Memoir Writing and Legacy with Michael Williams

In this episode, Michael Williams, the founder of Memoir Studio, discusses his transition from end-of-life planning to helping people write their memoirs. They explore the therapeutic power of storytelling, especially for older adults, and how sharing personal stories can offer emotional and historical value. Michael emphasizes the importance of acknowledging life's ups and downs, regrets, and failures in memoir writing. Michael shares touching stories of his clients finding their voices and the profound impact of preserving legacies through narrative.

00:35 Guest Introduction: Michael Williams

00:40 Michael's Journey: From End-of-Life Planning to Memoir Writing

00:46 The Power of Storytelling

00:55 Therapeutic Benefits of Memoir Writing

01:02 Fear of Judgment and Vulnerability

01:15 Welcoming Michael to the Podcast

01:36 Michael's Background and Passion for Memoirs

01:54 End of Life Planning Facilitator

02:55 Supporting Families and Addressing Practical Aspects

04:55 Transition to Memoir Work

05:10 Discussing End of Life Plans with Clients

06:07 Reassuring Conversations About Death

08:57 Legacy Work and Finding Meaning

12:30 Recording and Transcribing Stories

13:34 Helping Clients Find Their Voice

18:12 The Importance of Preserving Stories

18:48 Personal Reflections on Family Stories

22:09 The Value of Listening to Elders

23:19 The Importance of Journaling

23:41 Family Stories and Names

25:00 Everyone's Life is Interesting

29:38 The Power of Group Writing

30:10 Therapeutic Benefits of Writing

32:38 Challenges in Writing Memoirs

34:47 Honesty and Universal Themes in Memoirs

38:59 Dealing with Regrets and Mistakes

42:54 End of Life and Legacy

43:07 Conclusion and Resources

Links: My Substack page: https://memoirstudio.substack.com

The Memoir Studio at https://memoirstudio.ca

My personal website: https://www.michaelwilliamsstoryteller.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/storycatcher/

Transcript

Michael: [00:00:00] You have your ups and downs, that's universal. That's life. If you want an interesting story, you need your regrets in there. You need your failures. You need the things that you're not so proud of because that makes you a human being. And that's what people are looking for. The story by human beings.

'cause we've all made mistakes. 

Jill: Welcome back to Seeing Death. Clearly. I'm your host, Jill McClennen, a death doula, funeral celebrant, and end of life care planner. On this podcast, I sit down with guests to have honest, thoughtful conversations about death, dying grief, and what it really means to live life.

Well, today's conversation is with Michael Williams, the founder of Memoir Studio. Michael shares his journey from working in end of life planning. To helping people tell their stories Through memoir writing. We talk about the power of storytelling, especially later in life and why these stories matter, not just emotionally, but historically and personally.

We explore how writing a memoir can be therapeutic, help people find their voice, [00:01:00] and even ease some end of life concern. Michael also speaks openly about the fear of judgment and the vulnerability that 

Michael: comes with sharing personal stories. Reminding us that every life holds meaning and every story deserves to be told.

Thank you for joining us for this conversation. 

Jill: Welcome, Michael, to the podcast. Thank you for joining me today. I know we connected because I follow you on Substack and I love reading all of your posts. Can you just tell us a little bit about who you are, your background, where you come from, anything like that you wanna share?

Michael: Thanks very much for following me on Substack It. It's always wonderful to actually meet somebody who follows you there. I'm Michael Williams. I, I live in Canada. I'm the founder of a memoir studio, as the name suggests. I'm passionate about people's stories and helping people write their memoirs or collections of personal stories, and that came out of my background.

In end of life planning, I trained as an end of life. Planning facilitator and I helped people with a range of issues around end of life, [00:02:00] including Wills, funeral plans and advanced care plans. But it was the legacy side of it. People were constantly asking me or wondering about what they could leave behind or that people who'd always wanted to write some of their stories down.

That was the part I became quite interested in. That was related to my background in storytelling and stories in general. So. That's who I am. That's what I do now, is work with people around writing memoirs and coaching them. 

Jill: And what did you say it was an end of life planner sort? 

Michael: Yeah. End of life planning facilitator.

I trained with an organization called Before I Go Solutions. Uh, I worked for them for about seven years and I trained with Jane Duncan Rogers the founder of that organization. In Scotland, I was, well, one of the first of her trainers and then continued to work with Jane, and then I trained other people to be end of life planning facilitators.

So these were people that you could go and talk to, firstly, to have the [00:03:00] conversation about end of life, death and dying and everything related to that. And also to help people with the practical. Aspects of it, like, you know, what would you like in your will? You know, and, and explaining why you need a will, why you need powers of attorney, and preparing people for that visit to the lawyer.

Knowing what you want before you go, rather than let the lawyer tell you what you want. You know? And having the conversations, often helping people have conversations with their partners or adult children, you know, that sort of thing. And then sometimes the other, I guess the other kind of client I would get was somebody who needed help addressing these issues with their elderly parents.

