Welcome

Lisa Dale Norton authored the acclaimed book
Hawk Flies Above: Journey to the Heart of the Sandhills
(Picador USA/St. Martin’s Press).

And, great news!

Lisa’s new book has found its home.

Shimmering Images: A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir
will be published by St. Martin’s Press August 2008.

Shimmering Images gives you voice.

You have the right to be heard.

Your life matters, and Shimmering Images illuminates a way to write a story about your life.

  • The chapters are short.
  • The book makes good use of your time.
  • And it gives you easy tools to structure a memoir.

Shimmering Images is divided into three sections:

  • Part I: The Ideas Behind the Process
  • Part II: The Process
  • Part III: The Tools to Craft the Process

Endorsements for Shimmering Images:

Honest, taut, funny, useful, stimulating, graceful, and all those otherlovely words, but best of all this book will make you sit your skinny butt in the chair and actually start typing, which is the point. A terrific book of operating instructions for giving birth to stories.”
—Brian Doyle, editor, Portland Magazine

Shimmering Images is a marvelously uncomplicated little book. Read it through once for the gorgeous sentences, but on the second run, get to work! With Lisa Dale Norton’s kind guidance, you’ll have your life shimmering on paper in no time, a universe to give to friends or family or even the whole wide world.”
—Bill Roorbach, author of Writing Life Stories: How to Make Memories into Memoirs, Ideas into Essays, and Life into Literature

Shimmering Images is an encouraging, smart, and surprisingly funny guide, full of well-tested exercises and approaches. Lisa Dale Norton teaches memoir writers how to get beyond blame and self-pity, how to find the compassion that leads to new insights, how to be “bone honest” with themselves. She is a very wise coach who understands that the writing process is the way to truth, that truth is complex and deep. This “handy little guide” will transform the lives of those who need to understand their pasts in order to change their futures—that is to say, all of us. Trust me, she says: and we do, we do.”
—Meg Files, author of Meridian 144, Home Is the Hunter, and Write from Life, Director, Pima Writers’ Workshop

Shimmering Images is a practical, simple, and wonderfully concise guide for memoirists seeking to improve their craft as well as those who are just getting started.”
—Debra Ginsberg, author of Waiting, Raising Blaze, About My Sisters, and Blind Submission

Never has there been a more compassionate gift to those who write. Shimmering Images is a clear-eyed, authentic vision of the art of storytelling. Norton gathers the inspirational winds in her sails, and gently propels the writer toward a place of knowing–that place where one can, at last, trust in the creative self. Awesome. Simply awesome.”
—Doris Booth, Editor-in-Chief, Authorlink.com

Like a smart friend in whom you can confide, Lisa Dale Norton leads you not only through the issues of craft you’ll need in order to form your life stories into art, but–perhaps more importantly–through the emotional landscape such work requires. A thoughtful, helpful tool for anyone facing the challenge of memoir.”
—Samantha Dunn, author of Faith in Carlos Gomez

Shimmering Images is every memoir writer’s ideal guide. With eloquent Simplicity borne of decades of teaching writing, Lisa Dale Norton has given us a map and a method that soars above all others.”
—Elizabeth Lyon, author of Nonfiction Book Proposals Anybody Can Write and A Writer’s Guide to Nonfiction

“You can read this book in an hour — but the impact could well last a lifetime. It’s simple, smart and inspiring.”
—Jennie Nash, author of The Last Beach Bungalow

In Shimmering Images Lisa Dale Norton traces a clear stimulating path to writing a memoir. Norton starts with the ideas behind the process, how story transforms experience on the page. She then gives the step-by-step process that she has been teaching for decades—finding Shimmering Images (memory pictures) and weaving them into a whole. In the third part Norton looks at some of the tools to craft the process. In writing bighearted, compassionate stories, we contribute to changing the world. Norton’s book is bighearted and compassionate. It is a gift to the reader.
—Susan Tiberghien, author of One Year to a Writing Life

This book shimmers with thought-provoking insights and truth, and Lisa Dale Norton’s elegantly spare formula is a valuable addition to the literature on the topic. Even though she specifically addresses only the memoir form, her system of memory retrieval and organization will be useful to any life writer.”
—Sharon Lippincott, author of The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing

Lisa Dale Norton’s practical and lively guide to writing memoir is like having your very own writing coach holding your hand and guiding you through your story with patience and humor. Her clear, good advice covers everything you’ll need to start writing: the difference between memoir and autobiography, claiming your own voice, finding the heart of your story, and finally crafting it into a piece of work to send out into the world.”
—Barbara Abercrombie, author of Courage and Craft and Writing out the Storm

Learn more about Shimmering Images

More about Lisa

→ Lisa’s book Hawk Flies Above has been compared to writing of Annie Dillard and Terry Tempest Williams.

→ Lisa has appeared on television, radio, and before live audiences across the country speaking about her two passions: writing and the transformative power of story.

→ Lisa holds degree Reed College and University of Iowa.

→ She founded and directs The Santa Fe Writing Institute.

→ Lisa edits and works with a select number of narrative nonfiction writers who are finishing book manuscripts. See Editing & Consulting.

→ Lisa teaches creative nonfiction for UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, the grandaddy of extension programs in the United States.

→ She writes a column for Authorlink.com. Her column, Your Life As Story: Writing Narrative Nonfiction, covers the hottest form in the marketplace today.

→ Lisa leads workshops across the country.

Sample organizations: