Lorraine Ash

Lorraine Ash, MA, is the author of Life Touches Life: A Mother’s Story of Stillbirth and Healing and the forthcoming A Sudden End to Seeking: Finding Peace and Purpose Within. Both are spiritual memoirs, an old but evolving genre she believes in as a catalyst for personal healing and transformation and social change. “We each were born as a character into a large family and cultural story,” she said, “and not always in the roles we would have chosen for ourselves. Then fate takes us in unexpected directions. Writing spiritual memoir is a way to weave our outer and inner lives to create meaning and trace and direct our evolving identities over time, including that timeless core in each of us called the soul.” What does all that have to do with social change? Nothing helps the human race see and understand itself more than such honest witnessing in every corner of the human experience. There is no taboo territory in autobiographical writing, which the author William Dean Howells once called “the most democratic province in the republic of letters.” In her workshops and writing retreats Lorraine fuses rigorous original literary techniques with a wide range of spiritual and philosophical thought. Participants learn to find their strongest writing voice, structure their stories in compelling ways and see their lives from surprising and useful new angles. All these goals are achieved in an informal backdrop of serenity and relaxation. Why? Because gracious contemplation is a friend to creativity. The ultimate achievement always is for the writer to lead herself, and her readers, to some spiritual truth. Lorraine also likes writing shorter memoiric works that have appeared in anthologies, including Steeped in the World of Tea, and various journals and webzines such as Cairn, Journeys, Ducts and Recovering the Self: A Journal of Hope and Healing. But she doesn’t always write memoir and autobiographical fiction.