The Retelling
At my annual family Passover table, I absorbed a powerful message: There are stories important enough to ask you stop what you are doing, gather around a table to read it out loud, though you have heard it many times before.
Decades of seders have taught me that storytelling transmits messages designed to make us remember and stir discussion.
But in recent years I’ve come to see that though we read the same words from the haggadah (our ‘script’) describing the exodus from Egypt, the experience is never the same.
Every year, there is a different configuration of people at the table.
Every year, a myriad of geo-social-political events dictating the contemporary topics to discuss.
Every year, there’s a distinctive mood based on what’s happening among the gatherers.
Every year, someone is missing because of work, a move, illness or death.
There’s a connection between this annual retelling of the trauma story of Exodus and writing difficult life stories. Challenging personal stories are never told the same way twice. There are subtle - and not so subtle - changes, conscious or unconscious. There are nuances that illustrate a new awareness, a shift, some change or personal growth.
Like the seders across my life, it took many tellings and retellings to get Seven Springs into its final form. I’m grateful for what those versions gave to the final manuscript. A well-told, complex story relies on layers of thought, time and variations that came before, just as previous Passovers provide more context and dimension to the Passover to come.
Like the annual haggadah reading, our stories land differently for us every time we read or tell it.
To a meaningful Passover to those who embrace it. Hoping the same for those who engaged in Easter celebrations and Ramadan.
Happy birthday, also, to Seven Springs. Three years post-publication, the book holds even more meaning because of the healing it offered. Read the reviews here.
Photo by EBB.
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Barbara Byer
A Mother and Memoirist
on a Mission
In early 2021, Barbara Byer sent me the first chapters of her beautiful, bittersweet memoir-under construction - a stunning tribute to and testimony of a mother’s love as she supports, advocates and wrestles with her son’s diagnosis of ALS. Those pages set a multi-stage process into motion that began with a discussion of the book’s shape, review of the story’s narrative arc, navigation into writing obstacles and a dig into the sentences.
By the summer of 2023, Barbara had completed the manuscript, mulled over publishing options and on her 80th birthday, Shatterproof: A Mother’s Memoir of Love and Loss was released into the world.
Soon after, a second book followed - a guide for families facing a loved one with ALS titled Pathways Through the ALS Storm.
Grappling with the death of a child is heartrending on its own. Taking the story to the page in a way that makes meaning and healing for writer and reader is heart lifting and inspirational. Barbara’s publishing story is a map of the often circuitous path a book travels to become itself.
Barbara and her husband Stephen co-founded ALS Worldwide, a foundation devoted to providing free guidance and support for people - and their loved ones - living with ALS.
"The gift that Ellen offers is clarity, vision, and wisdom. Ellen understood my dream, kept me focused and brought it to fruition. After fifty years of floundering, taking a myriad of classes, and struggling to find my voice, I feel blessed to have her in my life." Barbara Byer
What does it look like to have your writing-under-construction strengthened and supported? Find out more about the ways I guide writers here.
Coming Up
“What a Moment Can Hold: Writing Short Truths” Story Studio Chicago, Single session. Online 6:30 - 8:30 pm. May 21, 2024