Memory and Imagination: The Alchemy of the Unconscious

Workshop with Helen Fremont and Linda Joy Myers—90 minutes

Date: October 22, 2026

Price: $69 (NAMW Members) | $79 (Non-Members)

Time: 2-3:30 PM PDT | 5-6:30 PM EDT

As you work on your memoir, you discover that you are dealing with flotsam and jetsam,  vague impressions, fleeting dream-like scenes. Is it really memory? Are my memories accurate and can I count on them? We hear this countless times when memoirists struggle to write their story, asking: do I remember enough to write my memoir? How do I trust what I feel, see, and hear in my mind as I write?

As memoirists, we rely on memory to create and develop the stories we want to tell. But we must also rely on our intuition and imagination to capture the actual feeling of the events and stories we are trying to bring to light on the page. Memoir, in other words, is not merely a transcript of our memories; it is an exploration and revelation of our truths. And a search for the deepest layers of our psyche, as we look for ways to bring to life our lived experiences.

How do we accomplish this? We must learn to work with our unconscious mind and pay attention to the half-known intentions and impulses that arise as we are writing. We need to stay present with what we do remember, the images and dreams that beckon us to capture our truths. As we keep writing into this process, our early drafts guide us to gain insight and meaning about our experiences that beckon us to keep returning and inviting our inner self and soul to release what it knows. Feels. Believes.

Throughout the early writing process and on into further drafts, we keep taking dictation from these various layers of our psyche and memory, trying not to stress about the outcome. Your early drafts require you to lean into your search for self and truth, and to keep writing no matter what! Trust the process—we all need to discover our inner channels of truth.

This workshop will present ideas about how to tune into what are often subtle processes of inner listening. We invite you to explore where you are now in your writing with prompts and exercises, and we will all support this amazing creative process of writing your memoir.

In this workshop we’ll discuss:

• How do we capture the feeling of experiences that remain locked in memory?
• How do we enrich our stories, using imagination, speculation, and reflection?
• How do we write about events or experiences that we do not fully remember?
• What is the difference between imagination and invention? How do we remain true to our stories, while exploring feelings and images we cannot verify?

And more!

Teachers

Helen Fremont is the author of three critically acclaimed memoirs, including the national bestseller After Long Silence. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications, including Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The New York Times, The Harvard Review, and others.
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In my first memoir, I wanted to write about my childhood memories and upbringing, in order to understand how my own identity was shaped by the hidden stories of my parents’ lives in eastern Europe during WWII.

I was raised Roman Catholic in Upstate New York, but in my mid-thirties, I discovered that my parents were in fact Jewish Holocaust survivors who had kept their true identity secret.

In order to tell their story, I needed to blend together my own memory of stories they had told me as a child and as an adult, together with the new stories they now revealed, upon my discovery of the truth of our family history. I also needed to rely on my independent research and imagination to bring their stories to life. Finally, through speculation, I tried to make sense of their reasons for keeping the secret, and to understand the discrepancies in their various accounts, and in the conflicting accounts of others.

Linda Joy Myers, Ph.D., is the founder of the National Association of Memoir Writers and is the author of two award-winning memoirs — Don’t Call Me Mother and Song of the Plains — and two craft books, The Power of Memoir and Journey of Memoir. For forty years, Linda Joy practiced as a licensed therapist in Berkeley, CA, and draws on her training in psychology to teach the psychological dimensions of memoir writing.

In my first memoir, Don’t Call Me Mother, I needed to write the story of growing up with my maternal grandmother in the center of a generational struggle between her and my mother. Chaos ruled, people broke down, and never spoke to each other again. I promised myself, as we all do, that my life would be different but the trauma of their mental illness and abandonment was etched in my body and dreams, which were the source of memory.

I had to search for the words, the scenes, the moments to convey the emotionally true layers of the story. For research, I returned to my hometown over and over, each time the painful movies surged in my mind and body, I researched my family’s history—could there be clues to the dramas that were never resolved.

It took many years for me to write the book, and for the first time I had the right to own my story. I claimed my voice. Finding language based on body memories showed me the way.

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