Very often it was daughters. This is primarily a, an area that's, you know, mostly women taking care of these issues. There are a few men, but mostly women. Often the responsibility would fall on daughters too. Take, uh, this issue with their parents. [00:04:00] I was there to offer support if they wanted it, or provide them with practical information, the details so that they could pass those on to their parents or in other cases with their partner and their own children.

Jill: Definitely sounds a lot like what end of life doulas do. Yeah. Some of those do that. Yeah. 

Michael: Yeah. So the difference is that an end of life planning facilitator doesn't necessarily. Sit with the dying the way a doula might and usually does I, I have done that more as something I did for a friend sat in the hospice with her dying mother until her mother had passed to support her because she was the only family member available at the time and came from out of town and needed support.

That led me to doing some volunteer work in the hospice. That's a difference between a facilitator and the doula. The doula is more hands-on attending to the dying. Sitting with them, but doulas often do the planning work as well. 

Jill: Do you still do any of that facilitating work? 

Michael: I'm more focusing on the memoir work now.

The end of life planning work often [00:05:00] comes in handy because I'm often working with people in that third act of life. Older folk, probably after 55, 60 years old. A lot of my clients are in their seventies, eighties, and nineties. While we're working on their memoir, they often ask questions about their plans.

They're end of life plans. Some things they know and very often they just want to talk. They just want to talk about dying, and I'm comfortable with that. I, something I think is a real privilege to be able to sit with someone and talk about whether it's fears or whether people want, sometimes people just want to talk to me about what their vision of the afterlife is, or if there is one.

So sometimes we end up having these very philosophical discussions. They might be spiritual sort of discussions, but very often they're just practical discussions. You know, it's like, well, what happens if this happens? Not that I always know, but I can provide practical information about, for example, what might happen in the hospital, what it means to be intubated.

Or to [00:06:00] be on life support and the kinds of questions you and your loved ones might want to be asking yourselves if you did happen to be on life support. So I think it's just providing support, providing factual information, making connections, talking with other family members who might be reticent to talk about these things and, and just to support and hopefully bring a bit of comfort and reassurance.

You know, to people. Certainly it can't stave off death. That sometimes happens in the fairytales and stuff like that, but it's just trying to sort of reassure people and also to reassure people that death's not a failure. I think often our culture paints death that way as if you're not fighting hard enough or that you failed.

You often hear that phrase, oh, they got beat by cancer, or They failed in their battle against cancer. I think it can make a lot of people feel guilty or feel shamed that maybe they didn't. Try hard enough. I'm all for. I think your state of mind is really important. If you're in a very positive state of mind, that can have [00:07:00] a dramatic effect on holding off illness.

But dying is not a failure. It's an inevitable part of the life cycle. It happens to every single one of us. Doesn't matter, rich or poor, every single human being in the world, every living thing eventually dies. So I think that's the other part of it, is trying to reassure people that it's a natural part of life.

And we give a lot of attention to births. We celebrate birth to try to bring a little bit of reverence and acknowledgement, celebration of people's feelings, whatever they might be around dying and death, and try to find the positive in it. And I know that's not always easy to do, but mm-hmm. Yeah, 

Jill: we agree with all that.

Michael: I'm sure you do. And I'm sure you've had so much experience doing the same thing. 

Jill: Yeah, and I love this work. I love working with people in this space. That's why I sought out people like you that write memoirs, because I do find I'm not a writer. It's not ever been a skill that I felt really confident in.

The more that I [00:08:00] talked to people and I was hearing their stories and they were sharing with me about their life. It's just really beautiful to hear things that I don't think they're always saying to their family. They're not telling these things to loved ones, but they're telling it to us because we feel like a safe space, that we're not gonna judge them, that we're not there to try to change their mind about how they feel.

If they're ending a fight against cancer and they're like, I'm tired. I don't wanna do this anymore. We're not there to try to convince them to keep fighting. They open up and share things with us. I know that's part of legacy work with people writing these stories down. When you work with people. Are you just teaching them how to write better or what's the difference?

What's the difference between writing something versus a memoir? I feel like it's different. I'm not writing a book, I'm writing a memoir. That seems like a whole different thing. Not that I am, but for people. 

Michael: Yeah, no, they are different things. You're right. I think it's important to recognize that [00:09:00] many people, not everybody, but many people want to leave something behind beyond money or material goods.

Many people, in fact, you may have come across this yourself, but my work in the hospice, hospice nurses tell me that one of the concerns that the dying often bring up with them in their conversations is this question. D did my life, did I make a difference? Did I have any kind of impact? Was my life worth living?

It's that search for meaning, which is so universal, you know, to all of us. And it, it is very understandable that people at the end of their life would, you know, we're looking back on, on a life and did we live a well lived life? Did we love enough? Were we loved those existential questions, concern all human beings and.

