Welcome
Lisa Dale Norton authored the acclaimed literary memoir Hawk Flies Above: Journey to the Heart of the Sandhills (Picador USA/St. Martin’s Press.)
She is also one of a handful of developmental writing coaches in the United States with a specialty in Memoir. She edits memoir, and helps clients develop books of memoir. Click here to read about here work with writing clients: http://www.lisadalenorton.com/?page_id=8
Lisa’s new book Shimmering Images: A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir (Griffin/St.Martin’s Press) is in bookstores everywhere.
- People everywhere love Shimmering Images.
- Shimmering Images teaches clearly and concisely the process for creating a story drawn from life material.
- Shimmering Images is the ultimate lifestyle tool, showing you how to reshape your life through storytelling.
The technique Lisa teaches is disarmingly simple: Write your story; change your life.
The Santa Fe Writing Institute has received hundreds of emails expressing gratitude for the book, its loving tone, and its laser focus on the essence of how to write a memoir that has the power to change how you live your life in the future.
Here’s just one testimonial:
I have just finished reading Shimmering Images and only wish I had read it before writing my manuscript. I have about 350 pages exploring our family’s life raising our son….”
— S.L, New York
And this one came to us in January 2009:
“I think you are the guru of nonfiction writing!”
—K. R., New Jersey
Library Journal found Shimmering Images “hard to put down.” Here’s what they had to say in a June 15, 2008 review:
Norton (founding director, Santa Fe Writing Inst.; Hawk Flies Above ) offers a similarly speedy and approachable read. Only slightly over 100 pages, it gets right to the point about the process of crafting a memoir. Norton’s goal is to teach lay writers her own method of writing compassionate and arresting personal memoir. Her instruction focuses on the titular concept of “shimmering images”-memories of blazing detail, many only a moment or two in real time, which are imbedded in the mind from childhood forward. Norton first outlines the steps for conjuring these images and capturing them on paper. She then follows with simple instruction for selecting, organizing, and unifying the images. Norton’s writing is friendly and refreshingly spare, with most chapters only a few pages long.”
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
It’s an easy process to follow, one that any person who dreams of writing about his life can follow, no matter how much experience he may have with pen and paper, or tapping the keys of a computer.
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 blogs for The Huffington Post.
- Lisa edits and works with a select number of narrative nonfiction writers who are finishing book manuscripts. See Book Editing: Developmental Coaching for Memoir Writers.
- She founded and directs The Santa Fe Writing Institute.
- Lisa holds degree Reed College and University of Iowa.
- Lisa teaches Narrative Nonfiction classes for UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, the grandaddy of extension programs in the United States.
- She writes a column for Authorlink.com: Your Life As Story: Writing Narrative Nonfiction, covers the hottest form in the marketplace today.
- Lisa speaks to groups across the country about the power of story to transform lives and about the craft of memoir writing. Sample organizations:
- The Open Center(New York City)
- International Women’s Writing Guild (New York, Santa Cruz, Chicago, Saratoga Springs)
- Society of Southwestern Authors (Arizona)
- The Pahaquarry Foundation (New Jersey)
- Willamette Writers Association (Oregon)
- The Whittenberger Writing Project (Idaho)
- The Mandala Center(New Mexico)
- Pacific Northwest Writers Association (Washington)
- Richard Hugo House (Washington)
- (Complete listing—Speaking Schedule.)
Subscribe to my