined to be different from their absent mothers, ultimately follow in their footsteps, recreating a pattern that they yearn to break. Accompany Linda as she uncovers family secrets, seeks solace in music, and begins her healing journey—ultimately transcending the prison of her childhood and finding forgiveness for her family and herself.

This edition includes a new afterword in which Myers confronts her family’s legacy and comes full circle with her daughter and grandchildren, seeding a new path for them.

In Journey of Memoir you will find lessons on how to write a great scene; information on the difference between freewriting and outlining, and why you need both; timeline and turning point exercises to help create structure; and much more. This unique workbook gives you the tools you need to begin, develop, and complete your memoir.

In Breaking Ground on Your Memoir, Linda Joy Myers (President of the National Association of Memoir Writers) and Brooke Warner (Publisher of She Writes Press) present from the ground up—from basic to advanced—the craft and skills memoirists can draw upon to write a powerful and moving story, as well as inspiration to write, finish, and polish their own story.

Full of rich insights and practical advice and strategies, Breaking Ground on Your Memoir offers all the tools writers need to write a powerful, publishable memoir.

In this book you will discover:

• how to get focused on what your memoir is about—your themes.
• how to build the structure of your story.
• techniques to make your memoir come alive.
• the secrets of craft: how to write a great scene, colorful and memorable descriptions, narration, and flashback.
• how to connect with your reader using through-threads and takeaway so they’ll keep turning the pages, and learn something about their own lives by reading your book.

Visit the authors online at WriteYourMemoirInSixMonths.com.

The City of Light is encased in smoke, and the Eiffel Tower is invisible. The dark cloud of WWII has arrived at the gates of Paris. Nineteen-year-old Charli, a German-Jewish artist, has been using her art skills to forge official documents, stamps, and signatures for those who need them since just after the war started. She thought she’d managed to leave the Nazis behind in Berlin, but now they’re drawing close to Paris, and she and her father-figure/mentor—once known to her as Mr. Lieb, now, in an effort to hide his Jewish identity, known to all as Mathieu DuBois—must flee once again. On June 11, 1940, bearing false papers, they leave their adopted home with Charli’s lover, Cesar, a refugee from the Spanish war, and his childhood friend, Javier. But when they are machine-gunned on the road during the Exodus from Paris, tragedy ensues, and Cesar—racked by grief—abandons Charli and Mathieu.

As Charli and Mathieu, now alone on their journey, continue their march toward southern France and hopeful safety, they face danger after danger. But when new laws are created in July that strip naturalized citizens of France of their rights, it’s not long before Mathieu is caught in the net of a round-up, arrested, and taken to prison. Now Charli finds herself truly on her own, and she quickly becomes involved in what will come to be known as the resistance, forging documents and managing the complex, secret worlds operating just under the radar in Marseille, a place where friend and foe are hard to distinguish. With the war still roaring around her, separated from the people she loves, Charli must make decisions that will shape the fate of her life—and the lives of countless others.