Meli: Hello. 

Rachel: Hi Meli. 

Meli: Hello, Rachel. 

Rachel: We’re going to talk about memoir as therapy today, or as we put it in our title and our notes [00:02:00 ] “memoir equals therapy question mark?” 

Meli: How are you feeling about your memoir? You were saying before we started recording that you you were talking about writing the damn thing. 

Rachel: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s kind of the whole point of our project. Well, it’s part of it. I mean, it’s to find our community of other grievers who are writing grief, memoirs but a big part of what needs to be happening in tandem for me is writing the damn thing. And I find I’m still kind of avoiding it. So in this episode, I guess it preamble, I’m going to commit to getting my hands messy again, go back to at least my outline and start thinking about where I need to start writing again, the sections I need to expand. How about you? 

Meli: Yeah, I think actually you saying about returning to the outline is probably a good [00:03:00 ] place for me to go back to I’ve right now I’m working on smaller pieces. I still don’t know if I’m going to have chapters or a collection of connected pieces. So I guess I don’t have to decide that, but it would be good to go back to an outline for sure. 

Rachel: Yeah, that feels like a later decision that you don’t need to make yet. I know we’re both reading Betsy Warland’s book on revision, Breathing the Page and how she talks about the form kind of the writing knows the form that it wants to be in. 

Meli: Yeah. 

Rachel: So to me that feels just right. And then you’re going to see what form it wants to take. 

Meli: You mean I can’t plan it all out ahead of time. That’s disappointing. 

Rachel: Yeah, for sure. Well, for me too, cause I took a whole course on planning it out. Like that’s why I have an outline. I took a course on outlining [00:04:00 ] and it’s useful in its own way, but it hasn’t manifested magically into a memoir. Now, since I have that outline. 

Meli: Do you think there’s value to making an outline, knowing that it might change, but at least you feel like you have something like you’re going somewhere? Like having a way through the woods. 

Rachel: I think it’s helped very helpful scaffolding. Like, yeah. It’s like, I have a general idea of where it can go, but I also think I still have to find where I’m going to begin and where I’m going to end, even though I’ve declared that in this outline. But again, I want to keep it loose. It’s like the pencil sketch version. And it’s going to change when I keep sketching, erase some lines, add paint, but I have to be doing those damn things. That’s the thing that’s frustrating me right now is I’m not. But you know what? I also am living in 2021 [00:05:00 ] as a woman who’s got a lot of personal responsibility, so it doesn’t help me to beat myself up about it, but the desire is there. I might go to some looser kind of mapping like of visual, you know, brainstorm kind of, what do they call that mind mapping that might be where I go now? 

Meli: What is the, when you write all over the page in no order, what’s that called? There’s a word. I not remember. 

Rachel: I think it’s a mind map too, right? Where you do little bubbles and they all kind of feed off each other.

Meli: I was thinking like when you write around the outside of the page or you write sideways or you make shapes out of the text. I learned about that in a writing workshop once. 

Rachel: I don’t know this. 

Meli: Anyways, I don’t know 

Rachel: if we find it we’ll link to it in the show notes or we’ll explore it in a future episode because I’m super curious about that.

Meli: Yeah. 

Rachel: So today, we’re talking about therapy. 

Meli: I was going to, [00:06:00 ] I was going to try for a transition. I mean, authentically, I did think like when you were saying you know, still figuring out what the story is it just, it does kind of remind me of how. Seeing a therapist, whether it’s