New Class - Hypnosis and Writing

Blocked? Need motivation to write? Want to get in and out of flow easily and effortlessly? This is what we have been up to. Felice Austin, president of Memoirs Ink and hypnotherapist has put together this unique and totally awesome hypno-writing class. Right now it is only for Los Angeles residents, but we hope to make it available online in the future. Check out this video and if you live in L.A. enroll today! To learn more about the unconscious mind and it's power to transform your life, visit www.treeoflifehypnosis.net.

Get Feedback on Your Contest Entry Before You Enter

Want to win the Memoirs Ink Writing Contest?

For the first time ever, get feedback from contest judges on your entry BEFORE you submit it.

Two of our previous writing contest judges thought this might be a good idea. Based on the overwhelming response to our post-contest feedback (we had to turn people away because of limited space) we thought they might be on to something. After all, part of our mission is to help writers grow and prosper and win. So if you think this might be helpful to you, here is all of the information.

Two of our previous judges (Jaela Austen and Christina Tanios) have agreed to give feedback on intended entries for the upcoming Half-Yearly Contest (guidelines here: www.memoirsink.com/contest).

Feedback will include a detailed critique of your story including:
1. Strengths - what makes the judges smile, laugh, cry, etc.
2. Weaknesses - what makes judges roll their eyes
3. Suggestions for tightening
4. Other suggestions for improvement and keeping it out of the "NO" pile.

* Feedback is for personal essays, memoirs, and creative nonfiction. less than 1500 words (per half-yearly contest guidelines).

* Essays can be emailed, and responses will also be emailed. (No postage and handling this time. Yay!)

* Price $50. Pay Online Now. Or mail a check to: Memoirs Ink, 10866 Washington Blvd., Suite #518, Culver City, CA 90232. (If you are mailing a check, Please indicate in your email.) Did I mention that if you pay for feedback, you receive $10 off the contest entry fee when you submit your revised story?

* Email your story or questions about this offer to: jill@memoirsink.com

Send your story now and receive feedback by January 1, 2011. You then have 6 weeks to revise and submit your story by the contest deadline of February 15, 2011. Start the New Year right--writing and submitting.

This the first time we have done pre-contest feedback and we may or may not do it again depending on the response, so take advantage now. Each judge has agreed to review only 20 stories, so space is limited. If you'd like to participate, please pay and submit your story as soon as possible.

Winners of 2010 Annual Contest Announced

The winners for the 2010 Annual contest are:


Grief by Tara Cowie (New York, NY)

Frankenvag by Erin Hart (Vancouver, Canada)

Surviving Black Holes by Kaitlin Legg (Fairport, NY)



To read the winners please visit www.memoirsink.com/archives

Tell Me Your Biggest Challenges

What you may not know is that in the past year I have become a hypnotherapist. My interest in hypnotherapy started with childbirth, but now I see how it can benefit literally every field. And so I have decided to put together a hypno-writing class. What that means is that in addition to the regular writing instruction and all that jazz, it would also include hypnosis. I have found hypnotherapy to be one of the most effective modalities for making behavioral changes. For example, increasing motivation, habit control, blocking negativity, and yes, getting into "flow" quickly. Flow is basically as hypnotic state. Hypnotherapy can also be used to deal with emotional issues that come up, especially when writing a memoir and facing the past. Hypnotherapy can heal your inner child, vent out negative beliefs, reduce anxiety, eliminate fears and phobias and much more.

So that's where those muses frolic.

So, what I want to know from you is what are your biggest challenges as writers or would be memoirists? I would like to know what issues are most common so that when I make the hypnosis tracks to go along with the class, I know what will be most useful. Feel free to just freewrite and vent them all in the comments. Or send me a private email. I look forward to hearing from you.

Time Travel--You Wouldn't Believe It Anyway

Raise your hand if you think about time travel?

I used to think about time travel a lot. Mostly for fun. But then I read Einstein. And I learned that time is actually space. And space is not linear. Space can warp and bend and fold back on itself.

So if time is not linear, what really holds us back from time travel?

From my current point of view as a hypnotherapist, I believe it is our minds.

For example, if you had come to me 5 years ago and said, "Hey, check out my time machine. Get in. I'll show your life a year from now." And you had shown me--my mind never would have accepted what it saw.

After years of interviewing people about their life stories, I know that this applies to most everyone. Things almost never turn out how we think they will. How many times have you said to yourself, "If you had told me a year ago I'd be here or doing this [wherever that is] now, I would never have believed you."

