How to Write About Trauma Recovery, with Diane Cameron

DIANE CAMERON HAS LIVED – and thrived – through trauma recovery and, as a result, she knows how to write about trauma recovery. She has written and published books, given a breathtaking TedX talk and now runs workshops teaching others how to live through trauma. But it is her process of writing through trauma that drew me to her and her work. Listen in and read along as she instructs us on how to write through trauma.

Read along as you listen to this episode of QWERTY. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes, Spotify or Stitcher. (The following transcript has been edited from the original recording).

Marion Roach Smith: Today my guest is writer Diane Cameron. She’s the author of three books as well as a speaker, teacher and coach whose real area of expertise is recovery. I invited her here today to talk to me about how to write about, through, and from recovery. Welcome, Diane.

Diane: Welcome. Thank you.

Marion: It’s lovely to have you here.

Diane: I’m really happy to see you.

Marion: We’ve been friends for a long time.

Diane: A long time.

Marion: I know your process and I really want to help writers write from and about recovery. So I wanted to set this first question up a little bit. As you know I teach memoir from the idea of it’s best being written from one area of your expertise at a time. And something you know after something you’ve been through. And seeing this way a person can have a writing life and not just write that one big book that you never finish and no one ever reads.

But what I feel you have more than anyone I know is many areas of expertise of course, but this one, this trauma recovery understanding. And I can honestly think of no one better to have this conversation with. So let me set up a little bit why it is you have this.

Diane: Okay.

Marion: A young Marine returns from battle after World War II. He’s in Western Pennsylvania. He becomes a high school teacher. He marries the young woman who stayed home and waited for him. Her widowed mother comes to live with them. They are the picture of modest American success as you say in your TEDx Talk. One year later, the body of his mother-in-law is found in the kitchen. His wife’s body in the living room, both shot multiple times and he gets arrested.

He returns at 64 years old to this hometown. He lives seclusively for 10 years. And then one day in a Deli in downtown Pittsburgh, he starts talking to a woman and says to her, if you come back here next week, I’ll buy you lunch. And a romance begins. He’s 74, she’s 70, one year later, they are married. To his credit, he tells her the whole story of the China’s service, the murders, the awful institutions he lived in. That woman is your mother.

Diane: Right.

Marion: And she waited until after they were married to tell you who he was. She was very smart. So where in when did you think you had a story here?

Diane: I thought I had a story early after that learning because I had been doing a little bit of writing before that and I thought, well, this is interesting. And I sort of started with my mother married a murderer, very provocative. And even I did a little piece for the Christian Science Monitor on could you forgive people who did awful things? And I use the story that way.

I didn’t realize how big and different this story was until I started actually digging into the research because one of the questions that came to me was, well, how did he get that way? How could this nice man that I knew have been that young man that committed murders or younger man that committed murders? So I started researching and it popped up many more questions than I could answer.

Marion: Of course. And I’ve watched you, I’ve known you for this whole process, 20 years you have spent with and around and through this story. And it was like watching a lotus flower open. It really was. It was fascinating to me. But it started with some ads you took in some military publications. Can you explain that?

Diane: I mean there’s the earliest baby step of research and actually I ended up learning things I wasn’t advertising for. I thought I needed to hear from other people my age who knew what happened in China around the time that Donald was there, I was expecting to hear from a niece, a nephew, somebody who had their uncles manuscripts and who I heard from were actual China Marines, men who were in their late 80s, 90s, who brought me firsthand stories. And these were some of the worst atrocities committed in that period. The Japanese had invaded China. We weren’t in the war. The Japanese were slaughtering the Chinese and the Americans were brought in just to basically clean up the bodies. That was the physical body handling. Later I learned there’s a term called “body handling.” I learned what the psychological dynamics of that are and then the story began to form for me with questions of one of the big questions, how could they not be crazy? That really, it flipped it around. How did the ones who came home be more or less functional?

