Deep Memoir Writing: 3 Stages of Transformation Every Writer Should Know with Jennifer Selig

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:00]
Well, hello, Jennifer. Welcome to the Writing Your Resilience podcast. I am so excited to have you on today and to have an opportunity to talk about your book, Deep Memoir, which I have here for anyone who is watching on YouTube. Oh my gosh, this is such a great book. So, let’s get started.

Jennifer Selig [0:15]
Thank you, Lisa, thanks for having me on the show.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:19]
Well, it’s my pleasure. We were just talking about this; you have included so many great quotes in this book. And holy smokes, I cannot believe the number of memoirs that you quote, and they’re so good, and there were so many that I was like, “Oh yeah, I’ve read this. I’ve read this.” And then I was like, “Oh, wait a second, I have not read this.”

Jennifer Selig [0:41]
That was exactly my intention. I wanted to create a reading list for everybody and give a shout out to all these great memoirs that have really taught me about the craft, about the form. I wanted to talk about their books. At you know, the rock bottom of who I am. I’m kind of a geeky researcher, and I just love nothing more than curling up with a good memoir and my highlighter and saying, “I’m doing research.”

Lisa Cooper Ellison [1:02]
Well, it definitely shows in this book, and you have created an amazing reading list for everyone. So, before we get started and we talk deeply about your book, I always like to give my guests a chance to tell us a little about themselves and their work. So, what would you like us to know about you and Deep Memoir?

Jennifer Selig [1:21]
Thank you. So, I have been a lifelong reader and a writer since I was a child, and I started my first greeting card company. I was writing greeting cards and the school newspaper and a family newsletter, etc., and I spent the first third of my career teaching high school English. I had a degree in literature and taught high school English, so I was deeply immersed in story. And then in the second part of my career, I turned to psychology, and I got a degree in depth psychology, which we can talk about, a PhD. I left high school teaching and moved on to teaching at the graduate level. And then in the last part of my career, this part that I’m in now, I’ve left kind of institutional life, as I say, and I teach primarily memoir. I also teach courses in longing, on vocation, on spiritual writing, etc. And it was funny, I was meeting with my financial advisor last week, and she said, you know, “What age do you plan to retire?” And I just laughed. It’s like, it’s inconceivable, like it would be a punishment for me to retire. Because I just love this work that I do, teaching, and so this memoir writing really brings together this sweet spot for me between storytelling and psychology.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [2:38]
I absolutely love that, and I agree. I think my husband would love for me to retire someday, and he also has fully accepted that I probably never will. Because I think when you find your passion and you find what is truly in alignment with what your soul’s purpose is, there’s no need to retire. You’re happy. You’re doing your life’s work. I also want to say that I love that you had a greeting card business when you were younger. When you were a kid. I had a comics business when I was about 10 years old, and it was based on, I can’t remember the exact name, I think it was like The Puppy Paws Diary. And I would hand-draw these little comics for people. Unfortunately, there was just one issue. My mom would not give me stamps. So, I had promised all these kids that for a quarter I would create these comics and then I would mail them to their house. That was, you know, the big special thing. So, I took it upon myself to make my own stamps. I actually drew stamps that look like the Special Olympics stamps that they had at the time. I drew them, pasted them on, and I mailed those letters. They all got there, but then one friend, like their parent got charged, and that was the end of my business.

Jennifer Selig [3:52]
Oh, I didn’t have any artistic skills, so I used Shrinky Dinks. Do you remember those?

Lisa Cooper Ellison [3:57]
I loved Shrinky Dinks. They were so much fun.

Jennifer Selig [4:00]
My company was called JenMark instead of Hallmark. So, I love that I made some money.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [4:07]
I don’t know how much I made. I think it was at about $2.50.

Jennifer Selig [4:14]
That’s about how much I made, but it felt like a lot.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [4:16]
Yeah, it felt like a million dollars. I mean, a quarter back then, holy smokes. Yeah, that was a lot back then, especially if you’re dealing in candy.

