Hi I’m Jerry Waxler, a therapist and memoir teacher. To tell you the origin story of my decades-long relationship with Linda Joy Myers and NAMW, I must go back a few years earlier. Sound familiar? Filling in the backstory is one of the great structural challenges of writing a memoir, and here I am facing that challenge in this short post!! Memoir writing has been such a joy to me since I discovered it in 2002, so let me start there.

Shortly after I earned my master’s degree in counseling psychology, in addition to figuring out how to become a new therapist at the age of fifty, I felt a creative pull to write about what I was going through. I was having way too much fun in my lifelong learning journey. I thought writing would be a good way to share it with others.

Fortunately, a writer who lived nearby had a similar impulse. Foster Winans had recently “graduated” from a prison sentence for white collar crime. Instead of rehabilitating alone, his instinct was to use writing to create community. He started a writing club in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which attracted writers from a hundred mile radius. It was an awakening for me, exposing me to the joyful experience of being together with others who long to write.

Foster had written a memoir Trading Secrets, about his catastrophic life choice, and. I quickly realized that by writing the story, he was discovering the moral and emotional mix-ups that landed him in prison, and then, after serving his time, he showed how he was going to find the decent person beneath the mistakes. When I took my first memoir writing class with him, I realized that by writing a book about himself, he’d helped himself heal and grow.

Discovering that a person could turn their life experience into a story about a healing journey broke me open. After my own fifty-five-year long search for self-understanding, I realized I no longer needed to search for my inner truths in silence. Like hot lava flowing out of a fissure in my shy, self-contained, and too private space, I had to learn everything about how memoirs work. Even though the memoir genre was just being born, the torrent of writing talent in the Bucks County group made it relatively easy to find support for my new passion.

One member of the group, Linda Wisniewski, wrote a memoir, Off Kilter, about breaking out of her mother’s old-world attitudes about women being second class citizens. And Foster recommended a memoir he edited, Shades of Darkness by George Brummell, a Black soldier who grew up in Jim Crow south and was blinded in  Vietnam. From the very beginning I was learning that memoirs give a voice to those who lacked one.

To offer my background in self-help and psychology to my fellow writers, I asked Foster if I could teach a self-help course for writers. He agreed, so I overcame my fear of public speaking and learned how to teach. Teaching a group of writers ignited a second fire. I discovered I loved teaching as much as I loved writing. (Yes I was going through a midlife growth spurt.)

After a year or two more of this intellectual Valhalla, the small vibrant writing community closed its doors, the writers retreated to their homes, and suddenly I was on my own. After a period of grieving, I turned my attention to the connections made possible by the recent popularity of the internet. I started a blog and posted essays about what I was learning from all the memoirs I’d been reading. That’s when I met Linda Joy Myers.

Her memoir Don’t Call Me Mother introduced me to a complex mother-daughter relationship, and how the emotional wounds in childhood can serve as an inferno of self-development later in life. Through the author’s need to grow through her pain, she showed me the power of lifelong emotional self-understanding. And as the founder of NAMW, I saw how like me, she was passionate about sharing her message with others.

We had another thing in common. Many of the teachers I met at writing conferences behaved as if there was some taboo against claiming a psychological benefit from writing a memoir. Linda Joy had no such reservations. Like me, she saw memoir writing as a way to harness literary excellence in service of psychological and social health. Our shared vision made us kindred spirits on this journey.

She lived on the west coast, in Berkeley California, a town that played an outsized role in my coming-of-age story. I liked that the bicoastal nature of our collaboration seemed to embrace the duality of east and west.

Over the intervening years, I’ve been studying memoirs, writing two of my own, and, combining my passion for self-development and literary expression, I have been teaching and coaching others to do the same. Throughout those years, I stayed connected with Linda Joy, inviting her east for some teaching events and visited her on the West coast.

This pursuit into the stories of life, through memoir, has turned this past quarter of a century of my life, into a vigorous, intellectual, creative, and socially stimulating period. And I owe it all to the thirst of an ever-increasing number of aspiring and accomplished memoir writers who are willing to look inside themselves to find and then share their stories.

The surprising commercial success of a few big publishing hits in the 1990s gradually matured into a grass roots movement. Through this special genre, we can now share the important realities that take place within ourselves.

Like the old growth root systems of the prairie lands around which Linda Joy grew up, memoirs reveal a previously underserved root system of our social fabric, the universality that connects our inner selves.

What is your origin story?

Are you writing it?

Bio
Jerry Waxler M.S. LPC, is a workshop leader, writing coach, and therapist. He is the author of Memoir Revolution, an inquiry into the social and psychological importance of the emerging genre, and How I Learned to Love the World, My Epic Journey from Solving Equations to Healing Hearts through Therapy, Memoirs, and Writing, which traces his lifelong coming of age, from the utopian promises of the sixties to wisdom, kindness and caring later in life.