Marion: Of course, so your original intent was this. My mother married a murderer, dramatic and as you learned more, which is the lesson, so it’s such an important lesson for writers. As you learned more, you had to make room for the story.

Diane: Right.

Marion: Were you angry about that? Were you accepting about that? Right from the beginning did you say, Oh my goodness, what am I going to do with? How do you handle that kind of pressure and learn how tow rite about trauma recovery?

Diane: I touched on all of it. There were moments as I would get a juicy piece of research, a piece of information and I would think that’s really cool. That’s going to be another section of the story. I’m going to do something interesting with that, but right behind that would be another question of how or why or who or what expert can I get to verify my theory and then it would be like, oh, this is going to be too hard. I’m not up for it. It’s going to be longer.

Now, I’m realizing it’s a book. This isn’t an article. And also around that time we’re starting to learn the new word trauma because of course they didn’t call any of that trauma. I mean that’s a language issue and I wanted to touch on that. Most of those men were diagnosed with schizophrenia today, exact same symptoms, exact same behaviors we know as trauma, which is treatable, which is much more sympathetic. So there were weeks at a time that I would just push that manuscript to the other side of my desk and think I can’t do it. It’s too hard. It’s too complicated. Why can’t I have a nice story? Why couldn’t somebody just get married in this story? Be happy. Right. But they were happy and that’s another piece of it.

Marion: Also, so complicated, as they had this marriage and you had this outside opinion going in and then it became, as I always think of, it’s like you go to a museum, you fall into a painting, you come out changed. You’ve got to be willing to fall into your own story and not just see it with your original intent.

Diane: Right. And it very much changed… My mother had died by that time, but it changed my relationship with her as I understood her decision to marry, love, except this man. And I thought, I mean she had lots of difficulties, which I talk about in the book, but it was like my mother was somebody who could say, your past is your past and live that way.

Marion: So the book became the title.

Diane: Never Leave Your Dead.

Marion: Right. I want you to talk about that. So talk about, Never Leave Your Dead a little bit.

Diane: Well, it has many layers. One of them is, it’s one of the things that Marines say of themselves and it is one of the trust traditions of Marines. They go back on that battlefield and they bring their comrades out.

Marion: Such a good title. I love this title.

Diane: But then I also realized in many ways, Donald had never left the dead he met in China and he had never left a wife and mother-in-law that he killed and my mother hadn’t left those. And at the end of the day I couldn’t leave Donald dead.

Marion: It’s one of the more powerful titles I know. And it really brings to the fore what I believe is your authority about understanding that our trauma is not something that we’re going to cut off, shut off, leave alone.

It’s something that’s traveling inside us. And so you’ve really broadened your entire career. You’ve written three books to date and you do a lot of workshops, you do a lot of speaking about recovery. So it’s trauma recovery, it’s trauma and recovery. And so specifically do you feel, I’d like to talk with you about all kinds of recovery. You wrote a book called Out of the Woods, which provides guidance and perspective on life and recovery from any addiction after 10, 20, 30 years.

And I love that you acknowledge that there’s no shelf life, there’s no half-life, right? There’s no half-life to trauma. And there’s chapters on health and sex and relationships, work, retirement, relapse and all of that. But my question becomes because you have statistics and because you know we never leave our dead, how do you identify that moment when you have enough authority to write about your own trauma?

Diane: Well you know what? I think it evolves over time. Because I also remember early teachers saying to me, I was adding in too much external authority and I was like, I felt like I had to quote everybody in their brother and they said, claim your own Diane. Like you’ve lived this. You’ve read a lot, studied a lot, you’ve got that. But really trust your gut. You know what you’re talking about here. It was hard to get there psychologically.

Marion: It’s very hard to get there. I edit a lot of books and I see a lot too many quotes and I’ll start saying, the only voice I want to hear is yours in the margin over and over again. But if there’s addiction in the person history that undermines confidence even 30 years after sobriety. We still default to that. But I used too.