Jennifer Selig [4:20]
Oh yeah, that’s right.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [4:21]
Well, I want to begin by talking about this career shift you had. So, you worked as an English teacher. You have a background in literature. That’s one of the reasons why you do so well with this. But then you have this other unique way that you look at things, and that’s depth psychology. So, I am fascinated by this. Can you tell us what depth psychology is and how this gives you a different lens for thinking about this?

Jennifer Selig [4:51]
Yeah, so depth psychology should really be called depth psychologies because there are several branches of depth psychology, including, you know, one of the earliest kind of founders of the field, who would be Sigmund Freud. Some of you might be familiar with the work of Carl Jung, etc. So, it’s a psychology where basically the animating force behind it is that there is an unconscious, that we all have an unconscious. We’re all partially unconscious human beings, and much of our maladies or our malaise, or we could just say our issues, come from what we’re unconscious of. And the goal in depth psychology is to make the unconscious conscious to find some healing or some release from what we’re suffering from. Freud talked about depth psychology as a “talking cure.” So, you know, you talk yourself through your issues, but then what I got really interested in is depth psychology as a “writing cure,” really. Yes, that brought me to memoir. And you know, it’s, I’m going to steal a line from your website, because you talked about how you work at the intersection of storytelling and healing, what I’m doing here as well is storytelling and healing and making the unconscious patterns of our life more conscious through actually writing about them.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [6:05]
Yeah. And I think writing is one of the most powerful tools that we can use. And I was at the Psychotherapy Networkers Conference recently, which is held in Washington, DC, and it’s where all the bigwigs of psychology go. Frank Anderson was there. David Kessler was there. Dan Siegelman was there. I got to sit in on all these talks with these greats in the field. And Frank Anderson, he has written a memoir, and one thing that he said during the session that I went to, and he does a lot of work on internal family systems, was he said he has done a lot of therapy in his life, which has led to a lot of healing. He didn’t realize how much healing he could do through writing. But that he had healed more over the course of writing his memoir than he did over these decades of therapy that he had done on himself, and he had done a lot of really good, hard work.

Jennifer Selig [7:03]
I have some quotes in my book where people say the same thing. Published memoirists say the same thing. “It was better than therapy,” or “I got there faster than therapy,” or exactly what he said. You know, “I had done decades of therapy, but this was the thing that really did the healing.” And no offense to therapists, you know, in saying that, but it does add another element. And many of my students go back to therapy when they’re writing their memoirs, because they need that extra support.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [7:28]
Absolutely. And that’s one of the things I actually tell people, and especially if someone’s my client, I’ll say, “Okay, I’m going to be working with you in one way. And yes, I have a background as a therapist. I worked as a trauma therapist for a period. However, we are doing a certain kind of work, and you are going to need some adjunct work depending on the type of story that you’re working on.” And so sometimes I will collaborate with therapists, or I will tell my clients, like, “Okay, here’s what you talk about with your therapist. And this is that kind of work,” because I think they can serve as an adjunct. They are not the same thing, but we need a lot of support when we’re doing this. And I can certainly say, as someone who writes memoir and who has done a lot of healing, I was shocked and humbled when I came to the page the first time, because I’m like, “I have done this work. I have done lots and lots of this work. This is going to be very easy, because I already know, shoot, I have a degree in this.” And then I started doing it. And there’s something about this reliving that happens when we are externalizing our stories and we’re getting things on the page that allows us to see things in a different way that you can’t see or manipulate when you are engaging in the talking cure.