You know, so that, that, that often leads people to saying, you know, I'd love to write something down or record something. I'd like to leave something of my thoughts for my children or grandchildren or future [00:10:00] generations. Many people have acquired a lot of wisdom. Over their lifetime, you know, life lessons.

Mm-hmm. Uh, you know, there, there are exercises where you write to your younger self. What would you say to your 16-year-old self if you could talk to that person? We all have this tendency of wanting to share our life lessons, but many people never get asked. That question, never get asked to do it. So I think that's what I do now.

I try to provide the space and the patience to sit with somebody and say, you know what? I'm interested. What would you like to say? What would you like your grandchildren to know about you? In other words, how would you want to be remembered? I saw the other day an obituary for a woman who had died. The obituary simply said she was a kind person and made great jam.

That was it. Yeah. Maybe that meant a lot to whoever wrote that obituary, but is that how you want to be remembered that you made great jam? Is that the sum total of your life? Is that how people are going to remember you? You [00:11:00] have some say over that. You can do nothing and leave it up to other people, or you can spend some time writing some things down.

What lessons would you like to pass on to your granddaughters? Or your grandsons, or your nieces or nephews. I have one client at the moment who's doing exactly that. She's writing what she's calling a memoir, but we will be really a collection of little stories, anecdotal stories about her and about how.

How she really came to empower herself through the seventies, through the feminist movement, and she wants her granddaughters in particular to know what their grandma went through during that time period to become the woman that she is today. She was a young woman, she was rebellious. She was the first woman to work in a rock quarry with men.

And that was a big deal at the time. This woman is a very powerful, strong, and wonderful woman. She wants her grandchildren to learn the lessons that she learned. I meet a lot of people like [00:12:00] that. Men have learned a lot through their lives as well in their work and so on. So legacy work is really an opportunity to pass on the wisdom.

Pass on the life lessons, even the things you wished you hadn't done or the mistakes you've made so that others can learn from that. And I just think it's such a privilege to be able to sit with people and provide them with that space and curiosity because it's helpful that I can keep asking them questions, you know?

That sounds interesting. Can you say more about that? Very often I'll record people and then have the recordings transcribed for them. I have another client in a group of mine, and she loves writing. And she, she does wanna publish a memoir and actually try to get it published. And she's had a very interesting life.

The people I work with, some are writing to leave something behind for their children and grandchildren and others have more literary ambitions in mind. Writing a novel, they say we all have at least one novel in us, right? And some [00:13:00] people have had that dream of writing since they were teenagers. An English teacher told them they had some potential, but they never got around to it.

Life took over and now that they're retired, they think I've always wanted to write a book and they've decided I'd like to write a book my life. I think I've had an interesting life. Sometimes we self-publish stories and others say, well, I'd like to try to send this to a publisher. I can help them to some extent.

I can certainly help them with self-publishing, but I can direct them to the literary agent or others to give them support in that way, if that's their intention. I have, and there's another aspect to this too, Joe, I had a, my oldest client was 96 years old, and this was some work I was doing at a care home.

I worked with her and some of the others in a group for six weeks. At the end of the six weeks, I asked the group how coming to the group had been helpful, and this 96-year-old woman stood up and thanked everybody in the group. She said, [00:14:00] this group has helped me finally to find my voice. She said to find my voice, 96 years old, she said, I'm married young, so I, you know, I, I was the youngest in my family.

I had older brothers. I was the only woman in the family, so I didn't get listened to a lot. My brothers got all the attention. I married very young and I was a wife, a mother, a nurse. That was her career as a nurse, and she said then I'm a grandmother and now I'm a great grandmother. And she said, I've spent my whole life caring for and listening to other people, and she said, it wasn't until I came to this group that I really felt was the first time in my life a group of people sat and listened to my stories.

She said, I've, I've found my voice now. She wasn't a great writer, mostly because she had arthritis and found the physical act of writing difficult. She was also legally blind, so she used a great big magnifying glass. She did try to write a little bit. [00:15:00] She couldn't read her own writing, so she'd give it to me to read out to the group.

In the end, I recorded her story and transcribed it and gave those transcriptions to her, which she wanted to leave with her family. I just think to be able to help the 96-year-old woman find her voice something, which many of us at, at much younger ages think we've already found. That's no small thing for me.

That was something I found so thrilling to have helped somebody find their voice. That's happened on several occasions. One other story I had to share with you. I worked with an 89-year-old woman when I was living in Scotland. And she was also legally blind. She lived in the Royal Blind Home in Edinburgh, and I met her through the church and she had come to some of my storytelling sessions as well.

She wanted to tell me her life story. I had her over for tea, got up my recorder, and I spent two hours with her. Recording her life story, you know? And now to do that, it's not like you just turn [00:16:00] the recorder on and let her talk. You have to have questions. You have to show curiosity, and you have to kind of know how to interview somebody to draw out the story without exhausting them or letting them go on too long about something.