Diane: Right.

Marion: So how do you as a writer, because I think a lot of people listening are going to be people who have their own addiction, recovery that they want to tell about. How do you deal with that lack of confidence?

I think, I mean several ways. I think if you are in a some kind of a healing recovery practice, it could be a 12 step program. It could be another kind of program practice, self-help, group therapy. Because now there’s a lot of ways and when I got into recovery 12 step was kind of it and there was a lot of attachment to like well if you’re not doing it our way, you’re not doing the right thing.

Today we know that’s very different. So it’s like go to whatever is truly supporting you and work that and find those people there. I mean it’s interesting. So many people in recovery come to first accept their story and then embrace their story and then they want to tell their story, whether it’s sitting in a folding chair or on a stage or on paper.

And I think the good intent is that is all of those stories are what help us heal. I mean, the whole 12 step movement is about stories. People sitting in folding chairs in church basements, and we’re not given theory. We’re hearing what somebody else did. What did you do when your child got expelled? What did you do when you got a bad diagnosis? What did you do when there was a death in your family? How did you not use whatever your substance is? We learn through stories.

Marion: It’s such a wonderful point and I genuinely believe that in that there’s so much good confidence that we can give to other people. I hear that all the time with writers. What right do I have to tell this story? What could I possibly bring to it? And then I’ve heard from other writers who didn’t go through the 12 steps, they say, well, I have no right because I kind of made up my own program. I said, but you’re 20 years sober.

Diane: It’s a program, something worked.

Marion: Worked. So let’s tell it. So what are we looking for when we read a recovery memoir do you think?

Diane: I think I’m looking for honesty and what tells me that there’s honesty is that it’s not all happy and flowers and sunshine. I need to hear your honesty about self-doubt. When you were dishonest, it felt very important to me because I do tell tales on myself in both of those books, bad behavior, bad decisions, what I learned for it, making the same decision two, three, four times until you figure it out.

Part of the process. Those are the things we laugh at, but they also tell us, oh, this person is letting me in. They’re really going to tell me either how hard it is, how awkward it was when they were embarrassed in some situation. I mean even in non-recovery, that’s what I want to see in a story, in a TV show, in a movie.

Marion: Of course, and the kind of honesty I’m looking for is showing me the bad behavior too.

Diane: Right.

Marion: Not showing me 12 or 25 scenes that tell me the same thing Would they scenes, let’s say there’s alcohol abuse. I want to see the scenes move like beads on an abacus. I want to see, oh, I see you learnt to drink at home. Oh I see then you continue to choose people in college who you drank with. Oh I see then you chose a spouse who let you drink or drank with you. Oh, I see. We don’t need 19 scenes of you getting rip-roaring drunk. We need to see the evolution of the alcoholic and then the awareness that something has to change. Tell me about the time that you only bought your vodka in square bottles or rectangular bottles because they wouldn’t roll out from under your seat.

Diane: I was like, then I know you’re a real one.

Marion: Yeah. I knew a guy who used to buy the squeeze bottles so he could sleep on it.

Diane: That’s great.

Marion: Great details but they let us know how bad things got. If you’re making the decision that you need to sleep on the bottle too, you’re not taking much with you, but my goodness you’re showing us what your life is like, oh, I can sleep on this one. So how then in this world of, I think there’s also the sense that there are so many recovery memoir that there’s no room for other ones and I always say to people, that’s not true. Good writing will out. And people have read Caroline Knapp’s, Drinking: A Love Story, which is a beautiful book.

Diane: Beautiful, brilliant.

Marion: It’s the only book I put in anyone’s hands when they asked me for a suggestion of a memoir because the structure is simply perfect. She just goes from here to there. But in this crowded world let’s say of a lot of recovery and a lot of acceptance of recovery being a real process, how do you best pitch a recovery memoir these days, do you think?