Jennifer Selig [8:45]
And I talk to my students about the difference between reporting what happened to you, yes, and discovering what happened to you. That’s what a lot of people come in with, like, “The story this happened to me. I’m just here to write it down,” and then they get shocked and sometimes disheartened to realize that there’s so much more to discover about the story and discover about themselves. And I think that’s why memoir writing takes, particularly when you’re writing about trauma, takes far longer than anyone ever imagines to actually write the memoir, because you are still discovering things about yourself. You know the unconscious is coming to the surface as we’re writing. And so, when people say to me, “I’ve already done all that work,” or “You’re just here to write about it,” you know, I have to have that little internal chuckle of, “Good luck with that.” But when things come up and when people get triggered by their own story, I try to frame that as good news, yes, because what it does is it means you’re freshly in it, and being fresh in it can show up on the page. Yes, it shows up as this aliveness on the page, like emotions are coming up that you can put on the page, all of that, you know, is really powerful for your writing to be able to do that. So, it doesn’t mean you don’t need to go back to therapy or come up with some really good self-care, but it is good news when we find ourselves moved by our own writing, when we find ourselves crying over something that happened in the past.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [10:04]
Yeah, when it comes up, it can come out, and that is how we let things go. And when I was in graduate school, I had this wizard of a professor. He did all this experimental stuff with us, and he was fascinating. I learned so much about how to teach experientially, as well as just from him, about the concepts. And when we were talking about Freud’s work and the concept of the unconscious, right? There’s the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. And the preconscious is kind of this borderland where we have some understanding of some things, some we don’t. And we did this hypnosis guided imagery exercise called the House on the Hill exercise, and so he led us through this, and we actually got into the unconscious. And some people didn’t. They had a memory, and then the memory stopped, or they fell asleep. And those people that fell asleep kind of fell asleep at the borderland, and then other people went to a different place. And I think writing allows us to get to that different place, and for a lot of people, it can be disorienting, right? So, when you’re in the unconscious, you’re in a landscape where there is no map, and you’re trying to figure out what that is. And you talked about one of the metaphors that you use, which is thinking about it like a puzzle, right? So, you dump it out, and then you turn the pieces over. That was something that you had said. You think your book offers us an opportunity for thinking mindfully about how we are turning over those pieces and then what we’re doing with them.

Jennifer Selig [11:34]
Yes, yes. Because when you turn the puzzle pieces over, some of them, or when you dump the box, some of them come up face up, and others are face down, and we have to turn them over to discover what’s on them. And so, I find that to be a really useful metaphor there, right? You’re not going to see all the pieces and know where they all go right away. There’s an uncovering process.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [11:53]
And the subtitle for your book is An Archetypal Approach to Deepening Your Story and Broaden Its Appeal. So, we’re going to go into some of these archetypal approaches, but before we get there, because not everybody knows what that word means, could you share with us what an archetype is?

Jennifer Selig [12:10]
Yes, very simply put, it’s just a universal pattern in the psyche, the software human beings come loaded with when we come into life. It’s patterns that all humans across all times and cultures understand. We can think about archetypal characters, the villain, like the hero, like the orphan. We can think about archetypal values like love and power and courage. We can think about archetypal themes like the hero’s journey, the descent into the underworld, the battle between good and evil, etc. So, these are universal patterns, but they’re flavored differently.

So, if you think about the battle between good and evil, we can see that playing out right now, let’s say on the collective, so right now, in politics, there seems to be this kind of battle between good and evil. Now, one side thinks they’re the good side, and the other side is the evil, and the other side thinks, you know, vice versa, right? But we all understand what we’re doing. We just dress good and evil differently, or we address them differently, or we imagine them differently.

So, there’s both a universal element in archetypes, but then there’s the personal element, or the particular element. And so, what I’m arguing for in this book is that to make our memoirs most satisfying to a reader, to connect the most with the reader, we need to understand the universal patterns that are inside of our story, as well as the particular patterns. A lot of people already know this, but a lot of people come in just to tell their very personal story, and they don’t see what’s in it for the reader to hear this story, right? What are they going to get about it? How are they going to resonate with it? And so, to resonate with something, we want to look for the more universal.

