the stories we own, and the stories we don't

An Excerpt from Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create

As I wrote in yesterday’s piece, Permission — the latch that every storyteller must open in order to write with clarity and power — was born of my own experience with creative paralysis and silence emanating from a century-old family myth. After a decade of leading memoir workshops at every level, I have come to know that, more than any other issue — time, money, energy, space — permission and story ownership are the elephants in the room of art-making. Whether permission to tell your story is happening in real-time (someone says that you are not allowed to write about X) or you grapple with it as an ancient and unthought known, permission is rooted in fear, shame, hierarchy, and control. Permission and story ownership are created as binary constructs by those who withhold them: you are not granted permission to tell a story by a perceived power, and if you want to tell it — if you must tell it (be it mundane, or the opposite) — you must also grapple with the ethics of storytelling, art-making, truth-telling, and creative soul-saving.

Here is an excerpt from Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create, released for the first time, for paid subscribers. The book is available for preorder, and will be published on March 11, 2025.

I will be leading a multi-day workshop on permission and story ownership at Kripalu from March 28th-March 30th, and would love to see you there.