Diane: Well, I think probably the first thing is it for, because now the audience is also enormous because there are millions of us in recovery and we’re readers. Does it have a kind of niche? Is this a parenting story? Is this a young adult story? Is this the story of somebody finding recovery after 65? There’s lots of really interesting stories in that way. So what’s sort of the broad category and then within that, what is it about you or your story? Was it in Europe? Was it here? Was it in a small town in a big city? And then probably the part that’s really going to matter to the reader. What lesson can they learn watching your life on the page, right? What’s different? What’s going to stand out?

Marion: Right. I think people forget, especially with memoir, that we’re not reading for what you did. We’re reading for what you did with it so that it’s not that I wanted to see you get drunk again and again and again. I really want to know what you know after what you’ve been through, and I want you to show me how you learned it so that the grace of strangers, for instance, I’ve always found in trauma. Isn’t it always the locksmith with whom you have the most astonishing conversation after you’ve left the bad boyfriend or the cardiologist’s nurse when you call up and you say, I think I’m having a panic attack, or the cab driver. I used to be a great one when I lived in Manhattan and was single. I used to tell cab drivers — I’m blurting out my truths to cab drivers, but there was always a transaction because at that moment you’re being so honest.

Diane: And the humanity meets whether the name or not. And then of course, hairdressers and manicures. When I lived in Baltimore every Saturday morning, I called it manicure therapy because she was just like, honey, did you do that this week? Did you make that call? What’d your boss say?

Marion: Yeah. And I think those are the things that we’re looking for. And I wonder I think about Caroline Knapp a lot. I wonder if she had not died so tragically young and we had her here to ask how, I’d like to ask her how she ever brought herself to dive into that tail after all, there’s just so much, there’s so many reasons not to. Oh, my parents will be embarrassed. Oh my parents finally live. Why did they finally live to see me recover why would I want to go back? So what strategies do you have to tell writers or to give writers to get them to dive in?

Diane: Well you know what? I think one of them, and I know that you are so good with your students and you bring them this too. It’s like you have to pretend that family is dead. You have to pretend all those are her vision. She will never read this. You’ve got put them in corner in another room, close the door and write the book. Then later decide if do you care about the impact on them? If you really do take that paragraph out, but if you try to edit anything while you’re writing, you will still stutter all the way through and you won’t tell the truth.

Marion: Absolutely. I think it’s great advice. I always say to people, right, and then let’s see what you’ve got. First of all, I promise you that revenge memoir, you’re not going to get more than two, three paragraphs. There’s just not that much to say about him. And the awful things he did to you. There just isn’t and I’ve edited a hundred #MeToo pieces probably, but after a while it becomes about the futility of revenge and the grace of moving on.

The book works because you evolve and in that becomes a really important question, I think. And that is, people say to me, oh, come on, people don’t like memoir. Oh come on people just write the ending that they want. And I said, no, no. You misunderstand completely what they do. As people go and look at their recovery and they get a handle on their story what do you think happens as they go move toward that act? What’s the process, there seems to be its own kind of recovery?

Diane: I think so. And I think that may be one of the differences. I mean I do mostly nonfiction, so fiction writers would have to weigh in. I think one of the differences is, and this certainly with Never Leave Your Dead. I was moving as the story was moving and maybe that happens in fiction as somebody’s evolving their character, but it’s still a little arm’s length because the fictional character.

But I had to keep saying, do I love my mother? Do I hate my mother? I mean, there’s a scene in the book where I talk about stealing money from Donald and it was one of those moments where like you have to put it in, you can decide later if you’re too embarrassed later, but the story won’t move if you don’t tell the truth about what you did that night. Because the day and the next day won’t make sense unless you tell what you did.

Marion: Right. And we were writing in real time. I think always when we’re writing, even looking back on recovery, because recovery is something that’s with us that travels underneath us. Maybe it’s the wind beneath our wings or however you want to state it, and writing in real time is very different than something else than writing from the past, writing about the past.