But we covered her life in a couple of hours. Most of it was on the record. There was something she told me that were not recorded. More private things, but at the end of our session, it was just amazing. She had done so many things. She had worked with the church in South Africa during the apartheid years, during the 1960s, late fifties.

She had been the head of a huge social work network in in England, and she had not married. She had nieces, which were really the closest members of her family. But when we finished that recording. We sat there in silence and it felt really profound moment. And then she said to me, well, I'm ready to go.

And I said, oh, don't worry. I'll drive you home. I'll make sure you get back home. [00:17:00] Okay. She laughed and said, no, I'm ready to die now. 

Jill: Wow. 

Michael: And there was a smile on her lips, as far as I knew at that time. She wasn't ill. Death wasn't impending. But she just said with great confidence and a kind of stillness about her being at peace with what she was saying.

She says, no, I'm ready to go. And it was because she had finally told her story to someone and it had been recorded. She knew that I was going to put it onto a disc and give it to her nieces, which was her request, and she died within the next six months before her 90th birthday. She told me she wanted to die in her 90th year, but before her birthday, and she did.

I passed on the recording to her nieces and a couple of weeks later they sent me back this beautiful letter. What really touched them was being able to listen to their ads voice again. They also heard so many details in the story they did, had no idea. They didn't know. There was, [00:18:00] there were just so many details of her life that they did not know before, and they were so touched to have a record of that now.

So this is not inconsequential work to me. It's really important. I think some of these documents even have local historical importance. People recall events that historians may not pick up. There may be more for the local historian or family history. Very important for family history. I'm kind of going on, just think of so many wonderful examples for this work.

Jill: No, that was great. I'm just listening. I'm like, yeah, this is so good. 

Michael: I'm a storyteller, so you gotta be kind. Let me keep going. Just stop me, you know. 

Jill: Oh, no, no, no. It is perfect. And I'm thinking how My grandmother was born in 1916 on a farm in South Jersey. When I was a kid, she used to tell me stories of mm-hmm.

Growing up on the farm and I wish that I would have recorded them. Yeah. In some way. I wish I [00:19:00] would've taken time to write them down. Because I remember little bits. That's the hard thing. We just get so caught up in our own life sometimes. Yeah. Spending time with our elders and listening to their stories, it's like, how many times can I hear the story about the farm?

Yeah. But now she's been gone for 15 years. I would love to hear her tell me that story. Of the farm. 

Michael: Exactly. Yeah. I understand that regret. I share that too. When people say to me, what do you miss most about your grandparents or your parents? I say, it's their stories. The stories I remember as a kid, I remember bits of them, but I'd be hard pressed to be able to tell them the way that they told them.

I wish I had recorded them. You know, I had a tape recorder. The thing we forget is that when we're young, we don't often think. That our parents or grandparents stories are important. They're important at the time, but we're young and kind of have this idea that our grandparents and parents will live forever.

So we can always get their [00:20:00] stories. And you're right, sometimes we get tired of them 'cause we've heard them, you know, so many times. I had an uncle like that. We'd see him once a year and a family reunion, and he told us the same story every year. And yet when he died, my brother was at his bedside. He retold the story.

That our uncle had told us when we were kids, my uncle was in a coma, but my brother said that when he retold the story, he felt my uncle squeeze his hand. I think that was in recognition and a kind of a thank you. For remembering that silly story he told us. When my children were teenagers, they weren't interested in my stories or what I had done as a young man, but now that they're older, my oldest son's in his forties and he often says that, you know, now he's interested.

Now he wants to know. Dad, what are your stories? I got more interested in family history when I got older. My forties, my fifties and sixties. Suddenly it's like I'm on ancestry.com and other [00:21:00] ancestry, family history things. I'm interested in where I came from. My lineage stories are a really important part of that.

I wish I had recorded more, but you know, I think my, my, you know, my dad, I, I, I don't think he thought we were that interested. So, and in old age homes too. I hear the same thing there too. They're like libraries of human stories. And the staff, even as, even as wonderful as the staff are, they're so busy with their responsibilities that they often don't have.

The kind of quality time they can spend, they will spend a little bit of time. And if you're lucky to get a a nurse, that can make time to listen to your stories. But very often I'll hear the nurses say, thank goodness you're here when I go in, because I'm gonna give up an hour or two to listen to these stories that they maybe have heard over and over again and actually have stopped listening, you know, 'cause they're busy taking blood pressure.

Doing all the medical stuff, changing the beds or whatever. [00:22:00] So yeah, they just don't have the time. It takes patience and compassion and like you said, non non-judgmental space to provide that for people. But boy, when I go into Care homes, I think, oh, look at all these people just sitting, looking out the window.

