Writing Your Resilience: Building Resilience, Embracing Trauma and Healing Through Writing Silenced No More: How to Write the Story You've Been Afraid to Tell with Meagan Justus
In this Ask Me Anything session, writer and advocate Meagan Justus brings two questions that so many writers are quietly wrestling with. 1st: when you keep circling the core of your story without being able to reach it, do you shape what you have or keep writing until you get there? And 2nd: when your story involves people or institutions with power, how do you protect yourself while still telling the truth?
Together, we dig into why writers circle their stories, how changing names doesn't protect you legally, what the vetting process actually looks like, and what the unfolding controversy around Amy Griffin's memoir The Tell can teach us about the publishing process.
Resources:
- The "but/therefore" principle
- The Queen’s Path
- The Beat Sheet
- Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn
- Some Ether by Nick Flynn
- The Ticking Is the Bomb by Nick Flynn
- The Liar's Club by Mary Karr
- Cherry by Mary Karr
- Lit by Mary Karr
- https://authorsguild.org/
- How Can I Avoid Lawsuits When Writing Memoir?
- Legal Vetting for Manuscripts to Manage Risk
- The Billionaire, The Psychedelics, and the Bestselling Memoir by Katherine Rosman & Elisabeth Egan
- Lawsuit Accuses Writer of Using Classmate’s Story in Best-Selling Memoir by Katherine Rosman & Elisabeth Egan
- Examples of Hermit Crab Essays
- Get Your Free Human Design Report
- Find and Refine Your Memoir’s Narrative Arc
- Ditch Your Inner Critic Now
Connect with Meagan:
- https://www.creativelyvisible.com/
- https://substack.com/@creativelyvisible
Meagan Justus is a writer and advocate exploring the messy middle of chronic illness, disability, and trauma. Through essays and storytelling, she works to make invisible struggles visible and a little less lonely. Her writing blends honesty, humor, and the occasional chocolate metaphor to explore resilience, self-advocacy, and the stories we discover while living through life’s hardest chapters.
Sign up for Find and Refine Your Memoir’s Narrative Arc: https://bit.ly/4aK5wQI
Connect with your host, Lisa:
Get Your Free Copy of Ditch Your Inner Critic: https://lisacooperellison.com/subscribe/
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Produced by Espresso Podcast Production