And it provides this — oh, I don’t know. I’m willing to say it — this new neural network building that we can do, that we can see that it’s not that we change the ending, it’s that we choose where the story ends.

Diane: And I think that is a huge piece of what we’re understanding now about trauma recovery and Bessel van der Kolk talks about this. We used to think that people had a memory that they push down and weren’t willing to face, and what his research has shown is the truth of trauma is they can’t fully form the memory, so they’ve got to go back and write a story and the writing of the story changes the brain.

Marion: Absolutely.

Diane: Literally changes the brain.

Marion: That’s what I’ve been reading. I’ve been reading a great deal about it and especially having seen so many people when the #MeToo movement started, my email box just blew up with stories when people felt safe to tell their tale. However, I did notice that they stopped feeling safe and it’s during the Justice Kavanagh hearings things got very quiet and I’m troubled by what that means. But one of the things I was seeing was people change because they were telling their tale and choose to have it end here and say that that’s it. I’m going from here to there and getting a hold of it unto itself, being a process that was part of the recovery process. It’s fascinating.

Diane: Right. Well I think that’s a little bit parallel too to people with a substance addiction, alcohol, drugs, food, anything like that is if they are part of like 12 steps or women in recovery or some kind of group. In your process of meetings, you’re hearing people, you’re seeing them. The one who came in the day before you is a little bit ahead of you. It’s moving.

You’re starting to put words to your experience and then you’re parting language to your experience. And so you’re getting hope and you’re also defining for yourself sort of like the classic of somebody saying, well, he was actually bad for you. Do you understand that? Because to survive any of these things, we’ve had to make ourselves the wrong one, right? We have a sweet story.

Marion: And ended up to switch that over.

Diane: Right.

Marion: And of course, if the trauma happened as a child, you didn’t have the language for it and somebody else gave you the language for it, you liked it, you wanted it, you wouldn’t have worn that dress. You have to be quiet. I will kill you tell, you’re a bad girl. And all of that is about voice. So given the opportunity to voice it in a piece, I think remarkable things happen.

And I’ve witnessed it every day in my book editing. So it’s wonderful to have this conversation with you about that. It’s important to me that people understand that something will happen, something will change. You’re not just going back and replaying the tape. In fact, we’re handing the tape to you and saying, what do you want to do with it? So it’s one of the things I hear from people all the time writing about recovery is, oh, I get so sick of my own voice.

Diane: Wow, I don’t. I don’t know what that says about me. I think maybe early I felt like that, but then as people responded to what I was writing or saying, if it was on any kind of platform that I had to trust, and this is the spiritual piece of it, I had to trust that I was being given an opportunity to say something, certainly to help me, but there was a good chance it was going to help somebody else. And it wasn’t my business who had helped. That was where it helped the ego to say, not my business, but use this. Use what I’m saying.

Marion: It goes out in writing.

Diane: Yeah. It goes out there.

Marion: It goes out there and you just don’t know what it might do. I really am a huge believer in that, the Ernest Hemingway, the Emily Dickinson, the Virginia Wall for the big, big oceans of, or the big rivers that contribute to the ocean of thought we’re tributaries where the writer, I’m a a small trickle, but it’s all going into this big nutritional wonderful thing that feeds us all, which is his thought and the exchange of ideas. And you’ve got to get up there and swing for the fences every day. I think not to make too many metaphors here but.

Diane: The other piece that comes in there then, because you’re a writing teacher craft because everybody sitting in a folding chair has a pretty interesting story actually.

Marion: Absolutely.

Diane: Can’t always tell it or write it. I mean Caroline Knapp was a girl with a dog, a young woman starting her career. That could’ve gone a lot of different ways. She had craft.

Marion: Yeah. She did have craft and she worked hard to get there. And so speaking about a girl with a dog or a girl with a recovery, I mean, one of the things I love about what you do is you develop this family trauma of yours and created a life for in these many platforms. And you said to yourself, apparently you gave yourself the authority to do this, which is awfully wonderful.

