Memorial Day Sale 2025

May is a beautiful time of year—spring has melted the snows and the flowers are bursting out everywhere. It’s also a time of remembrance, and this year many of us want to not only honor those who died in battle but the innocent people whose lives have been cut short by violence and war all over the world. Everyone has a story, a unique story that can be a lesson or a guide to others as they deal with what life offers—joys and the sorrows, inspiration and wisdom.

This is a good time to think about family legacies and the stories we want to pass down to the generations to come. After all, if you don’t tell your story and the story of your ancestors, who will? We celebrate remembering families and the importance of all our stories by offering our Memorial Day sale for a yearlong membership to support your inspiration to write and offer resources to help you complete your projects.

There are many benefits to becoming a member—archives of audios, articles, and teaching materials you can draw from in the member section of our website. Most of all we offer three live programs each month!

NAMW members receive our live Member Events on Zoom—a gift from the pandemic that has brought everyone together more intimately. Inspiring experts who are familiar with the path of writing and publishing a memoir speak about on developing your craft, the process of dealing with the inner critic, writing about family, and writing your truth. We learn about journaling, developing podcasts, how to best use social media, and how to market your book. Linda Joy is always looking for new expert presenters and authors to share with NAMW!

Group coaching is a live Zoom event for members. Here members gather in an intimate zoom room to discuss the progress of their memoir, and ask questions of the group and Linda Joy about things like—how do I find a publisher? Is it worth it to write a proposal? Where can I find writing buddies? (The answer is—many writers find compatible writing partners in our coaching group!)

Every month we host the live Virtual Book Club discussion where “regular people” who wrote a memoir share their published book, talk about they were inspired to write it, and how they chose their publishing path. There are strong personal reasons why people need to write a memoir, and in a memoir, all of us identify with the personal struggles the author shares. Many who are featured in the club discussion are former students and debut memoir writers who went the distance and now they generously share their tips and wisdom! 

Learn more about our many member benefits here.

What Made You Could Make This Place Beautiful a Bestselling Memoir?

You Could Make This Place Beautiful upended the world of memoir in 2023. It seemed for months that all anyone could talk about was this ambitious, exploratory, and unconventional memoir that pushed boundaries, pulsed with gorgeous prose, and that made any memoirist who read it want to write a better book.

For years, Brooke Warner and Linda Joy Myers have taught their bestselling memoir series, featuring books like Wild, The Glass Castle, and The Tender Bar. They’re back for another round with Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful because this is a book that has much to teach us both about the craft of writing and what we’re up against as writers of personal narrative when what we write involves and impacts others.

Brooke and Linda Joy are honored and excited to delve not only into what made this book so popular, but why it clicked with so many readers. This course will focus on what you can learn from You Could Make This Place Beautiful to improve and deepen your own writing—always with the goal of touching readers’ lives and leaving your own indelible mark on this genre with your eventual published work.

BONUS VIDEO: “Mapping Your Memoir ” Workshop Replay
As part of our Memorial Day celebration of remembrance and storytelling, new members will receive access to the video replay of our powerful mini-memoir workshop with Linda Joy Myers and Carla King. This class offered guidance on capturing brief but meaningful stories—from moments of love and loss to humor, healing, and personal discovery. Through vivid scenes and emotional clarity, writers learned how to honor memory and shape their experiences into short, shareable pieces that resonate.

Transcript for Writing as Healing, an Interview with Dr. James Pennebaker
Linda Joy Myers has been a therapist for over 40 years, and has always been passionate about the magic and transformation that story telling and writing brings to people. This bonus is an interview with Dr. James Pennebaker, a psychologist who conducted research about the power of words to transform and heal. His research gradually reached out to the whole world, along with his books and many interviews.