So maybe we can and do time travel all the time, but our minds protect us from what we see. And maybe at times there is leakage, in dreams. That's why some people are more psychic than others--more leakage--or more openness to the unknown.

What has happened in your life that you never would have thought possible 10 years ago?

The Family Tree of Knowledge

When I was a few months into my pregnancy and feeling alone, I came across this quote by Harriet Lerner:

“We are never the first in our family to wrestle with a problem, although it may feel that way…. Learning how other family members have handled their problems similar to our own down through the generations, is one of the most effective routes to lowering reactivity and heightening self-clarity."

I thought, “Yeah right? Who does this happen to? No one else in my family has been abandoned three months into a planned pregnancy.” I kept reading.

“If we do not know about our own family history, we are more likely to repeat past patterns or mindlessly rebel against them, without much clarity about who we really are, how we are similar to and different from other family members, and how we might best proceed in our own life.”

Since I was already passionate about genealogy and family history, I decided to test out this idea and have a look at my family tree to see if there were any single mothers that I had overlooked, and what, if anything, I could learn from them. To my great surprise, there were more than a few, and the details of their stories left me dumbfounded. For the purpose of brevity, I will share only two here.

The first was Ellen (my great-grandmother). She lived for a time in the Mexican colonies (that’s why I feel Mexican inside). She had four daughters with her husband, but after the fourth, he accused her of cheating on him. He said that Violet was not his child. With this announcement, he left her and moved back to the United States.

Life in Mexico at this time (early 1900’s) was tense. Pancho Villa, the revolutionary general in Chihuahua was suspicious of the white Mormon settlers. According to the colony’s history, he threatened to kill the white people if they did not leave. So Ellen and her four daughters, and the rest of their colony, fled Mexico with a few days’ notice--on foot. Ellen returned to the United States to her parent’s home in Cedar City, Utah, and lived with her family. She worked hard to support four children. Sometime later, she met her childhood sweetheart, married him, and had four sons—one of which is my grandfather.

If pioneer stories bore you, this next story is much different. It is from my father’s side. My father was adopted by his step-father (I guess that means my grandmother was a single mom for a while, too), and I had been trying to track his real father’s line for some time. A few years before, I had already discovered the big surprise—I am (blonde little me) of slave ancestry (that’s why I have always felt black inside). But I will save that story for another time and cut to the single mother: Maria Johns, my third-great-grandmother.

I found her in an 1860 census in a small town in Western Pennsylvania. She was listed as a single, black woman living with her young daughter, who was listed as Mulatto. Her occupation was “washer woman” and she was listed as owning property.

If your hair isn’t already blown back, I’ll give you a few more details. Maria was born in Virginia, so she was almost certainly born into slavery. Her child was mulatto, and she was never married, so I can only speculate about what master impregnated her and whether or not she was willing. How she escaped or earned her freedom is also speculation. What I do know is that 1860 was pre-emancipation proclamation, and it was rare even for white women to own property in 1860.

What this tells me about Maria Johns, is that she was awesome.

I found a few clues and rumors that Marie was a Quaker, which I believe, because the Quakers were in large number in that part of Pennsylvania, and were also the only group that would be accepting enough to embrace a black woman into their community and let her own property.

After learning these stories about my ancestors, I felt much less alone. I felt connected to these powerful women and inspired by them. I looked to what both of them (and others I found) did in their time of trial and saw that those who turned to their family and their faith were the most successful. I knew I would be wise to do the same.

By meditating on these and other strong women in my life stream, I felt them draw nearer to me. They would help me and lift me up. When my daughter was born, I felt them all surrounding me--my mother, my grandmother, Ellen, Maria and many more I didn’t even know, but who knew me and knew my daughter.

This was just the beginning of my journey with my ancestors. Since then, with each major struggle in my life, I consult my family history to see what I can learn. The results continue to amaze and humble me.

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Hello Anonymous

What's with all the anonymous comments? It seems that everywhere else in the blog world, people like everyone to know who left a comment. Because isn't it all about getting your name out there and having people link back and find your amazing blogs? Now suddenly we are getting a bunch of comments from anonymous. Makes me wonder. If you really want to be anonymous, you could keep your profiles private. So this begs the question: what kind of people leave anonymous comments. My mental search had come up with 3 kinds of people:

1. Spammers
2. Haters
3. Celebrities

These comments weren't advertising penis enlargement, and they had nothing nasty to say about my blog post, so that means that it must be celebrities. If not Steve than perhaps Tina Fey or someone that knows him. Sigh. I promise it's just a writer crush. Nothing serious. I had nothing to do with the rosebush incident.