And so, I’m thinking about just last night, I taught Joan Didion’s memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, the memoir about the sudden death of her husband and the year she spent grieving him. And it is so full of particulars. I mean, Joan Didion had an amazing life, and no one has a life like hers. No one can open that up and think, “Oh yes, I was at that hospital at that time, or I met those people.” You know, it’s a very specific life, and yet there’s something very universal about the grief that she’s going through, the process of grief that she’s going through, and all the places where I highlight in that book, it’s all the places that are universal that I resonate with personally in my own journeys through grief. And that book is perennially popular, even though it’s 20 years old, because if we know someone who’s going through grief, a lot of times, we’ll buy that book for them and give it to them, not we want them to learn anything about Joan Didion’s life, right? But we want to say this is how someone struggled in this year. We want to normalize it in some way or using the language of archetypes. We want to universalize it. That’s the thread I want to help my students pull. Their work is to really find the universal.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [15:02]
And I think the universal is so important. And I often talk about the universal as the “me too,” right? When you have described this well, when a reader engages with your work, they go, “Oh yeah, me too. This is the experience that I’m having.” And I think one of the particulars in Joan Didion’s book, The Year of Magical Thinking, that I love—I happen to love that book as a person who has experienced deep grief—is that most people are not going to the Merck manual, which is a manual about medical devices, to make meaning from their experience, but the idea that I am feeling so guilty about what happened that I’m going to look in all of these unusual places for an answer to this problem or a way to relieve this guilt is something we can all think about or connect with, and I think that’s really important. And I’m curious to know your experience.

I’m going to share just what I observe in a lot of writers, is that early in the process, someone will have had a big experience, right? Sometimes they have experienced something that is really painful. They want their pain to mean something, or perhaps they have healed in some amazing way, right? They have had incredible healing. And when you ask them, “Okay, so why are you writing this book?” It’s always, “Well, I want to help people,” which is general, right? So that’s a general thing. And I want to help them by telling them exactly what I did, which may be part of the process. That’s a reportage of what happened. But then, you know, we do have to do that. That is part of the process, but then we have to ask ourselves, okay, well, what’s going on with your reader? How does your reader handle these things? What are their struggles? And how can you toggle between your experience and crafting your experience so specifically that it serves as a mirror for something you know that someone else is going through?

Jennifer Selig [17:04]
That was wonderful, and a lot of times you don’t know what that is, right? You don’t know exactly when you’re starting to write your story, where’s the medicine in your own story? Where’s the wisdom in your own story? And to name that and to claim that sometimes comes later in the writing process. Sometimes we just need to, almost like purge the memories themselves before we can dive deeper into what does this actually mean, and how is this story going to serve someone else?

Lisa Cooper Ellison [17:28]
And that leads to the big thing we are going to dive into, which is these stages in the writing process, which I found to be so fascinating, the way you put them together, and the stages of—or the archetypes of transformation. Both of those things are aspects of the writing process that writers tend to struggle with, because no matter how many times you say, “Okay, well, how have you transformed? Or how have you changed?” You may or may not know, or you may have to wrestle through that as you’re writing your book, but having some patterns of going like, “Oh, this is the normal trajectory of what people go through, and these are the general kinds of change that happen,” can help you understand the specific change that you’ve gone through. So, could we start by talking about those three stages that you talk about in that transformation process?

Jennifer Selig [18:21]
Yeah, so I have a chapter in the book called The Archetype of Transformation, and I use alchemy as a metaphor in there. And alchemy is just this ancient science where these kind of mad scientists tried to turn base materials like lead into gold. And, you know, that was unsuccessful, obviously, but it’s become a metaphor for transformation, and particularly transformation of the dark material in our lives, the dark experiences, into the light. So, we can think about it that way. And there’s a lot of stages of alchemy and different books and different thinkers, but they really boil down to three that I think are most useful.

And so, the first stage is called the Nigredo, and that’s Latin for “black,” and that is when we enter into, you know, what I call the underworld. Yes, that’s when we experience trauma of some sort, and that trauma can be a slow descent, you know, when you think about like someone who experiences addiction, what starts with, “I have back pain, and I’m taking pills, and they help,” and then months later, it becomes a need, and then it becomes a spiral out of control, so sort of a slow descent into the underworld, or it can be something sudden, a sudden drop, like Joan Didion experienced when she’s sitting down for dinner with her husband and he is dead a few minutes later. That’s the Nigredo stage. And then, you know, we spend however much time we spend in the underworld, like Joan Didion, it was a year, and we know she did not get out of the underworld at the end of the year, but things lightened up for her as she was writing the book. And some people don’t make it out of the underworld. Some people die in the underworld, unfortunately.

If we make it out, the second stage is the belief that we can make it out. Really, it’s called the albedo, which is the term for “White.” In that stage, it’s almost like if you imagine that you’re at the bottom of a well, and your head is hung low, and you’re looking down, and all you can see is the darkness of the floor. But in the albedo, we start to pull our heads up and we can see maybe light on the walls, or we can pull our head all the way up and we can see the sunshine coming in. And that’s when we use the term, you know, “I saw the light.” We begin to see the light. And we imagine that there could be healing, and there could be a way out of this dark well that we’re in. And that might be, you know, we find a therapist, or we enter a 12-step program. Or, you know, we can find in a friend what we’re going through.

And then the third stage is called the rubedo, which is Latin for “red,” which is a quickening of our blood. That’s when we really feel the life force entering back in again. You can imagine, at that point, we’re out of the well, we’re in the sunshine, and we’re transformed by our experience. You know, we feel healed, or we feel more whole. We definitely feel transformed. You know, we may still carry our sadness and our grief and our loss, but life goes on. You know, we’re able to go on. And so, for people who are writing trauma narratives, they’ve all been through those stages, you have to be in the light enough to be willing to take a look at your story in the light and write about it. So, I talk about those stages of the trauma. And it’s helpful for people who are writing to think, well, what was happening for me when I was in the Nigredo, or what brought me out? What happened in the albedo? What was the light when we’re writing about trauma, a lot of times, we re-enter the Nigredo. We become re-traumatized. You know, our trauma is up. It’s in our faces. And I quote, you know, many memoirs to talk about that, and many people—I don’t know if you’ve seen this in your work as a writing coach—but many people stop writing at that time. They’re like, “It’s just too painful. I don’t want to go back there again,” right? And it’s confusing, and they feel lost in their own story, and they don’t know where to go. And then if they stay with it, at some point, you know, there is some light. It’s like, the AHA moment, like, “Okay, I can write about this. Maybe I found a structure that I could write about. Or if I get enough of the memories out, I can see, I can shape this into a story.” And then the rubedo comes—the third stage—where, you know, maybe we’ve reached the end of the story. And again, you know, it becomes very healing to have written this story for us. You know, we have something in our hands that memorializes our time in the underworld. And hopefully, there’s some lightness that comes with that as well.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [22:32]
Yeah, I love that framework. And as I was thinking about it, just to make it really concrete for writers, because I do think people do get stuck in the Nigredo a lot of times. And I think, you know, you can even publish a book and still be in the Nigredo, right, if you haven’t done all the work. I mean, I do think that that happens sometimes. In general, you know, your first few drafts where you’re having a lot of those feelings, I would say that’s usually Nigredo, like if you’re wondering, “How can I label this emotionally?” that’s generally what I observe. And then in terms of albedo, it’s like, oh, suddenly, this isn’t my story. It’s a story, and I can manipulate it, right? And I can really go to those places where I can do that perspective-taking, because I think early on, especially if you’re dealing with a trauma narrative where you have been victimized, it is difficult to take on another character’s perspective and really understand what are all the ways we could look at this situation. It’s like, “No, I’m hurt. I’m a victim.” And we need to be able to embrace those things and see that part of self to see the story in different ways. So, it’s a useful piece. But I think once we get to that place where we have more distance, that’s where we get to. And then when we get towards the end, when we’re publishing the book, it seems like that’s more where the rubedo comes in. I wrote down a note when I was reading your book. It’s like rubedo is more like that integration. I thought about it in terms of, like the Hegelian dialectic, to be all fancy for a moment. You know, thesis, antithesis, and then synthesis, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Try to say that three times fast, but it made me think about that same way of thinking about it, and that each part is important to get to that place of integration, right?

Jennifer Selig [24:21]
I worked with a student once who started writing his story about his really difficult grandmother. And he was very much a victim of his grandmother in all the early drafts. And then he started to see her in a different light. We can go back to that second stage of alchemy. By the time he was done writing about her, he said, “I have a brand-new grandmother.” Yes, right? He had a new grandmother. It wasn’t the one that his cohort and I had been seeing on the page all along. It was someone who was much more complex and nuanced, and he was the partner, not a victim, in that same sense that he was him. Certainly, these things still had happened to him. But he understood it differently. And if you stick with the writing process, that is the promise on the other side that is so beautiful.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [25:06]
Yes, there are so many ways that our lives are different, and the lives of the people that populate our books, at least in our own minds, are different. We see the world in a different way, and that has ripple effects everywhere. And I think that’s one of the beautiful alchemies of the work that we do. And part of that is not just understanding what those stages are, but understanding how change happens in the storytelling process and just in our lives. And I think that’s another piece that you have these equations around transformation. I thought was really brilliant. So, could you share a little about that?

Jennifer Selig [25:43]
Yeah, I take these from the work of Louise DeSalvo in Writing as a Way of Healing, and the work of Pennebaker and Smyth and their book is Opening Up, Opening Up by Writing It Down, right? So, I take this from their books. So, I have these four equations of transformation, and which I’ve discovered all over in the memoirs that I read, particularly the trauma narratives.

So, the first one is: secrets plus confession equals catharsis. So, we take something that’s happened to us, and we haven’t told anyone before, we’ve told very few people, and we write that down. You know, we confess to the page. We confess to our fellow writers, and then eventually to our readers, and that equals some sort of catharsis. And we know that’s a pattern, you know, just in looking at 12-step programs where they, you know, the idea is you’re only as sick as your secrets, and you come in and you’re confessing your story, you’re telling your story of addiction, you’re confessing, and then there’s a feeling of catharsis that happens inside of that. So that’s the first equation, and I give examples from published memoirs in the book about authors who say, “This did happen to me.”

And the second one is that your story plus reflection equals transformation. You know, that comes when we not just tell the story of what happened to us, but we really reflect upon it. You think about it and wonder about it. We’re not just writing about what happened, but maybe why it happened, or how it happened, or what part we played in what happened, why someone did the things that they did to us. So, reflecting on our story, or on the nature of the experience we were going through. So, reflecting on the nature of grief, or reflecting on falling in love or anything, and in that reflection, we come to understand our stories in a different way, in a deeper way. And that reflection is such a gift to the reader who may be going through the same thing themselves.

And then the third equation is an interesting one. It’s story plus organization equals transformation. So, a lot of times, what happens to us, and you know this so well as a trauma-informed coach, a lot of times, what happens to us when we experience trauma is that it’s completely chaotic. Yes, we can’t make sense of it, but when we go to write, we have to make sense of it by putting one word in front of another. We organize our stories, or we organize what happens to us in a way that helps us to shape our experience and to really make sense of it. We turn what’s muddled into some sort of narrative arc. And so that one’s really interesting.

Then the fourth one is that story plus externalization equals transformation. And so, once we take what’s inside of us and we externalize it, it’s not that it’s not still in us, but it becomes words on a page. It becomes a book on our shelves. It becomes a living testament to a person that we love or that we miss. It’s almost like a way of freeing us and freeing up some bandwidth within us, because we don’t have to keep ruminating on our story over and over and over again because it lives over there. Yes, right? That’s transformative. And so many authors have said that it’s really hard for me to have published the book, because every time I read a new memoir, I’m like, “That’s another example of…” right? To see those examples. And if you listen to, as I do, podcasts about memoirs, you know, in the podcast I listen to about you that you do, I hear examples of that all the time—the importance of confessing, the importance of organizing, the importance of reflecting, and the importance of externalizing those things that happen to us, and in that way, that’s why it’s called the writing cure, right? Yeah.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [29:25]
And I think all those stages and those ways of thinking about it are really important. I am curious to know about the concept of catharsis, because I think catharsis has a thorny way of being looked at in memoir, right? I’ve read essays, and in fact, I will add one to the show notes for this episode about how catharsis isn’t enough. And I tend to agree. And the reason I want to talk with you about it just briefly is just because I think there are many people who say, “Well, if I just get it out and get it on the page and have a feeling experience, that is enough.” When we think about Pennebaker’s work, or, you know, some of the other works about writing to heal, and it’s about personal writing, it’s not necessarily about published, public writing—those are two different things sometimes—and that catharsis is the act of experiencing an emotion, an emotional bloodletting, let’s say, but that if we don’t make meaning, if we stop at catharsis, and we do not do this other part of the work, we will not reap the benefits of the process.

Jennifer Selig [29:52]
Exactly. I agree with you completely. Catharsis alone doesn’t offer the kind of lasting transformation that we need in memoir writing. It’s part of the process, but it is not the whole process. Writing to release pent-up emotions, to get that energy out, can feel good in the moment, but unless we reflect on what we’ve written, dig deeper, and connect those emotions to meaning, the release may not lead to any lasting change. If we don’t take the extra step of reflecting, analyzing, and transforming our experience into a coherent narrative that conveys universal truths, the catharsis doesn’t fully help us make sense of our story. It’s like you said—just getting it out there isn’t enough if we want to make something meaningful from it, both for ourselves and for our readers.

And I’m sure, as a writing coach, you see that on the page all the time where you’re like, “Oh, okay, that was a reporting of what happened. It’s not dropping deep into the experience. There’s not a sort of reflection on it.” It’s like, you can kind of use the metaphor of the mirror, that the author is talking to a blank wall and not seeing themselves, or their experience in a mirror. And Pennebaker and Smyth, in their research on Writing to Heal, that was what they discovered, was that, you know, people would write for 10 or 15 minutes about something that happened to them, and they had a control group that just wrote the details, and then they had another group who reflected upon the experience, and the ones who healed were the ones who reflected on it. The other one, there was really no change in them. So, reflection is incredibly important. And a lot of times, when I read memoir pages of my students, I’ll want to stop them and say, “Wait, wait, wait, what do you think when he said that? Or how’d you feel inside of that experience? Or what do you think was going on in this experience?” And that’s where I’m kind of pushing them to make deeper meaning. And so, it’s those moments, you know, when you’re sitting with a friend and talking with them over a meal, and they’re telling a story, and you want to stop them and understand how they understand the story that they’re telling. And that’s really critical to what I would call a deep memoir versus a shallow memoir, in some ways.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [32:00]
In order to do that work, you have to get out of the Nigredo. You have to be able to look at the light and shine the light on all the pieces of the story that you aren’t aware of or that are still unconscious for you. And I think that is some of the challenge of memoir, but it can also be some of the fun of memoir is that you get to see things in a new way, and when you do, you will feel in a new way. Now, does that mean that everything is going to be all better? And you get to tie a bow on that? No, not in the least, however, but you get to have a new version of your life. And just like you said about your student, he has a new grandma. We can have new versions of everyone, and that is amazing.

Jennifer Selig [32:45]
Right? A new version of himself, a new version of his grandmother, for sure. That’s magical. It’s alchemical. It’s the process.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [32:52]
It is. And what I can say for myself is that I feel it when it happens. I have felt that alchemy, and that is one of the things that makes me so passionate about the work that I do. So, oh my gosh, there are so many different ways that we could talk about your book, and I really want people to buy it, because there are so many rabbit holes and just different examples you have about ways that we can use archetypes as a way to think about our books. But we’re going to step away from that for a moment, a little bit, and I don’t know where it’s going to take us as we begin to wrap up, but I am training to be an Akashic Records reader, which is just tapping into other forms of wisdom as I get ready to do these interviews. Obviously, I’m reading your book. I’m learning more about you, and then I’m just thinking and connecting in with this deeper wisdom to say, “Okay, what else should I ask about?” And this isn’t something that I shared with you in advance, so we’re just going to see where it takes us. What kept coming up for me was flowers. And I don’t know why, but it was just like flowers, flowers, flowers. And I’m wondering, when you think about flowers in your own life, where does that take you, and how does that relate to storytelling?

Jennifer Selig [34:03]
I think I’m going to tell you a story. When I was 40 years old, I quit my job, and I planned to travel across the country, going to all sorts of national parks and thinking about what I wanted to do with the next part of my life. And I went to Montana. I was at a park in Montana. And I’m also a photographer, so I was walking around with my camera, and I saw this kind of a grove, or a field, I think more I’d call it a grove of these really beautiful little yellow flowers. And I thought about Georgia O’Keeffe. And Georgia O’Keeffe, she painted so many flowers. And she painted huge flowers, and she painted them close up. And she said the reason why she painted them so big was that nobody pays attention to a flower. It’s just too small. So, she wanted to create—it’s a great quote—she wanted to create these huge images of flowers that were so big that even busy New Yorkers couldn’t help but see the flowers.

So, I got down on my hands and knees, and I took pictures of these flowers close up. And I started to see that each flower had its own personality, the shape of it, its body movement, whether it was spreading its leaves out, arms out, or whether it was—some of them were entangled with each other, and so I started to think about them as hearts. I named them. I was like, “This is a shy heart. This is an open heart, a betrayed heart.” And every day for the time I was there, I went back to look at those same flowers and see how they were growing and changing and really paying attention to them. And in doing so, I was really paying attention to my own heart too. I’m projecting onto the flowers, but I’m also reading the flowers and what they have to share. And each one became different, even though there was a whole grove of them. And so, I’ve written about this a little bit in an essay on my website, if anyone’s interested. But it was magical for me to pay attention to each individual flower as it was presenting itself, and not just say they turned out to be Arnica Montanas and so not just say, “Oh, that’s a field of arnicas,” but they were individual ones. It’s definitely how I approach teaching. Is seeing each of my students as this kind of individual flower or manifestation of heart. But the universal is that they were all Arnica Montanas, yes, but the particular was the way each one manifested itself in the world. So that’s how I would answer that question. That is.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [36:30]
A magnificent answer. I love it, and we’re going to link to that essay. I want everyone to be able to read that as well, because that is just, oh my gosh. My heart is so full hearing it and just, it’s such a wonderful way to think about the work we do and the work each person does. As a writer, you are looking at your own blooming, right?

Jennifer Selig [36:54]
And your own manifestation of something. So I’ll say one more thing about that, which is people, oftentimes, when asking me about memoirs will say, “I don’t know, does the world really need another grief narrative or another trauma story, or, you know, another coming-of-age story, which is like saying, does the world really need another Arnica Montana to bloom? We already have one, so we don’t need another one or second one, or a third one, or a whole field of them.” And so that’s oftentimes my answer. I usually give the metaphor of a love song. We’re not done with love songs. Just because so many of them have been written. We will be writing love songs forever. So, so too. Take courage and take heart in writing your own memoir. We need another love song. We need another flower in the field. Yes.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [37:39]
So writers, keep writing your version of your love song, of your trauma song, whatever the song is. We need your song. And so please, please keep working on that. And I think your book is going to be a great way for people to do that. If people want to get a copy of Deep Memoir, and they want to connect with you, what are the best ways for them to do that?

Jennifer Selig [38:05]
Yeah, the book is available wherever books are sold, and I have a website. It’s my full name, jenniferleighselig.com. You can connect with me there. You can find out about the courses I’m teaching and some of my other writings and you can also sign up for my newsletter. So right now, I don’t have any new courses coming up, but if you sign up for the newsletter, you’ll be the first to hear when I’m teaching something new again.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [38:29]
That will also be in the show notes. So, writers, please connect with Jennifer, buy her book, and, most importantly, review it, because that is how other people find our books, and it is one of the most important gifts that you can give to an author. Well, thank you so much, Jennifer, for being on the show today. It has been an absolute delight for me too.

Jennifer Selig [38:50]
Thank you, Lisa. You too.