You didn’t do it in spite of it and not really because of it but through it. I find that you’re talking in your counseling and your coaching in your TEDx Talks. So what does that say about the power of harnessing the recovery process itself? Can you get ahold of it and do with it as you want?

Diane: I think you can. I think the one thing that it’s important to say out loud because people will often, they’ll read something or they’ll meet me and they’ll say, you’re so confident and like kind of like you have it all together. And I feel like-

Marion: I hate that.

Diane: It’s so important to let other people know. The first time, years ago I was in Baltimore. I sent an op-ed over the transom. I wasn’t known to an editor. He called me up and he said, I’ve got your piece for Mother’s Day and I’d like to use it next week if that’s okay with you.

And they always think, Thank God that was on the phone because I had my arms wrapped around myself. My legs were crossed. I was sliding down to the floor thinking he thinks I’m a writer. Oh my God. He thinks I’m a writer. And I still have many moments like that.

Marion: Of course you do.

Diane: And in the outsides are what they are. But every time I mailed an envelope to a prospective agent or to even to the publisher, it was like, oh, they’re going to see you don’t know what you’re doing. The insecurity rides right alongside the authority.

Marion: I think that’s really kind and generous. I think it does more so with people in the recovery field. I think there’s a saddlebag that we don’t get rid of. I’m just not sure it works with everyone.

I certainly have met my egomaniac writing friends too, but maybe they’re just fluffing them, who knows. But I think it’s fascinating that you can harness that power, but that you also have that humility that travels with it at all times. It’s just true. And you’re teaching a lot of workshops that explore the various aspects of recovery. They’re listed on your website, which is a great place for people to go at Diane. What’s coming up for you soon that somebody could go and take? Like just talk a little bit about what we can get when we go there.

Diane: Actually at workshops. For instance, I teach poetry without fear because also I realized fear has been a thread in my life, my own fear, which that’s the source of the addiction, something make this fear stop.

As a kid, candy, food, long before I discovered alcohol. Alcohol was like, wow, this works better, faster. Liquid people don’t notice as much in certain settings, but I also, I feel side I sort of felt confident that I could tell the truth about how much fear I have in my life, even though I’m competent in a lot of ways. And I felt like there is a gift I can share one with other women and sometimes it’s men, but a lot of times it’s women to say I can do this. Then I thought, well then let me talk about things people are afraid of and people are afraid of poetry. It was the seventh grade teacher who said that’s about man’s inhumanity to man. And it was like you didn’t know what that poem was about. And they’re like, I’ll never pick up a poetry book again.

Marion: I thought it was about a blue bird.

Diane: Exactly right. So it was like, let me offer something.

Marion: So in Albany, New York, you teach a bunch of different workshops.

Diane: All different things.

Marion: That allow us to get into our fear. So if fear, I think fear is a terrific topic and a wonderful place to think about. Wonderful thing to think about. We become dishonest when we’re afraid.

Diane: Exactly, we pretend we lie, we dissemble, I buy expensive clothes to make you think I’m something else.

Marion: We’re not having that conversation. We’re not going to talk about our boots here.

Diane: Exactly.

Marion: Our black boot collection.

Diane: But I mean, one of the things that I talk about in recovery circles is most people come in with, it’s your first thing. It’s food, it’s some drug, it’s alcohol. You put that down. If you don’t deal with what’s underneath, it’ll show up somewhere else. There’s lots of, the thing that I’m currently writing about is recovery and money because lots of people in recovery end up in debt in bankruptcy, having a painful relationships because of money issues. It’s another thread that goes through there.

Marion: And when people, I imagine that people write to you and fess up and say this is, and how does that inform your own work when you have that interaction with a stranger?

Diane: So it’s weirdly validating because I can say to myself, one, I kind of know what I’m talking about. It actually builds a bit of authority because the book out of the woods came because I was at about year 15 in recovery at that time.