And they're not just little old people with gray hair. 'cause as soon as you start talking to them, you have, you have no idea until you ask somebody their story. I've met little old men and women who've had most more amazing lives than I've had. You know, they've traveled the world, they've, they've been in danger, they've been in love.

They've all the wonderful sort of human experiences they've had and just need as somebody. To be interested to say, tell me your story. Let's start with your name. How did you get that? And it takes you into their family history, where they were born, where they grew up, who was your first best friend? What do you remember about the first day of school?

All those things are universal because we're all still having those experiences. Yeah, 

Jill: I think too, how. There's times when [00:23:00] my kids are now 14 and 11 and I forget that they only know this one version of me. I was in my thirties when I had them. Yeah. And so I had, you know, especially my twenties, I had done a whole lot in my twenties, and you forget sometimes that the people around you don't know.

Because to me, this is just an extension of my life. Right. I did my twenties, then I had my kids, and now I'm in my forties and we're like doing our thing. It is important because I was one of those people where I would journal, but only when things were bad needed to get out the bad stuff. Mm-hmm. But it doesn't necessarily have the good stuff.

It doesn't have the parts of my life that are the stories that I want my children to know. And it's funny that you mentioned a name because my son, his name is Berkeley, like the city in California. And we have this journal that I got five years ago on Amazon. It's like a mom and me and it's got little prompts and you write the stuff in there and you know he's getting older.

So I'm [00:24:00] kind of like, we need to get this done now while we can, we need to finish filling it out. And one of the prompts said, where did I get my name from? And he said, oh, I know where I got it from. 'cause you got married in Berkeley. And I was like, actually that's not accurate. That's not really where you got it from.

So then we had this conversation about how we had a whole list of names and we were just throwing out names of people that we knew that were really interesting. We knew a guy in college, my husband and I, whose last name was Berkeley. We were just talking about people that had interesting names, and he was one of those people where you always said his first and last name together.

He wasn't just Brooke. He was Brooke Berkeley. Like you had to say it that way. And then we were like, actually, Berkeley's kind of a cool name. Yeah. But it was just one of those things where I'd never thought about telling him that full story of, yeah, actually it's not just because, and he thought we got married in the city of Berkeley because we liked.

And I was like, no, it's just where the wedding venue was, right? We didn't pick Berkeley on [00:25:00] purpose. We have all this information within us, and so many people I talk to, and I'm sure you hear this all the time, it's like, well, I don't have anything that interesting. Like nobody's really gonna care about my stories, but everybody that I talk to, when you really talk to them, I'm like, this is fascinating.

I think it's amazing. I would love to have you write this all down and put it in a book because. It is really interesting. Everybody's had an interesting life, even if they don't think so, even if they thought it was boring. So 

Michael: yeah, 

Jill: I love seeing people writing these things down and sharing the stories with their families.

Yeah. And even publishing 'em, which is super cool. 

Michael: Yeah, exactly. And I think there was a time when families. Spent more time a around the kitchen table or the dining room table and talking often. That was where stories would come out. I remember as a kid at family get togethers when aunts and uncles, my grandparents and parents would get together and the grownups would all gather around the [00:26:00] kitchen table and the kids were all kind shooed away.

I remember it was maybe like an 11, 12-year-old sitting in the threshold of the doorway and my mom trying to shoo me away, and I remember there came a time. I guess I must have been maybe 12, and my grandfather saying, no, he can, he can stay there in that threshold. I realize now that was probably his way of introducing me to the adult world.

Jill: Mm-hmm. 

Michael: I got to sort of sit there in the in between place, between the adult world in the kitchen and the kids' world out in the rest of the house. But what I was fascinated by, Jill was. Why were all the adults laughing? Why did they all seem so happy? Because my parents never struck me as really happy laughing people at home.

But when they got together with the others, they would be telling all these stories and jokes and all laughing together. I think I found that really fascinating as a kid. I don't think I understood why that was, but I think it, in some ways, it [00:27:00] inspired me to take this real interest in literature and stories.

If stories could make people laugh, maybe that's something I should follow, you know? And then I could laugh and be happy too. So I think that's one aspect of it. The other thing he said, many people say they think their stories, their lives haven't been interesting. And I think that's in part due to the fact that we live in a culture where when we talk about memoirs, people often think, oh, like those big books in the bookstore that a celebrity has written a Hollywood star or some hero of some kind.

Somebody who's fought off some rare disease has written about a terrible childhood or a heroic thing like climbing Mount Everest, you know, something of that sort. And we measure our lives against the celebrity culture. Often think, why would anybody wanna listen to my story? I think just the opposite. I think these ordinary lives can often be led in extraordinary ways.

I just find people's stories fascinating. A lot of my work is [00:28:00] reassuring people that, no, let me hear your story because our stories are as unique as we are. And if you don't tell your story, who's going to? Either no one will ever tell it or someone will tell it, but they'll tell it in their way and it won't be exactly your story.

