A Book and a Chat with Jane Rowan

The old story is that when asked why people climb mountains the answer is “because they are there”. When Jane Rowan, my guest on today’s “A Book and a Chat” was asked why she wrote her book, her answer was…

What is writing for? Is it about your ambition to sell a million books for money or fame? Is it about reaching certain readers and changing something in their hearts and lives? Is it to express something inside you that is important but unformed, demanding work and attention to bring it to the surface? Is it an expression of spontaneous need like the impulse to splash red paint across a wall when you’re angry?

I came face-to-face with these questions when I started to write The River of Forgetting: A Memoir of Healing from Sexual Abuse. Did I want to write a bestseller, sensationalizing the details to lure publishers and readers? Was I writing for revenge or to display how victimized I was?

Strangely enough, I began writing from sheer gratitude for the healing that therapy had brought me, for my therapist’s skill and care, and for the new sense of life and creativity that I had discovered. That was the bright impulse and the continuing thread, but the work of writing was something else.

Strangely perhaps to some her book is actually a celebration, a celebration of the many people who carry out heroic work every week in therapists’ offices all over the globe - uncovering painful pasts and integrating and learning to open their hearts and move on.

Jane’s story is one of many showing the paths of the process that lead you through despair to that of hope and joy, how difficult it is to really trust a therapist and allow them to literally walk through your soul.

About “The River of Forgetting”

The River of Forgetting covers a particular five-year period in Jane’s life, from the first creepy memory that surfaced and hinted at childhood abuse to the moment when she decided to write the book. It was a very turbulent time as she tried to understand whether her loving, eccentric family was also an abusive family.

While she encountered each new wave of doubt, mistrust, grief, and revulsion, Jane also had to live her regular life, teach, and care for her elderly mother.
Creative writing and artwork came to be essential outlets – the expressions just poured out of her, including the self-help booklet Caring for the Child Within—A Manual for Grownups.

Later, she went back to craft a story about this passage and create The River of Forgetting.

This deeply personal memoir invites the reader behind the closed doors of the therapist’s office and into the author’s journal and her very body. Jane’s tender story shows how we can use the challenges of painful childhood traumas to transform our lives.

So listen to an interesting and hugely entertaining show as I spend thirty minutes sharing "A Book and a Chat with Jane Rowan"

Barry

Direct link to the show
"A Book and a Chat with Jane Rowan".

or you can download the mp3 file of the show from
"Jane Rowan"

You can find out more about my guest and their books at:
"Jane Rowan - The River of Forgetting"

Barry Eva (Storyheart)

My Blogs:

Book Information and Things UK - Across the Pond

Book and a Chat Radio Show Guests - A Book and a Chat

Funny, Weird Or Just Interesting News From Around the World - Laugh I Thought My Trousers Would Never dry