 All right, it is 6.03 and I would like to welcome all of you to how to transform traumatic events into published writing with Louise Nair and Lisa Gehr. My name is Taryn Edwards and I am one of the librarians here at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. And I'd like to thank those of you who elected to support this event and pay a little something to attend. Let's just say it goes a long way to help us do more in these challenging times, help us provide more free events to the public, and help us continue the work that the Mechanics Institute has done in San Francisco since 1854. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Mechanics Institute, we are an independent membership organization that houses a wonderful library, you can see it right behind me. It is the oldest library designed to serve the general public in California, not just mechanics, but I might add that the term mechanic really refers to anyone who works with their hands. As a writer, you are indeed a mechanic. The Institute also is a cultural event center and houses a world renowned chess club that is the oldest in the United States. So, right now, due to the lasting effects of the pandemic, many of our events continue to be virtual, but we are slowly working our way towards offering in-person events again. So if any of that sounds exciting to you, I encourage you to come and visit the Institute. We're open Monday through Saturday and membership is only $120 a year. And with that, you help support our continued contribution to the literary and cultural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. Now, I am delighted to introduce our speakers tonight. We have Dr. DeLise Daguer, who is a clinical psychologist, an author, and a childhood burn survivor. She earned her doctorate in clinical psychology from Weidner University, and she has written for and appeared on numerous media outlets, and also is a national keynote speaker. She currently is in solo practice in New Jersey, and tonight she will be talking about her writing and also referring to her multiple award-winning book Flashback Girl, Lessons on Resilience from a Burn Survivor. And then we also have Louise Nair, who has spoken for us before. She is the award-winning author of five books, including her memoir, Burned, which was an Oprah Great Read and winner of the Wisconsin Library Association Award. She's taught creative writing classes for over 40 years and has been interviewed widely, including on NPR. And by me at the Mechanics Institute. She is a member of the Writers Grotto here in San Francisco and teaches memoirs through Ali Osher Lifelong Learning Institute via UC Berkeley. All right, a little bit of technical stuff. Before we get started, I just want you to, I want to encourage you to use the chat space, which many of you are doing already. And if you have any questions, let's pose them there. And we will get to them at the end of the reading. And as I said earlier, I will send all of you registered guests a link to the YouTube video in a couple of days. Can I hear from Elise first? Are we ready? Absolutely. Hello, can you hear me okay? You sound great. Okay. Hello. It's nice to connect with all of you this evening. I'm a psychologist and an author. I'm going to start with telling you a little bit about the, my story, and then go into talking about some psychological issues in memoir writing. Can you share with me while I share my screen? Okay, very good. I am only going to show you a couple slides from this. My story begins. And a house that looks very like this. Can you see it? Can you nod if you can see the house and everything? Are we good? All right, thank you. My story begins in 1967 when my family went to take a very brief trip to New Hampshire. And this is the beautiful Lake Wenna Pasaki. We were not in this house, but we were in a similar house, and it was dinner time. My mother decided to start to cook dinner. She was very much around the house for something that she thought was lighter fluid. And she went to pour the lighter fluid on the charcoals. I was standing right next to her. I'm four years old. She pours the lighter fluid on the charcoals, but they don't light. So they take the can again. She pours it on the charcoal. And this can, it turns out, was carrying actually a highly flammable household solvent. So she poured it on the coals. And at that point, there was a giant burst of flame that immediately covered my mother and myself. My mother, in that moment, realized that the only way to save herself was to dash through the wall of flame and right down into the lake. And that's what she did. But she left me in the fire. So I was trapped alone and abandoned behind this giant wall of flame. Thank goodness my father was able to see me and he dashed around the side of the porch where he was, and was just tall enough to reach me. And I was just small enough to be pulled through that fence. He got me out through me in the lake. And I was saved. And it turns out that the very small town of Wolfboro, New Hampshire had absolutely no ability to take care of my mother and myself and they took one look at us and they said, there's nothing we can do for these two people. But we were very near Boston and Boston, Massachusetts had actually the very best burns hospital in the country. So that's where we were transferred. And I was saved. This is a picture. And I should have warned you, I'm sorry, you can look away if you wish to this is a picture of how I looked after this fire. This, you know, 90 seconds of horror left me burned on 65% of my very little body, third