It'll be somebody else's version of you. They might end up just saying, you're a nice person and you could make great jam. So I think that's another challenge. And I've been an English teacher, so I often reassure people I'm not reading your work per spelling and grammar. That's the other thing that inhibits a lot of people from sharing their stories.

Or at least writing them down. I've heard people in their seventies and eighties still carrying the shame of an unfortunate English teacher in high school who told them they weren't great writers or this, this wasn't their, you know, this wasn't their strength. You know, they should avoid writing at all costs, you know, kind of thing.

And, and I've met people in their seventies and eighties who still carry that shame. If it [00:29:00] wasn't a high school teacher, maybe it was at university or a parent. Who made an offhand remark about something they had written and shown to somebody. And sometimes it's somebody in their twenties and thirties who sent a story to a journal to be published and then got it rejected saying, we're not interested, or sorry, you know, you didn't, you weren't a winner in our contest.

You know, there are all kinds of things like that. And, and yeah, those, those can lead marks of shame or inhibit people and. They'll say, I once sent something in and it got rejected. So I guess I'm no good. A lot of my work is reassuring people, this is not an English class, this is not a competition. I like to work with small groups of people.

'cause I think the group process is really important because of the feedback that a group will give each other and the support they give one another. We're not there to, it's not competitive. We're not critiquing one another, you know, tearing each other up to bits of a counseling background as well. So as well as a teaching background.

So the. [00:30:00] That, that group, the, the kind of the, the community building aspect of it, building up people's self-esteem, their confidence is really important to me as well. And that can be done through writing. And lots of people say writing feels very therapeutic. You mentioned your journal. And I've journaled since I was 13.

My grandmother got me onto that. Not every day, but off and on throughout my whole life. I've journaled, I've got bookshelves of journals. I don't know what I'm gonna do with them. What am I gonna do with all my journals before I die? You know, I, I can't imagine people reading them 'cause they, it'd be all be outta context and they'd think I was really crazy.

But then, so there are lots of reasons that inhibit people. Part of my job is to help people get over that inhibition and give them confidence. Maybe your English teacher was wrong. When people think about writing a memoir that's too big a thought to begin with. I say, don't worry about a, a book or even a chapter.

Let's just start with something really small. I, I often say my, my work, I teach people to write two pages at a time. 

Jill: Okay. 

Michael: And that's why [00:31:00] often I'll use writing prompts to get people started who haven't been writing for some time. And I say, let's start with a scene, not a chapter, but just a scene. Let's take one memory and begin with that.

What surfaces, what comes to mind that might require a little conversation to stimulate their memory. Everybody has one memory that they've always held onto, and I say, let, let's just start with that and then I can say, so where were you? You know who was there? Tell me what you remember about that. And we can start to build that into a scene.

And then scenes can then lead onto, you know, another scene and another scene. Maybe when you come up with three or four scenes, wow, you got a chapter? That's how you build a book up, you know? And then let's see where it goes. And if it doesn't go any further, well we've got a short story, you know, so let's, let's just say that's great.

You got a short story now. You know, other people say, oh wow, big a big flood of memories comes. And it's like, okay, now I know what we want write. So [00:32:00] yeah, I mean, I can talk about memoir, but I don't wanna get too off topic here. 

Jill: Yeah, it's all on topic for me. I love to see where the conversations go. I know a lot of times.

At the end of life, people do wanna also talk about, you know, the good things. They want to share, the stories about the vacations and the softball games and like all that stuff. But then they also do wanna share their regrets and the things that they did wrong. Some of the things people have told me, I'm like.

No judgment at all, but there's not a lot of people they told that to. It's kind of like they just wanted to get it off their chest. Yeah, I could imagine. When they're writing a memoir, there's this feeling of censorship almost, where it's like, well, I don't know if I wanna share that. What if my family reads it?

What if somebody reads what I wrote about them? I think about that even, you know, I'm not a great writer and I think I'm not a great writer, probably because I was told that when I was young. 

Michael: The story you're telling yourself, [00:33:00] Joe. 

Jill: Yeah, and just practicing it more and more and trying to find my voice at 47.

I don't wanna wait until I'm in my nineties. I wanna find my voice now. But there is a part of me that does hesitate a little bit. Like once it's out there though, it's out there. Yeah. Do I wanna share these things? It's not just my story, right? It's interactions with other people. There are other people that are part of your story.

There was a quote in my high school yearbook. I put it in there as my high school quote because I had read it then and I really liked it. It said something like, there's three sides to every story. There's your side, there's my side, and then there's the truth. Neither of our sides is exactly true. Is that something that you find a lot of where people wanna write something but then they're worried because of course, what's the family gonna think or the person that's in the story, like how do you get around that with people?

Michael: There's a couple things I can say. One, it is certainly a legitimate reason why people often [00:34:00] don't start because they're, they have things they wanna say, but like many people, like, like myself, I was raised with that adage, we don't air our dirty laundry. We don't expose the family. As children, we have this, this sort of tendency that we, you know, well.

