According to Us: Four Older Women Tell Their Stories, And How to Write Your Own Memoirs

Description

According to Us:  Four Older Women Tell Their Stories, by Diane Drechsler, Berdjouhi Esmerian, Barbara LaMark and Norma Rappl, and How to Write Your Own Memoirs by Marjorie Baker Price .
 This unique selection of life stories by four women in their seventies and eighties who developed memoir writing through a monthly memoir writing support group that met with Marjorie’s facilitation for many years to use storytelling as key ways to “touch, teach and pass on” healing, empowerment and greater meaning in our lives.  

Includes a separate “how-to” section to develop your own memoir writing and more fully express and understand who you are and where you came from.

In the mid-nineties I began teaching a senior memoir writing class at Nazareth College Center for Lifelong Learning in Rochester, NY, that I titled “Tell Your Story, Write Your Life.”

I agreed, after some discussion and much thought, to alter the class format to become an ongoing monthly memoir writing support and personal growth group.

Every month each participant brings a story she has written to read to an eager, supportive audience of fellow memoir writers. Each month someone laughs, cries, opens up, and shares what she most struggles with, what she most cares about, what she most fears, and what she most hopes for in her life. Class members are in their seventies and eighties. They have lived full, challenging, loving, tragic, compromised and successful lives. They have much to look back on and much to continue to participate in, as well as continue to actualize within their lives. They are both paradoxically young and old; mature and simply living for each present moment.

We yearn for stories that have meaning to us – that “touch, teach and pass on,” as I have said in the very first memoir writing class I taught at Nazareth College. May you both enjoy their offerings and be moved and inspired similarly to record your own!

ISBN  978-097691750-2

Copyright 2010, First edition 2010

Copyright 2010 by Diane Dreschler, Berdjouhi Esmerian, Barbara Lamark, Norma Rappl

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Centering Tools Publications. www.centeringtools.com