degree, which is the most severe kind of burns. You can sort of see in this picture that I lost my lip. My chin was burned away. My neck was burned away. My arms were fused to the sides of my body. And I lost my face to the degree that I couldn't speak actually, other than using my tongue as my bottom lip, nor could I smile. Or do you really anything that one has to do with one's face. And this is how I started out. I've had, I, as a child, I had something like 40 or 50 operations. I really don't know how many because my family didn't count because my family was pretty neglectful. And then as an adult, I've had about 25 or 30 more operations. So what you see now is the product of tremendous amounts of time and pain, because burns are very painful and mess. Because burns are very messy and time away from school and from work and bullying and all kinds of difficulties that I've had in my life. Difficulties dating, you can only imagine. This is how I looked in first grade. This is my first grade school picture. And then I'm doing a reading just about my book Flashback Girl. This is the part in which I start to do a rather long reading about being bullied as a child and what that was like. I'm not going to do that with you guys today, but this is how I started off in my life. You can see, I think by the look on my face that I was friendly and eager to connect with people and also very, very, very badly disfigured. And that was tough. It's tough now was really tough in 1967. Back before there were any interventions for bullying and bullying wasn't even really something honestly anybody acknowledged happening. Okay, a little bit more setting up the stage. This is my family. I want to show them to you because they are major cast of characters in my book this, the cast of characters in my book is me, my mother, my father, my brother, some other people too but this is the main cast of characters and what I wrote about. This is the first known picture that I know of anyway that was taken after the fire of the four of us together. And this picture tells you everything you would want to know about my family in one quick snapshot as great pictures too. You can see me there. I'm the one smiling without a face. But look at me trying so hard to be cheerful, trying to do the right thing you know, you can see nobody has their arms around me. I'm sitting between my parents but neither one of them is comforting me in any way. There's no protection. It's every man for themselves in this family. My father there. If you had known him, you would find this picture shocking, because my father was in a brilliant happy cheerful, lively go getter of a man. And in this picture he looks completely stunned. He's just shocked from what we had all been through. My mother there you can see she looks like she has in a care in the world. She's completely emotionally separate from the traumatized child sitting next to her. She's fine. My brother on the other end is looking intense and troubled. The last picture I'm going to show you from my slideshow this is my brother. This is the last picture of him taken before he died. My brother died when he was 19. He died quite young. Okay. I'm going to stop screen share. There we go. So that's the setup. That's what I wanted to tell you, kind of the, the teaser of my story, what I wrote about how traumatic it was. And honestly, I have to tell you, I really haven't even covered half of the rather intense amounts of trauma that are in my book flashback girl. I'm going to assume because you're here that most of you are also interested in writing about what you have been through. And I'm here to address those issues not only as a writer, which I am, but also as a psychologist, which I also am. One thing I would say, and hear me loud and clear on this. I really think it's important to be quite well before you set out to write a memoir about trauma that you have endured. Not that there isn't a place for writing when you're not well, because I could show you a stack of 30 journals that I went through in my childhood and adolescence and 20s, and every one of those journals, help me to ground myself and to understand what was going on and healed me in many ways. But that journal writing would have never made a good memoir. It was, I lacked the perspective. I lacked the clarity. And I God knows I lacked the healing. I wrote my book a full 50 years after the events that I began describing to you today, a full 50 years now I'm not saying you have to wait 50 years, I did. Why did I wait 50 years I first of all I had to heal physically, and very much I had to heal emotionally. Also I had to heal socially, because being a burned woman in this world is not easy let me tell you. There's another reason why I waited, and I'll get to that reason in a little bit, because I had healed a lot and gone through a lot of therapy. I'll just be honest with you, a ton of therapy, which helped me to have perspective on what I went through, and help me move out of just being depressed, or just being angry, or just being, you know, rageful really. I was able to approach the material of what I was going through with much more clarity, and I think make it a much more interesting read. One of the things that you know I hear a lot from people who read my book is like they really appreciate the humor in it, because there is a lot of humor you might think there wouldn't be but there is there's a lot of funny things that happen and, and they really appreciate the pacing, and they really appreciate that I wasn't just sort of complaining. And all of those things I was able to do because I had years of distance from what I went through to when I was writing it. I think I strongly recommend that I mean journal all you want. And by the way, some of that material might be a goldmine for you after you field, but don't rush into writing a memoir. Take your time to heal first, and you'll do a better job at it. Another thing that I wanted to address is the importance of having a theme to your memoir that is not just telling your story. Now, I will say that when I sat down to write flashback girl, I didn't yet had that theme. To me, I was just like, I had to write this, I had to write this, I had to write what I went through. I had to get it out there on the page. It was a really a compulsion. In writing it, I found a theme, and the theme was something that was beyond me, and something that would be helpful to other people. And I've read a lot from other memoirs on the singular importance that your memoir be something that can be helpful to other people, because, you know, let's be clear, people are reading it for themselves. They don't want to just be entertained. They want to learn something from it, get a message from it, be uplifted in some way, be inspired in some way. So, my theme, as I developed it, was that life is incredibly challenging, and often far more challenging than we expect or admit. But the good news is that resilient recovery is possible. I went through something, some things, so horrific you can't even imagine them. And yet here I am, 50 years later, a psychologist, happy, married with children, living a beautiful life. And my theme is basically, if I can do that, you can do that too. So that's my theme. Having a message to the memoir, I find has been incredibly useful in giving presentations afterwards. And I'm going to assume that as writers, a lot of you are aware that, you know, one of the ways that you get people interested in your book is presenting. And having a theme that is not just about you but is applicable to other people is what's going to get people interested in coming to your presentation and buying your book. So that theme is huge, I think, in terms of getting people interested in what you've done. Another thing I wanted to bring up is writing about other people. And I showed to you the cast of characters in my book, my mother, my father, my brother and myself. And I told you that I waited 50 years to write my book. So the other reason why it takes me 50 years to write this book is that I literally waited until every single one of those people in that picture had passed away. I had to. Because they're the honest and true story of what I went through, unfortunately did not reflect particularly well on my parents and in particular my mother. So I waited until my mother died. I didn't wish to cause her pain. I didn't wish to cause a family rift. I didn't, I, you know, I just was not wanting her to have to deal with that. So I waited until she died. And three weeks after she died, I started writing my book. And that is, you know, generally an issue with memoirs is how you want to deal with the other people if you're writing about them. One of the decisions I made when I wrote was that when I was writing about people positively, I would use their accurate first name, I didn't really identify anybody by last names. Well, maybe a couple people but very few. I would use their first name, if I was writing about them positively. And if I was writing about anybody negatively, I changed their name. Having done that, there was one person in my book who will not be named, who pointed out to me that he could be figured out if one really wanted to, even though I changed his name I changed identifying stuff he said, you could still figure me out and he was mad at me. He was really pretty darn mad at me actually. What I learned after a couple of these mad at me conversations is that really as long as you're writing about people accurately, and you're not, you know, making things up about them. You can write about them and you don't even have to change their name if you don't want to, because you're not lying. But why not change their name. The other thing I learned is that if you are writing about people accurately, and it is something that is life destroying to them. I mean, you know disclosing that they did a horrible crime or something like really life destroying. They might have the ability to sue you for that. Other than that. I mean they could sue you, but no one would win. That's what I learned in my panic googling when this person was mad at me. So definitely it's safer to wait until people are gone. But then I think a lot of times you are waiting a long time. The other thing that came up in writing about others was extended family members, and I was pretty worried about that at the time, how that would go, especially with my mother's family. I learned that it really didn't cause problems. I believe that the tone of my memoir is so vulnerable. And I am so devastatingly truthful about myself as well that it's kind of hard to be mad at me. Except for that one person who I won't say who it was. But if you read the book you figured out. I guess the last issue I want to bring up before I pass the torch to Louise here is the psychological exposure that comes with writing memoir. If you're going to write a book at least the way that I wrote a book, my book is really, as I mentioned, highly vulnerable. There's really not much about myself that I leave unturned. And it, I'm very out there now for anyone who has read this book. And that is another reason why I strongly encourage people to have healed as best they can, before they put themselves out there, because lots of people know lots of things about me now when I have no control over what they know. And most people have been awesome and great and kind. And a couple people haven't. And that's hard. So, I think, again, the tone that I set in terms of being sincerely and honestly and kindly vulnerable helps a lot. But it takes a lot of courage to put yourself out there. And I encourage you to be thoughtful about that. Okay, so I'm going to stop here I'm going to rest and let Louise take over for now. Thank you so much, Lisa. It's just amazing, your presentation. So many things that are common to my journey in writing the memoir. And I just want to say one thing I had had a lot of therapy and a lot of something called co counseling before I wrote, and people would always say, Oh, what you wrote was healed you right. It did, but on the other hand, it brought up a lot. So I was dealing with panic attacks, as I was writing, and I got tremendous help. I mean through actually a hypnotist and therapist and support so I would echo, you know what you said that it's really important to get support as you're writing. I'm going to share my screen now and think that hopefully. Okay, is that can everybody see or yes, yes. Okay, yes. Okay, good. And this is my book, which actually this press went defunct, which was unbelievably disappointing after writing the, you know, spending so many years writing the book but it was published by another press. You know, I was, I'm so happy that it's still out in the world. And what I wanted to say about that is persistence, whatever that's, you know, if you don't, if you go away with one word from me at least, it's just to keep persisting keep getting the writing better and better and better, and however you get it out, believe in your story, and find the time to do it. Because a lot of people will say, I don't even have the time, but I used to write on napkins at coffee shops or when I was giving final exams. So just keep persisting. Okay, this next slide is my dad and me and my sister and my sister might be here I'm hoping, and I printed this out picture because there's total joy in my face. And this was a year before the accident that severely burned both my parents when I was four. I wasn't physically burned, but I saw my mother horribly facially burned and my dad as well. And they also disappeared from my life quite suddenly for nine months. Writing is a way of transforming trauma. And because I love language so much. And it's really like painting with words. So yeah, writing about trauma is difficult. But if you love to write and you love to get better as a writer. It's you're in a zone, as you write, and a place of inspiration and also a place of solace, even with all the difficulty. So writing can be both difficult and liberating. A little bit about the story. My sister and I were upstairs and my parents came home and lit the pilot light on a gas heater in the cellar, and it turned out gas had been escaping for hours with no smell. And there was a flash fire. My parents were taken away. We're very fortunate because they were in the medical field to have people who took really good care of them. My mother almost did not live. And we were sent to live on a farm in upstate New York with our aunt, uncle and cousins, and probably even harder than seeing the burns, even though that was really difficult, was a separation for nine months from my parents. I spent over 10 years and it might even be a little bit more. But what I want to say to all of you is I have learned so much. So when I teach memoir classes I say I can take about seven of those years away by helping you in how to write a book. I was busy with, with teaching full time and with my kids. And I had been a poet for many years. So I could write with images, paint with words, but I had no idea how to create suspense at the end of chapter so somebody would actually want to read on how to have character development. And I guess the people as least was talking about in your book are usually your family, those are characters, and you have to kind of separate yourself and say, Okay, who is this person. And also are because and least talked about this too in terms of a wider world. What are you trying to say, and what have you learned on the journey. I want to mention a writing schedule, because you can always find a little time. If it's something that you're compelled to do, and you're driven to do, you can always find the time. But how do you start. Okay, I started with memories and scenes. I started the book into three parts the accident, the farm, and then reconstruction. And it would take a long time for the final shape to happen so that's one thing I would say be very patient with yourself. I woke up in the middle of the night with an aha moment, where I realized in the reconstruction part of the book, we were all living in our different orbits. We reacted to this accident differently my parents were terribly burned, and my sister and I were really traumatized but we were trying all the time to look and seem normal. And that took a lot of effort. And so, really, I would say, take classes workshops like this, and learn the craft, because it took me a long time I actually didn't take a lot of classes but I got a lot of books, like Judith Barrington's writing the memoir which I use in my classes which really helped. The next slide is in my mother's face, burned and if this is going to be hard for you to look at you can look away. My mother was actually the frontist piece of a plastic surgery book. My mother's position was a friend of my father's. And so this was over, I think three or four years of all the surgeries. And one of the reasons I'll move off the slide but one of the reasons I wanted to show that slide is that my mother's face is threaded through the whole book. And so little when she was burned that it was almost like I was part of her body. So suddenly her body changed, and also her desire through many years to have her old face back was part of something that we all longed for. I hardly look at the photo when I started writing the book. And now I have another memoir coming out at the end of this year, and I say my mother's face was a face rearranged by fire. And that was it. You know, it was still my mother still her voice. But she had these burns. This picture is on the farm at where we lived. And of course it's Halloween. And I showed it because I, you know, I'm looking down. I have my arm around my sister who I was very dependent on which, you know, as a six year old, she was only six. But my, my whole look has changed, even though the farm was a wonderful solace and it was a respite from all that was going on in New York and the hospitals. And so another thing about writing from trauma is to make sure that you go back and forth. I mean, Lee's talked about the humor in her book and I loved her book and I love the humor, and the fact that, you know, her spirit was really strong throughout. So in this section of the book we were sledding down the hill we were ice skating. We had a family by the way with no screens at all, no TV, no computer so we played games and we played outside. And also I would say sensory detail is so important. You want to engage the reader, not just with what you see, but what you hear what you feel. If you're writing for instance about a beach, go to a beach nearby, pick up a shell, feel the shell in your hand. We have the internet so you can even see what a neighborhood looked like in the 1950s. So research is really, really important. Okay. The other thing is, you can find out things like what book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954. My dad was a big reader so yeah you can say it's a little embellishing it because I didn't really know, but I knew that he would have read the old man in the sea. I also know that Ajax was called Bon Ami because I researched it. You research clothes, what if people dress like what do they look like how is it different. So you're creating a whole world, and a world that's very different. I'm going to move from this one. The book consisted of many stories that I had to merge, and I worked with three editors and I must say that the last editor I worked with who sadly passed away a friend of my sisters helped me enormously. They told me to create a timeline for each story. So for instance, my sister and I had a story on the farm. What were the important moments for each of us. My parents were in the hospital. Were the important operations or things that they went through. And I was very lucky to find a list of all the operations because there was a there was a lawsuit and a deposition. And I had a lot of material. Another thing for research if anybody important to your story is still alive and willing to talk. I would say, call that person up now, because when people pass away, the stories are gone, you can't really get them anymore. The other thing really. Okay. I guess to end with, I want to talk about probably similar in some way to what least was talking about but finding your truth. I really did not even realize that. I had gone through anything, because it was so buried inside me I didn't have the physical scars and so I wondered, why am I feeling the way I'm feeling or why am I more on high alert or why do I get the panic attacks. And I had to really get a lot of help and realize my truth was something I wanted to share with the world. The book started that way, you know, what about me, I went through all this, these things what about me, and over the years it became a bigger book about my parents a much bigger hearted book. This is picture of my family, my husband, my two daughters are dog who passed a while ago we have a new dog. And, you know, the importance of family that you know least talked about that too that we were both able to create families, however you do it or it could be a family of friends it's just love in your life. We have people and connections. And that's me and my sister at a little book party that was given for me by a close friend. And Darcy Allison talks about I want hard stories, I demand them for myself I won't read the whole thing, but it's okay to write hard stories but give yourself a break to, you know, right in the present sometimes and then go to the past. And if it's hard, move away from it, writing the scene of the accident, I wasn't actually there, took me a long time so be patient with yourself. I was very excited, you know, as Lisa's gotten a lot of awards to get the mention a USA book news the opera mentioned. I did readings all over the country. There's a speaker at the World Burn Congress which in some ways was one of the most meaningful talks I gave, which is that people in a family where somebody who is burned also go through a lot of things and, and it's important to understand that. And people have written to me from all over the country about the book and how it moves them and that's why you write to connect with other people. So I think I am going to stop here and we'll open it up for questions. Great. Thank you both for sharing all of this