The Alchemy of Memoir is about discovery of the Inner Self through writing the Outer Life. It is about Change through Self-Discovery. Through our writing, becoming conscious of everything that happened, and thus being able to live in more than one dimension of experience.
It is about How one changes in the process of writing about change. About the different kind of consciousness that emerges.
Memoir writers are like alchemists in that we take all the components of who we know ourselves to be at any one time, and add them up, add them to each other. Then we apply the heat of the mind, the heat of mental energy, to find what it all means.
Perhaps we will find the main benefit of memoir writing, focusing intensely on the Self, allows us to finally go beyond the Self.
Nancy Wait is a writing coach and editor.
Contact: wait.nancy@gmail.com
Bio
Nancy Wait, author of The Nancy Who Drew available on Amazon.
Nancy Wait was born in Chicago in 1949 and grew up in New York City where she studied acting at the High School of Performing Arts. After two years in the theater department at Carnegie-Mellon, she moved to London and attended RADA. Nancy had a career in England during the 1970s under the name of Nancie Wait,
working in film, theater and television. When she returned to the States after seven years she took up painting, and during the 1980s she was a freelance artist doing portraits and architectural renderings.
She also painted a series of paintings from her imagination she called Journey to the Deep, the final one being that of a young girl looking very much alive at the bottom of the ocean. It was after that painting that she received an inner message telling her she didn’t have to paint anymore, and it was time now to put her story into words. Eventually she went back to college to study writing and finish her degree at the New School, continuing onto grad school at Goddard College. Fourteen years and an uncountable number of revisions later, her memoir, The Nancy Who Drew, was published in 2011.
The Nancy Who Drew, the memoir that solved a mystery, begins more than half a century ago and tells the story of a shy dreamy girl who is betrayed by her mother. Wounded and confused, she flees to London to become an actress and have her own life, but finds that the past will not let her go. Only when she stops running and starts drawing and painting the dreams that have haunted her since childhood, will she discover the clue that makes sense of it all. And eventually she realizes that betrayal is sacred when the heart can encompass the whole.
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