We don't wanna kind of expose or embarrass our family, like our parents and ev, even if we were angry at them. One thing I do say about memoir is don't write a memoir out of revenge that never works. And in fact, people don't really like reading. Somebody's kind of just wanting to get revenge on whether it's a parent or a partner or whatever.

People read memoirs because there are lessons in them. They want something to be there. There's gotta be something universal. Your memoir has to be about something. People find this odd, but I say, your memoir is not all about you. It is, but you need some kind of universal idea that your memoir is about.

Maybe it's about how you overcame adversity. That's a [00:35:00] universal theme, and then you use your story to illustrate that theme. And maybe how you went from rags to riches, back to rags again, or the other way around. There needs to be some lessons the reader can take away. That's if you're wanting to share your story publicly, but you don't have to.

At the end of the day, your story is yours. I can't force you to share your story with everyone in my groups. I always ask people when they've written something, do you want to share it or do you want us to give you feedback? If you don't, that's absolutely okay. There's no judgment on that. If you're not ready to share, to me, your story's sacred, and I'm not going to misuse that.

Trust and confidentiality are very, very important. And the other thing I remind people is you can still write your story, but you don't have to share it with everybody. The act of writing can be very therapeutic, just getting it out of your head, onto the paper, onto your laptop. You can write it all and delete the whole thing if you want.

Many people find just getting it down on [00:36:00] paper or saying it out loud is a big relief. Very often you find that within the group, people often say, wow, I thought I was the only one that happened to, or, I thought I was the only one who had a dad like that. This is where sharing our story can be really helpful in knowing that we're not alone and many people go through life, you know, so afraid.

They've got these regrets or things that happen to them that they're really afraid to share because they, again, it's shame and guilt. I mean, those are such powerful emotion that really hold us back. In terms of publishing a memoir, you, you can't just say what you want about other people and use their real names, none of in your own family.

You have to get permission, a publisher. Then the publisher's lawyers will be careful about reading over every page, every line of what you've written. So you need to be honest. And authentic, but you can't say things about people that are not true and you can't denigrate people. [00:37:00] The publisher could get sued for saying things.

I have a friend who had a memoir ready to be published. It was at the publishers, and she happened to send a chapter or the whole manuscript to her sisters. Two of her sisters were okay with it, the one sister was not, and it had to do with how the mother was portrayed. That sister wrote to the publisher and said, if you publish this, I'm going to sue you.

And so the publisher withdrew it. It wasn't worth it to them to go through that kind of court proceeding. It is important to get, if you're going to go the publication route, and that includes self-publishing as well. Really, you should. Get your family on board or have conversations with them and say, look, I'm writing this story.

I'm writing about a difficult time we had when we were kids. You're my brother. I know you were there, but I have a very different kind of version than you do. And if you have siblings, [00:38:00] Jill, I'm sure that you know this. I've got five siblings or six of us. When we get talking about our childhood, you would think we grew up in different houses and had different parents.

The stories, the versions are often very different. That's just how it is. I've heard so many people say that again, the police know that when it's an accident, if you've got four people on four corners at an intersection, they'll all say something different about the accident that happened in front of them.

It's just how we are. We have our own. Way of seeing things, but I try to respect that and say we have to strive for honesty and get some perspective and distance on your story as well. Tho those are more sort of literary considerations when you're writing for a public. That's different if you're just writing for yourself.

First drafts, you just spew it all out on the page, get it all out. Then we can sort of say, okay, maybe this part shouldn't be there, and maybe say more about that, and so on. You can shape it after you get all the material out first. Mm-hmm. [00:39:00] The one other thing I wanted to address that you said, which I thought was important, this whole thing about revealing your regrets or your failures or the mistakes you made in life.

That makes you human. And honestly, I very few people wanna read stories that are just nothing but success. One, success after another, or a story about how great I was. Those stories get boring when I work with people. Having a story that's more dynamic, I'll bet if you plotted your life on a lifeline, on a horizontal line from childhood to your age now.

That line. If you joined up all the dots, put all the positive things above the line and the negative things below the line, you'd get a roller coaster, a wavy wave. You have your ups and downs. That's universal. That's life, and that's what makes a really interesting story. People don't wanna read all the peaks, neither do they really wanna read all the lows.

They want something that's more multidimensional. So I say to people, if you want an interesting [00:40:00] story, you need your regrets in there. You need your failures. You need the things that you're not so proud of because that makes you a human being, and that's what people are looking for. They're looking for a story by human beings.

'cause we've all made mistakes. And when you read those stories very often you realize, you go, oh, I thought I was the only one that made that terrible mistake. That can really release you from shame to know that somebody else did it. And look at that. They're actually putting it out there publicly. You know, that takes courage.