personal information but also this this writers advice is fantastic so I, I can tell just on the basis of the comments that are so far in the chat space that you're you're really touching on something here. So some people have made a few comments, and I'd like to encourage people to go ahead and put your questions in the chat space. So it looks like the first comment is by Rick. Since we have rather small audience right now Rick, would you like to ask your question or make your comment directly or maybe you're not in the audience. No, I don't see Rick. Okay, let's move on to kin, kin, would you like to ask your question directly is kin still here. No, Kin's not here either. Dropping like flies. Strange. Okay. Looks like Winna is here. Winna, would you like to speak and ask your question directly. I'm trying to turn you on. Here we go. Okay somehow she's not muting herself. I'll ask her question for her. So how did you find a publisher for your stories did you, did you query them or did they find you or how did that work out for both of you. I think we should go first. Yeah, first. Okay, well, yeah, I, I that that took me a long, long time. And I did query and I did work with I forgot to mention that in the story. I worked with two agents each for a year, one gave me an in-house editor, and then dropped the book. It was really devastating. And I just kept going and found, I finally found an agent who spent a couple of years, you know, saying, oh, she could sell the book and it's wonderful and then wasn't able to. And then suddenly on Valentine's Day, I think in 2010. He was emailing me. I was at a writers conference and gone into a kinkos it was freezing outside. And anyway, I got the email that she had sold the book to a small press that, you know, so I got a very I got it, I did get an advance quite small. But it, it was just wonderful to have the book out. But it took me a long time and a lot of agents and a lot of letters and all of that. But that's not the only way to publish a book. So, please, you take it away. So that was a good, good handoff there. So my, my memoir came out in 2020. And I, when I was done with it, I landed my very first person I query signed me. That's how quickly I got an agent. I met her at a conference, big New York agent and I'm like, psych, I am done. She could not sell my book proposal. My book proposal went to publisher after publisher after publisher and was eventually rejected and I am not making this up 30 times. And the publisher said repeatedly, love the story, love the writing, we're really not doing memoirs of unknown people. And I am not famous. And at the time I had a relatively small platform that has improved a lot, but just the same. I really do think that most publishers are just not that interested in publishing memoirs unless you are famous or have a huge platform. And for some exceptions, I was not lucky enough to be one of them. So I self published, I figured it out. I, I just, I figured it out. And it actually has turned out very well for me. Because if you can figure it out, and if you are able to put out a quality product, and if you're able to speak and promote and do all the things that one does, you get a lot more of that money back. So, you know, it is a way to do it. I still sort of feel a little bad that I wasn't able to find a traditional publisher, but I will tell you this story. I recently was interacting online with a woman who is a well known author. I don't want to say because I'm not sure how much he's putting it out there. And she just self published her memoir. And I wrote to her and I said, why did you choose to self publish. She said, no publisher would take my book. She said I've sold 8, 1.8 million books. And no one would publish her memoir. So it's really getting tough. If you're an unknown person. But, but there was a way to do it. And you can figure it out. And it's actually awesome self publishing. It's not only getting harder, but I think that the rewards are getting bigger for self published people. Yeah, so don't discount that but it is, it is a lot of work. Okay, now we have a question from Mary M. And, Mary M. Would you like to ask her question directly. The question has to do with unexpected physical illness. If you're not yet healed from it. You can have learned a lot along the way, but there is no. You can say all the things that you have learned along the way, but my difficulty is that there's no therefore to my story. And I wonder if you have any input on that. I'll jump in on that Miriam. I was talking about healing. So, you know, and I made that point earlier. I really was talking about psychological healing. I was not talking about physical healing, although that was a part of my journey to so I think that it is good to come to some place of psychological healing before you write your memoir but, you know, I also, I will never be 100% physically healed I am scarred on 65% of my body and, and it is a lifelong health condition for me so I can relate to what you're saying. I don't know how to tell you what meaning there might be in your journey, but I imagine it's there. And I just encourage you to look for it. It doesn't have to be a happily ever after thing, but meaning. Those are my thoughts anyway I hope that's helpful. Yes, thank you. Okay, Nancy can does not have a microphone so I'm going to ask her question for her. When looking for an editor for your memoir. Do you have any suggestions about the types of experience that that might be helpful for them to have. And did any of your editors have similar experiences to what you are writing