Everyone inherits hurts, secrets, and strengths.
We all hold stories of family, faith, failure, and forgiveness.
Everyone has a book in them. It’s called a memoir.
Memoirs, like libraries, are a collection of tales. The more generously libraries lend their treasures, the more they become themselves. Libraries don’t produce stories to sell; they offer quiet places where minds and hearts can grow in stillness.
Is it time to convert the library of your stories into a spiritual memoir? (A memoir, by the way, is not the same thing as an autobiography; you don’t have to start with your childhood and move forward through the years. Your memoir could focus on any part of your story that is calling to you to be told.)
“Composing Your Spiritual Memoir” will run from January 14 – June 10. Judith Favor as the facilitator will:
- Lay out a palette of themes
- Break down the patterns of published memoirs, many by women.
- Give you a tool kit to express yourself through psalms, poetics and various forms of creative non-fiction
- Encourage you to let yourself go on the page.
- Teach you to write outside the lines of celebrity memoirs
- Guide meditations to support you in moving freely from your center
The program will consist of:
- 22 weekly emails, delivered on Fridays (starting January 14), with writing prompts on People, Places, Events and Activities.
- 6 monthly Zoom gatherings with teachings and short guided writing practices from Judith Favor on Beginnings, Rising Action, Climaxes, Revelations, and Rewards.
- 6 generous listening sessions with attentive global peers during the Zoom gatherings.
- Guidance in how you can energize and strengthen your craft of memoir writing.
- Examples of ways to structure your spiritual memoir.
- Collective wisdom from memoir-writing colleagues who post insights in the online Practice Circle.
This program is a rare opportunity to receive sturdy listening support from peers combined with guidance from an author who has published five memoirs in 12 years.
Ancestral secrets prompted Judith Wright Favor to write The Edgefielders and Silent Voices, family memoirs set in the Depression and World War II. She then combined contemplative practices with creative nonfiction to intertwine financial and relational troubles with sacred possibilities in Sabbath Economics and The Companion Journal: 52 Weeks with Love and Money. Her work as soul guide and contemplative-activist led to co-writing a memoir of friendship with Rosie Alfaro. Friending Rosie: Respect on Death Row illuminates how love led the way toward healing for both women, through an enduring friendship that began in 1999 and continues to this day.
Are you ready to write your spiritual memoir? Consider these wonderings:
- What words and images might best express your unique story?
- How can you sincerely convey your deepest faith, values, and practices?
- What sort of remembrances do you want to give to the people who matter most to you?
- Are you ready to see your life through a new lense and reveal to yourself and a caring community the hidden parts of your wholeness?