Well, if they have the courage to do that, maybe I could at least have the courage. To talk to a friend about it or seek a therapist, or maybe I could even just write it myself. I think a well-lived life is a life that has the highs and the lows. Light and shadow. You know that. That's what I mean. It's like an art.

A work of art is not all light. You know? It's light and shadows. That's what makes the work, you know? That's how we see things. We need darkness as well as light, but [00:41:00] yes, shame, guilt, embarrassment, those are all things that we have to deal with when we're talking, particularly at the end of life. You could die and take all those secrets with you.

Or you could share them and relieve yourself of some of that burden. But there's no right or wrong. I'm not, you know, it's a very individual thing and say to people, I'm here, I'll hear it, I'll listen, and I'm not gonna judge you if you don't want to share. If it's more important to you to take it with you to the grave, then I will respect that decision.

But I'm here if you want to talk. Sometimes I can say, well, do you want me to start? I can give you lots of examples of things I've done that I regret. 

Jill: Mm-hmm. 

Michael: I dunno if regret's the right word, but maybe if I'm looking back, I would do things differently. I mean, I'm divorced, so that probably will say enough right there, you don't get divorced without having made some mistakes and it going through the challenges, um, of ending a very important relationship and dealing with the consequences of it.

And yes, of course it's embarrassing. [00:42:00] It could be laced with shame and guilt and all of that, but you know, I wanna learn from those mistakes as well. It's not just writing about what happened to me. It's like, what did I do with what happened to me? That's what I try to instill in people. What did you do with it, and how have those mistakes or regrets shaped the person you are today?

If you can do that with somebody towards the end of life, if you can bring some comfort or relief or allow people to get stuff off their chest, because dying is a big enough to contend with, without dealing with the weight of regrets and guilt, it's like I say, Hey, leave 'em with me, or just leave them on the page.

If you want me to burn your journal after you're gone, I'll do that. Or you know, if you have a really good friend, you can instruct your friend to do that. You can actually leave a note or a letter to your executor or a specified person to do that for you. People say, really? I can do that? Of course, if you wanna do that, but write that letter today.

It is all connected to end of life work. Legacy becomes even more important as we get towards the [00:43:00] end of life. That's when we get really focused on these big questions about life and death. 

Jill: I agree. We are getting close to the end of our time. This is amazing though. So interesting. Definitely really appreciate you coming on today.

Can you tell us where people can find you, your substack website, anything like that? So if somebody is listening and they're like, I think it's time, I wanna write that memoir, but I need help. How can they find you? 

Michael: Well, folks, it is time. If you're listening to this, I'm assuming that this is a subject that interests you.

You can find me if you're interested in legacy or memoir or just writing some, some, you know, getting your personal stories down. You can find me@atmemoirstudio.ca, uh, memoir studio.ca. You can write to me at Michael at memoir studio dosier. Uh, email me there and I'm on Substack and it's, uh, guided autobiography.

substack.com guided autobiography is the, the, the training that I was [00:44:00] trained in. So I'm actually an accredited guided autobiography instructor, which is, that whole training is based out in California at the Bien Center for autobiographical studies in California. So Bien Center, B-I-R-R-E-N. The Baron Center, you'll find lots of really interesting information, and if you're interested in training in their work, they offer training program as well.

But I'm at memoir studio.ca and I have lots of free resources you can download. Some are not very expensive at all. I have six week courses, month long courses to get you started. You don't have to be a writer. You probably have an interesting story to tell. You just have to be willing to explore it and see where that goes.

One or two pages at a time. Yeah. It's doable. 

Jill: Yeah. One or two pages is a great way to do it. Yeah. Little chunks, right? I hope more people will start writing their stories and you know, I'm slowly starting a little bit time and I hope to at some point [00:45:00] get it all down and leave that behind because that is part of my legacy leaving behind with my family, all the parts of me, not just the parts.

That they've seen. 

Michael: I think that also it is role modeling for your children that there's more to all of us than just any one particular role that we play in life. Your children might be amazed that you were once 14 years old 

Jill: and I will answer 

Michael: you were. Yeah. But Jill, thanks very much. I really appreciate you offering the time and you know, open ear and open heart here for talking about this subject and giving me the chance to share my passion.

Thank you. 

Jill: If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or family member who might find it interesting. Your support in spreading the podcast is greatly appreciated. Please consider subscribing on your favorite podcast platform and leaving a five star review. Your positive feedback helps recommend the podcast to others.

The podcast also offers a paid subscription feature that allows you to financially support the show. Your contribution will help keep. The podcast advertisement free. Whether your donation [00:46:00] is large or small, every amount is valuable. I sincerely appreciate all of you for listening to the show and supporting me in any way you can.

You can find a link in the show notes to subscribe to the paid monthly subscription, as well as a link to my Venmo if you prefer to make a one-time contribution. Thank you and I look forward to seeing you in next week's episode of Seeing Death. Clearly.