about. And if they did did that help or not with getting your book edited and packaged. I can start with that. I actually for burned. I can't remember the name, three or four editors. It didn't. What I was really after in in bird was writing the best book that I can write in terms of the writing, engaging a reader, learning all those things that I mentioned you know there is plot in memoir. There are characters so I didn't care so much whether the person had had a similar experience as me. I just really cared whether they could help me get the book in better and better shape. But all of them. And by the way, I would, I really put this out that you don't have to be an English instructor or even an editor to help somebody with a book. So you can show it to friends you can swap with other people because editors can be expensive. But I would say, you want to look for somebody who's sensitive who's insightful, and who really really is helping push you. To the best writing that you can do. So I'll just jump in and add a couple additional thoughts to everything I mean I agree with everything Louise just said, and add a couple of extra thoughts for myself. It was very important for me to hire people, because I wanted them to really put a lot of time and effort into the book. I had friends read it to, and they were mostly like it's great. You know, and that was wonderful and helped me feel good but didn't really help the book improve so I set out to hire editors, I hired three of them, and I concentrated on people who were like, you know, experienced writers. And also people that I felt could both support me and challenge me. People who knew how to start with the compliment, and then say, Okay, now let's look at this. I didn't want just it's all great and I emotionally couldn't have tolerated it if it was like this sucks and this sucks and this sucks I couldn't because it's, you know, a memoir so personal right I that would have been too hard for me. I had to have that balance which I think is kind of similar to what Louise is saying as well. Yeah, I agree with that and that's so important in terms of critiquing to find the good things in it but really you want to get better, and that's so important. You can get better from almost any level where you are, you know, even if you're you think oh the writing is really good. You can often go deeper and add more important detail. So I think having that drive to get better and better is really is really good. And then to know when it's done. All right, Thomas has a question that kind of piggy piggybacks on that how to go deeper. Comment that you made his daughter had has a tragic story and his question is how to balance the multiple perspectives. In the story that one tells of the, you know, of all the characters that are in in the story that are part of it. How do you balance their perspectives with with the way your narrative takes shape. I can, I can start with that when my book. You know, left just being well what about me. You know our story wasn't told I'm talking about me here and my sister and moved into the story of my parents. I had to actually imagine. For instance that I was my mother, when she was getting hand therapy her hands were very badly burned. She had to walk through Peter Cooper village housing development that we lived in in New York City. I didn't want people to look at her face so she would look down at the ground, and I actually went and I did that walk, and I tried to imagine it and look at the cracks in the concrete and hope that nobody else would stare. So and then with my dad who went into a huge depression and was almost suicidal. I wanted to imagine what he was feeling and what he was reading. So I was able to put in multiple points of views, but there were only four of us. I would say that could I mean some people could do it with a lot of people but, but I think the story of the, you know the main protagonist has to kind of go through the whole really be clearly threaded through, because you don't want to lose that. I often say when I teach memoir, you know, put yourself in it more, you know, don't just write about other people. So you have to balance that. I don't know if that helps it's a it's a very important question and it's not easy. But yeah, it's, it's trying to get to the truth of each person. I'm just going to rest that with Louise because she teaches writing and knows so much more about this, the craft of it than I do. Yeah. Thanks, please. Yeah, and just general, you know, general advice is to read lots of memoirs and see how other people do it, because, you know, really that's going to be a really great teacher is to find, find someone else's memoir and to admire and study how they threaded the stories through one that I really wanted to recommend is the story of Henrietta locks, and I'll put that in the chat space, because the author of that book has written a lot about her process for drafting a memoir and how specifically I remember how like literally she threaded in the multiple perspectives of the other characters in the story to form a braid as she calls it. So I'll put that in the chat space for you, Thomas. And now we have another comment and question from Teresa. She has PTSD from past abuse and is trying to write a memoir about overcoming that abuse, and she's looking for advice on writing, specifically if you have any step by step advice. She has to stop for periods of time. And in order to get through the writing because I presume it's so painful and so she's looking for any steps on how to I guess process the abuse that she's feeling and