What happens when we finally put our story to paper, the one we've carried quietly for years, sometimes decades?
In this episode of the Energy of Serenity Podcast, host Donna McDine sits down with author, editor, and memoir coach Lorraine Ash for a conversation about the healing power of storytelling. It's a moving, honest discussion about grief, resilience, and the courage it takes to say "this happened to me" out loud and why doing so can change not only the writer's life but also the lives of readers they'll never meet.
Lorraine Ash is a book editor and author coach who specializes in autobiography and memoir writing. She has written two memoirs of her own, Life Touches Life: A Mother's Story of Stillbirth and Healing and Self and Soul: On Creating a Meaningful Life, and most recently edited the award-winning anthology Corona City: Voices from an Epicenter, which gathers first-person accounts from 65 writers chronicling life in the New York and New Jersey COVID-19 epicenter. A graduate of Fordham University and California State University, Long Beach, Lorraine now lives in New Jersey, where she continues to teach memoir workshops and lead a career that spans journalism, ghostwriting, editing, and teaching all rooted, as she puts it, in the same literary continuum of helping voice come through.
Much of the conversation centers on Life Touches Life, the memoir Lorraine wrote after losing her daughter at full term and nearly losing her own life during the birth. She talks candidly about the isolation of stillbirth, an experience she describes as cloaked in invisibility, and about the decision to publish a story many in the industry initially saw as too difficult. That decision, made possible by publisher Maureen Michelson of New Sage Press, ended up traveling to 18 countries and connecting Lorraine to mothers around the world, including a reader who, decades after her own stillbirth in the 1960s, wrote to ask if the loss had truly not been her fault. It's a striking reminder of how long silence can last and how much relief a single honest book can offer.
The conversation also explores what Lorraine calls "braided memoir," weaving personal experience together with research, science, or wider cultural context so an individual story resonates as part of something larger. She reflects on her work editing Corona City, the friendships and closeness that formed even through early Zoom readings, and why she sees writing and testifying to our own corner of the world as something close to a moral responsibility: if we don't tell our own stories accurately, she notes, someone else will, and that's often where misunderstanding and prejudice take root. Lorraine and Donna also discuss the emotional release many workshop participants experience when they finally put pen to paper, and Lorraine shares a striking exercise from a yoga retreat that revealed how much of our inner critical voice isn't even our own.
In this episode, you'll learn:
Why Every Story Deserves to Be Told: How even ordinary lives touch on universal themes, and why that makes every personal story worth writing.
The Healing Power of "Braided Memoir": How weaving personal experience with outside research or cultural context can deepen a story's impact.
Turning Grief Into Connection: How Lorraine's memoir on stillbirth and healing reached readers in 18 countries and offered comfort across generations.
You Are Not Alone: Why hearing someone else's honest account of loss can dissolve decades of silent guilt.
Bearing Witness as a Moral Act: Why documenting our own experience authentically helps prevent misunderstanding and division.
The Emotional Release of Writing: Why putting words on paper, even without any intention to publish, can be deeply therapeutic.
Filtering Out the Noise: A yoga retreat exercise that reveals how many of our thoughts aren't truly our own.
Living Inside the Web of Story: How paying attention to where our words and reactions come from can change how we move through daily life.
This episode is a gentle, powerful reminder that our stories, even the ones we've been afraid to tell, carry the power to heal, to connect, and to help someone else feel less alone. If you've ever wondered whether your own experience is "worth" putting into words, this conversation with Lorraine Ash offers a clear and comforting answer: it already is.
Connect with Donna McDine.
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Connect with Lorraine Ash.
Website: https://lorraineash.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorrainevash
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LorraineAshAuthor/
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