And I was thinking, this isn’t like in the beginning, I’m not following the rules the same way. I don’t think about the program protocols the same way. And I thought it was just me. And then I would whisper with other women in the parking lot and it was like, oh they’re having that too. And so it was like, well then I’m going to say something about it. And I came up with this idea of we’re coming out of the woods and there are some changes to recovery as you get older and longer time.

Marion: I think that’s one of the things I love most about the online world is that you can have that interaction with people, really have a conversation with them or whether even be in the comments on a blog or in social media. And we make a lot of fun of social media.

We make a lot of fun of blogs. But I actually don’t because I think the value of this stranger to stranger contact on this thing that thrums through us all, whether it be dependence or fear allows for some conversation that is an eye to eye. And there’s a great amount of value in that. I had somebody I know who’s been my classes for a long time who had been in my classes when we had them in person and he’s a Vietnam vet. And I noticed when we went online that his work got deeper and even more honest. And I said to him, what’s going on here? And he said you know what? I can no longer see the pain in other people’s eyes when I read. So I can just tell the truth. Now there is a lesson in how to write about trauma recovery.

Diane: Say it, right?

Marion: Very, very valuable. So where do you think you’ll go next? What’s next for you?

Diane: Well, I think that this recovery and money will be a next book. I’m going to pitch it as a book because again, as I would tentatively kind of raise my hand in certain places and say there are money issues here. I’ve had them, somebody else has them. We sort of joke about the credit cards and the boots, but it’s like there’s consequences for that. And then I’m seeing the looks of recognition. So it was like, okay, I think there’s enough here, there’s enough audience here for this.

Marion: So what do you do next, you’ve got the inkling of the idea, it feels cellularly like it’s true, you’ve got the eye contact from other people and you’re going to write, you’re going to do some research, you’re going to do a proposal. What goes next?

Diane: Little bit of both. One of the ways I actually sneak up on myself too, so I’ll do some blog posts and see if people respond to that. So it’s like, okay, I’m testing my language around this, testing a little bit of authority because my authority is in the recovery and then I’m going to research the money piece. How much bankruptcy, what can people do because you’ve got to leave a solution or some solutions in there too and put that out there. And I’m right at the point now of doing a book proposal to pitch that out there.

Marion: I’m a huge believer in testing my material on the public. Two of my four books came out of shorter pieces. One came out of a blog post, the memoir project, the book on how to write memoir. And my first book came out of a magazine piece and I really believe in that, that it gives you that yes, no. If you get crickets and you’re dead silence and you have some kind of a following, if you’re not saying anything new, maybe so try something else. But so the interest begins the recognition you see in other people’s eyes, you get some feedback and you go and you do your research and you go pitch your book.

Diane: Right. And this is one of the funny things about being a writer because the other way I tested it is I sort of threw up a flag and just said, I’m going to do a workshop on people in recovery and money. People started signing up for it. I was like, okay, all right, and then after I did it, I had exercises and games and we shared in small groups and did all this stuff and individually people came up afterwards that nobody’s talking about this.

“My husband and I went bankrupt.” Nobody’s talking about this. I almost got myself in this situation and whenever I hear nobody’s talking about this, I’m ready. I feel like that’s my niche.

Marion: It is your niche and I can’t thank you enough.

Diane: Oh.

Marion:Thank you so much for this conversation.

Diane: It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.

Marion: It’s a pleasure to talk to you too. And thank you for listening. The author is Diane Cameron. You can find her at her website. Her books, Looking for Signs, Out of the Woods, and Never Leave Your Dead are found wherever books are sold. Her TEDx Talk can be found on her website. I’m Marion Roach and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. Subscribe wherever podcasts are available. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overitstudios.com.

Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY and listen to it wherever you go. Want more on the art and craft of writing? Come visit me at marionroach.com, and take a class.