keep writing. So I can step in on the writing part. I use this book, you might maybe put it in the chat writing the memoir by Judith Barrington, and I find it very nuts and bolts, and very helpful about the different elements, I mean, learning about sensory detail and summary, and also point of view time shifts, you know she goes through all of these elements. And I would say to Teresa that, you know you could put in the writing, the difficulty about writing it. In other words, that's part of what's going on. So I would say, you know if you have to stop you could even put at the end of a chapter, whatever. I'm stopping now. I'm starting to have these images in my head or whatever. So, so the reader sees the process that you're going through. I love that I love that idea of actually putting in the writing, what you're going through I think that's perfect. I also want to come back to the idea about the difference between journaling and writing, and how the journaling might might have even eventually become what you're writing. But I wouldn't put pressure on yourself when you're going through all that that it's got to, you know, come out and be some perfect book because I just don't think that's possible. I know for myself and I was not going through PTSD when I was writing this book, although I've had it. In the beginning, I was just writing it out, just putting it out there. And then I would go back and shape it and craft it and shape it and craft it and edit and read it and read it. But in the beginning, I wasn't putting pressure on myself that it had to be a certain thing. And I think if you're going through anxiety, it's important to not put any more pressure on yourself. It's also to know whatever whatever it is that you know grounds you and have those things nearby you, whether it's the ability to take a walk if you're getting too upset or a friend that you can call or, you know, I know when I get upset or when I pet my dog and I feel better and just kind of making sure you're taking the time to ground yourself and take care of yourself. It's not a race you don't have to race yourself through this process you might be writing it for years, I don't know. That's okay. Those are my thoughts. Those are great. All right, we have one time for one more question penny asks, how did your books impact your family your husband and children. Yeah, I can, I can start with that. And, you know, it's, it's, it's very complicated in a way because my openness about writing the book, and the fact that I had panic attacks because my children were four and six. I started writing it, and my sister and I were four and six at the time of the accident and I had what people call an anniversary reaction, where I just felt panicky. So I think, you know, there's something called vicarious trauma, where trauma is passed down and I think there was a certain amount of anxiety passed down. I'm sure I would have been so open about talking about it when they were young. And yet, there was something very powerful about that. And when the book came out everybody was just so excited and my husband drove me to all these readings and Cape Cod all over the place so you know it was something we shared. And, and I think in the end they were proud, very proud, but yeah, it was difficult for my children, writing about that material. And I'll just jump in and say that my, my, my daughters, I think learned a lot about me having read this book. My older daughter wound up doing the audio book for the book because she's an actress and so it in many ways brought us closer, because they understood a little bit more, you know, what my life was like they're young ladies so it you know they were ready for that. And I think also my husband I think it in some ways brought us closer because it's one thing to hear the stories it's another thing to see it all laid out be like, Oh, that's what you went through, huh. And they're proud, you know, they're proud because whoever thought I'd be doing all this at my age so it's been a wonderful family thing. Yeah. All right, great well I want to thank you for all of these insights. It sounds as if you are really tickling people's thought process as far as how to make their own writing deeper. Thank you both for all that you've shared today. And I want to thank our audience for their insightful questions, because I think the Q amp a period of the event is often the, the most interesting. And I just want to tell you that the mechanics Institute about a third of our members are writers so we have a lot of programming, much of which is free to help people become better writers and, and part of that's because we're a library I mean the last thing everyone wants to do is to read bad writing, but also that's a joke. But really, as an institution we honor the process. And just because it's, it's a wonderful thing to do, even if you're writing is bad, the act of writing helps, helps you and helps your readers to know. So we have a drop in writers group that's over zoom, it's every Thursday from 11 to one it's called right if you dare, and I will include a link to that when I send out the video. And once a month we have an event called the writers lunch, which is also over zoom. And that is really a learning experience where writers from our community pop in and share, share their knowledge with our community at large so both of those are free I hope to see you in those zoom spaces. And I just hope that all of you have a nice evening. Thank you, Karen. Thank you so much. Thank you, Lisa and Louise. Thank you. Wonderful. Have a nice evening. Bye bye.