Tangled Up in Blues—Writing Through Trauma

NAMW Memoir Panel—Free to All

Linda Joy Myers, Host

Nicole Walker, Mimi Nichter, Kerry Neville, and Laraine Herring

October 14, 2026

3-4:30 PM PDT | 6-7:30 PM EDT

Sign Up Here

Many memoir writers struggle with how to write about the trauma they have experienced, and how much to include. They struggle with permission to write their story and may spend years stuck in decision making about how much truth to tell, especially if it’s very painful or graphic, censoring themselves to “protect” the reader. It’s a challenge to give ourselves permission to write our truths.  It can be difficult to find the “right” words for the reader and even ourselves as we hope the story will touch readers who may benefit from the learned experience that a memoir offers.

The authors on this panel have all written deeply about trauma, each with her own creative solution to the problems memoir writers face as they wrestle with traumatic histories. This panel of experienced and talented memoirists who are also teachers will discuss ways you can invite a reader into your story without traumatizing them, or yourself. We’ll look at how various elements of craft and form can help shape your story for publication. 

Nicole Walker 
Tangling Threads, Searching for Clarity

Writing about trauma requires us to untangle our insights, emotions, and memories. However, tangling up our stories can help us create powerful narratives. By interweaving different threads, such as points of view, historical context, political upheaval, natural processes, we can see our own story through a new lens, providing insight and clearer perspective. I’ll talk about how to find useful threads and how to integrate them into your memoir.

In my most recent book, How to Plant a Billion Trees, I weave together stories from childhood trauma with stories about forest ecosystems. By bringing together research about the larger world with my own personal story, I connected that world to my own story, which not only enriched the narrative but also helped me see how important community is to healing. I’ve written about the braided essay for a long time, but this latest project allowed me to see how stories buttress and shape each other.

You’ll learn:

1. How structure and form can serve as a catalyst to free you to write your story.
2. How toggling between stories provides both inspiration and relief from the vulnerability of writing your truth.
3. How complicating the narrative can lead to clarity in the end and help you to find the threads to weave the layers of your story.
4. How you can view your own story in new creative ways to create themes and layers to bring a reader into your memoir.
5. How to reveal connections between your story and stories from the world.

Bio
NICOLE WALKER is the author of eight books including How to Plant a Billion Trees and Writing the Hard Stuff.  She has written pieces for The New York Times and is a noted author in several editions of Best American Essays. She edits Crux, the literary nonfiction series at UGA Press and teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University where she serves as Writer-in-Residence for the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society. You can find her at facebook.com/nicole.walker.18041, @nikwalk.bsky.social, instagram.com/nikwalker28, nikwalk.substack.com, and nikwalk.com. 

Writing about Buried Trauma
Mimi Nichter

For most of my life, I rarely spoke about a major life trauma—being a hijack hostage in the Middle East when I was twenty years old. Although I sensed it might be a powerful story to share with others, I couldn’t open up about it, not in conversations, not even on the page. From an early age, I had been socialized into silence about personal trauma. The concept of PTSD had not yet been developed. Whatever trauma you experienced in life—even if you were a soldier who had come back from war—you were expected to “move on”.  After many years, I realized that to finally heal, I needed to examine what had happened and the impact my silence had on my life.

When I talk about my recently published book, Hostage: A Memoir of Terrorism, Trauma, and Resilience, many people ask why I finally wrote about this experience. I explain that in the past ten or fifteen years, American culture has changed, and it is now widely acceptable (if not a cultural imperative) to talk openly about trauma. And, having been a university professor for much of my career, I had found my voice. But writing was challenging: perhaps my biggest struggle was that I had never processed my experience before writing—not to a friend, not even in therapy.

In this webinar, you will learn:

• Why you should process your experience before you start writing
• Useful tips on the path to writing about trauma
• The extent to which writing about trauma can be healing
• Giving yourself permission to write what happened

Bio
Mimi Nichter, Ph.D. is a professor emerita of cultural anthropology at the University of Arizona. She is the author/coauthor of three anthropology books focused on key cultural issues in the U.S. She has conducted extensive fieldwork on a range of global health issues in India, Indonesia, Turkey, and Sri Lanka.

Her memoir, Hostage (Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, 2026) has garnered several awards including Storytrade Awards Best Nonfiction Book, Next Generation Indie Award for Memoir/Overcoming Adversity, Finalist for the International Book Award in Memoir and Creative Non-Fiction, and Finalist for the Literary Award in Non-Fiction at the 2026 Tucson Festival of Books. Her essays have appeared in Newsweek, HuffPost Personal, Brevity, and Career Authors. You can find her at miminichter.com.

Kerry Neville
The Gift of Instability of Memory

How do we write a memoir about trauma and recovery when we can’t fully remember? My own gaps came from electroconvulsive therapy, but this challenge is shared: memory is unstable for all of us, and the tidy, linear narrative we’re taught “makes sense” often betrays that truth. So rather than pulling the rope taut and straight, we can leave, even celebrate, the tangled knots. We can let form mirror the instability of memory instead of papering over the gaps with chronology. An episodic, nonlinear allows us to build with movable pieces: notes, photographs, journal fragments, research materials, a collage ordered only the way we’ve ordered it today. And we can resist the false arc of ascending brightness: writing not “recovery” but “recovering” stories, ongoing and forever unfinished.

You will learn:

• How we can benefit from writing fragments, notes, and impressions.
• That you don’t have to worry about having a perfect, linear memory.
• How writing raw truth can be a way to heal.
• To allow the process of healing to continue in its natural way.

Bio
Kerry Neville is the author of the memoir Momma May Be Mad which won the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Memoir in 2026 and was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, and two collections of stories, Necessary Lies and Remember to Forget Me. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Gettysburg Review, Epoch, TriQuarterly, Brevity, The Washington Post, The Irish Times, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing and Chair at Georgia College and State University.

​Laraine Herring
Using Speculative Elements to Deepen Your Memoir

A powerful way to unravel a stuck story is to shift your perspective on the events and allow yourself to weave new narratives. Changing where and how you view the story changes the story. Speculative memoir, which is a way of crafting narrative that uses imaginative elements and metaphors to access deeper emotional truths, is a powerful way to deconstruct and reconstruct your stories. I’ll explain what speculative memoir is, and how and why you might incorporate its powers into your own memoirs.

You’ll learn:

• What speculative memoir is
• Why and how to use speculative elements in your work
• How to construct and deconstruct your story
• The benefits of shifting your story’s lens
• How to be open to new ways of seeing your story

Bio 
Laraine Herring is the author of A Constellation of Ghosts: a speculative memoir with ravens, editor of the anthology Becoming Real: Women Reclaim the Power of the Imagined through Speculative Nonfiction, the author of a trilogy of writing books from Shambhala: Writing Begins with the Breath; The Writing Warrior; and On Being Stuck: Tapping into the Creative Power of Writer’s Block, and the author and illustrator of The Grief Forest: a book about what we don’t talk about, and The Grief Carnival: a book about loving what is leaving. She’s a retired professor of psychology and creative writing, now focused on illustration, collage, and the combination of multiple art forms to create healing.
laraineherring.com

Linda Joy Myers

Host Linda Joy Myers is the founder of the National Association of Memoir Writers and has spent her writing life trying to weave an understanding about trauma from her psychology career as a therapist and help others write about these challenging topics. Her memoirs Don’t Call Me Mother and Song of the Plains are about intergenerational trauma, and her new book The Heart and Craft of Writing a Healing Memoir, due in February 2027 from Sibyl Press Craft books addresses many of the complex issues memoir writers face.