Blogs

How to Preserve Your Family's Legacy in Writing Before It Is Gone

Every family is a library of stories, and every year a few of those books quietly close for good. The recipes no one wrote down. The war a grandfather never spoke about. The real reason the family left the old town. Learning how to write your family history is how you keep those stories...

The Loneliness Men Do Not Talk About: Breaking the Silence and Beginning to Heal

A great many men are quietly lonely, and almost none of them will say so. We were raised to be strong, to handle it, to never be a burden. So we go silent, and the silence becomes its own kind of prison. That emotional isolation is one of the heaviest and least discussed burdens...

Writing to Heal: How Putting Your Pain Into Words Can Change Your Life

Long before I ever thought of publishing a book, writing saved me. In the hardest season of my life, I began putting words to things I had never said out loud, and something in me slowly loosened. That is the quiet secret of writing to heal: you do not need talent or an audience, only...

Books Like Educated and The Glass Castle: 6 Memoirs About Overcoming...

Some books stay with you for years. For many readers, Educated by Tara Westover and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls are exactly those books, unflinching stories of a difficult childhood and the long climb toward a different life. If you have finished them and are hungry.....

How Forgiveness Can Set You Free: Letting Go of the Pain You Did Not Cause

For a long time I misunderstood forgiveness. I thought it meant declaring that what happened was acceptable, so I refused to give it. What I did not realize is how forgiveness can set you free, not the person who hurt you, but you. It became one of the hardest and most important....

The Power of Second Chances: Why It Is Never Too Late to Rebuild Your Life

There is a lie that many of us quietly believe: that once life has knocked us down hard enough, the best of it is behind us. I believed it too, once. Then I lived long enough to learn the power of second chances, and to discover that some of the most meaningful chapters arrive after the ones....

Roberts Essex: The Savannah Story Behind Chance. Beginnings

In 1968, the songwriter Roger Miller recorded a quiet, tender tune about the birth and boyhood of a child he simply called Vance. Decades later, that little song lodged itself in the heart of a Georgia man and would not let go. He had lived a life that, in his own words, sometimes...

How to Write a Trauma Memoir That Heals You While It Helps Others

Almost everyone who has lived through something painful eventually feels the same quiet pull: to write it down. If that pull has found you, you may be ready to write a trauma memoir, the kind of book that takes the worst chapter of your life and turns it into something that can hold and help another person.....

What Is Intergenerational Trauma, and How Do You Break It?

Have you ever caught yourself reacting exactly the way a parent or grandparent did, and wished you could stop? That quiet recognition is often the first clue that you are carrying intergenerational trauma, the inherited weight of pain that travels down a family line long after the original event has passed....

How to Structure a Memoir That Leaves Readers Transformed

Two people can live almost the same life and write wildly different books. The difference is rarely the events. It is the architecture. Learning how to structure a memoir is what separates....

5 Tips for Writing Your Faith Journey as a Memoir

A faith journey is one of the most powerful stories a person can tell, and one of the easiest to tell badly. Write it as a sermon and readers quietly tune out. Write it as an....

How to Turn Your Life Story Into a Book

How to Turn Your Life Story Into a Book Almost everyone says it at some point: someone should write a book about my life. If you have started to suspect that someone is you, this is where to begin. Learning how to turn your life story into a book is less about being a natural...

How Childhood Trauma Silently Shapes Your Adult Relationships

You can be a grown, capable adult and still find yourself reacting to a partner the way a frightened child once reacted to a parent. That is not weakness. It is the quiet, lifelong signature of childhood trauma, which shapes our adult relationships long before...