Writers and Editors

• Arlene Friedman Shepherd: The Life She Loved (In memoriam, 2012)
• Ben Patton on interviewing military veterans (video, interviewed by RJ McHatton)
• Collaborating on memoirs (J.R. Moehringer and Andre Agassi)
• Coming-of-age memoirs make great gifts
• Helen Jean Medakovich Sarchielli (in memoriam)
• How reliable are our memories? How close to the truth?
• How-To Resources: Memoir, biography, and personal histories
• Is it still a great time to become a personal historian?
• Mark Twain on writing autobiography
• Memoirs of coping with chronic, rare, or invisible diseases, including mental health problems
• Memoirs of war and conflict: A reading list
• A memoir writer's dream come true
• Personal historians love their work
• Personal history videos (video by Peter Savigny of his mother, Remembering Renee)
• Photos and memoir writing
• A short history of the Association for Personal Historians
• Whose Truth? The ethics of memoir writing
• Why I love teaching Guided Autobiography (by Lisa Smith-Youngs)
• Writing workshops as group therapy
• Soundtrack of your life (engaging students with music, to write about a pivotal moment in their life)

"Writing about [events in my life] has been a way of processing them. Not only tragedies like the deaths of my sons, but other things like learning of my adoption as an adult and my search for my birthmother. These are life-altering experiences and writing about something is a good way to figure out what to make of it.

     "Patients, of course, are an endless source of inspiration and stories. Psychiatry is a performance art. We talk with people; they tell us their secrets and their pain. They benefit from the conversations or not. But it’s all words in the air; our case notes are sealed and unless we write something down, the experiences are lost except to our memories. But we’re changed by these stories just as our patients are and the truths they lead us to are worth preserving. Writing down what we have learned also constitutes a kind of “ethical will,” something to convey to succeeding generations in the same way that we distribute our property. I think that we have some obligation before we die to enunciate whatever we think we’ve learned about life. So that was also a motivation to write these books, because I thought that whether anybody buys them or not, my children and their children will have this gift from me."
                              ~ Gordon Livingston, MD, author of Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now and And Never Stop  Dancing, interviewed by Bruce Hershfield for Maryland Psychiatrist