Tyra Manning - Your Turn: Ways to Celebrate Life Through Storytelling

A well-told saga of recovery from loss and emotional breakdown, and a tribute to the ordinary blessings that made it possible.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

Telling stories and writing through your everyday stresses is the key takeaway in Your Turn. Dr. Tyra Manning believes that writing brings about clarity and hope in life. Her essential tools will help you get your inner thoughts onto paper and get you focused on the positives.

PARADE

Our worrisome thoughts can feel big, urgent, and uncontrollable. As Manning said, it can feel like were getting caught in a whirlpool. While we might not be drowning physically, were drowning in negative chatter, she said. Even though our worries can feel overwhelming, we can shrink them. We can channel them into solutionsor we can reveal them for what they are: unhelpful, unreasonable, and illogical. The key is to know the difference.

PSYCH CENTRAL

Your Turn provides advice on composing even more precise, telling details that truly capture ones life journey, and for anyone wishing to tell her/his story, its an unusually useful and specific handbook to guide ones writing.

COLEEN GRISSOM, Ph. D Professor of English Trinity University

Your Turns friendly and accessible tone makes it seem as if youre sitting down with a dear friend sharing stories over a cup of coffee, but Manning doesnt shy away from the hard realities of lifes more challenging moments. The writing prompts and examples offer readers an opportunity to truly get to know themselves through their stories, and hers.

BRIDGET BOLAND, Modern Muse

Drawing on her own challenging life experiences, Dr. Tyra Manning presents an invitation and a guide to all of us to celebrate our lives through storytelling. As she remembered her own good times and bad times, she was rewarded with gifts of clarity, acceptance, forgiveness, and new perspectives on life. As you review your life experiences and share them with others, you reaffirm your own lifea task well worth pursuing.

W. WALTER MENNINGER, M.D, psychiatrist of the Menninger Foundation, former dean of the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry and Mental Health Science, former CEO of the Menninger Clinic, former editor of Psychiatry Digest, and nationally syndicated newspaper columnist

Dr. Mannings book is a step-by-step roadmap to guide you through the maze that is writing your perfect memoir or autobiography. And the best part is that rather than reading like another how-to manual, Your Turn is filled with wonderful stories and anecdotes that give you a glimpse into the authors own life. Its a must read for any aspiring writer.

KAREN KEILT, author of The Parrots Perch: A Memoir

Copyright 2019 Tyra Manning

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

Published 2019
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-63152-456-1 pbk
ISBN: 978-1-63152-457-8 ebk
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019937621

For information, address:
She Writes Press
1569 Solano Ave #546
Berkeley, CA 94707
Credit: Where the Water Meets the Sand, by Tyra Manning was the original
source of some of the material

Interior design by Tabitha Lahr

She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.
All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.

Names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.

To all the storytellers and those who want to be. Tell your stories for yourself, those you love, and those you may never know. Write your stories and make a difference.

N othing helps us heal from the hurt feelings or resentments we bury deep in our hearts, from childhood through adulthood, like writing down our stories. I write about age-old pain left over from a quarrel with a sibling, an argument with my mother, or a bruise from a put-down on the playground that lives just below the surface of my skin, hidden, festering and gnawing at my psyche, a tattletales admonition that I felt wronged and too frightened to stand up for myself. I write about residual grief from the loss of a relationship through death or the loss of a relationship due to a misunderstanding or the loss of a dear friend due to a physical move across the country. The kind of grief that weighs on my shoulders until even the smallest reminder that I cant have a cup of coffee with the person Im missing overcomes me as Im waiting at the Starbucks drive-thru window for my caf breve latte while my favorite CD by Three Dog Night blares out Joy to the World.

Writing my stories helps me remember the good times and the worst of times, and offers me the opportunity to understand them. Writing and celebrating my stories helps me heal. Hindsight gives me many gifts: clarity, acceptance, forgiveness, and new perspectives on past experiences. Im not unique in having lovely and sometimes sad stories in my repertoire. Sharing our life stories teaches us that we have more commonalities than differences. It brings us closer together.

Sometimes, the most important stories are the ones that pop into our mind when we least expect them to. They are often spurred by seeing or doing something that reminds us of a particular event or person. I didnt intend to think about my grandfather PaPa, who grew watermelon in West Texas. But when I saw watermelon in the grocery store recently, it brought back memories of when I was a small child, searching with PaPa for the best watermelon in the patch.

Okay, Tyra. He grinned as he broke the watermelon in half, plunged his huge hand into the center, and pulled out the sweet, dripping red heart.

Sit here. He lifted me onto the bumper of his truck. This is the best eatin there is.

Music is also a strong catalyst for memory and writing. Musics rhythm helps me develop a cadence to my writing and helps me drown out unwanted thoughts. A few weeks after I checked myself into The Menninger Clinic, Mona, my sewing instructor, walked me over to the gymnasium for my first obligatory volleyball game. As we approached the gym, off in the distance I heard the familiar high-energy Three Dog Night rendition of their classic anthem Joy to the World blaring through the loudspeakers. A tiny shiver of happiness pulsed down my spine. I remember being surprised at the return of an emotion I hadnt felt since Id fallen into a deep depression months earlier.

I walked tentatively into the gym, where other patients were lined up on opposing sides of the volleyball net, poised for the opening serve. Each team had some players who were clearly more swept away in the sheer joy of the musical moment than at the prospect of competing. Their bodies swayed back and forth to the beat of the song, caught up in their own expressions of exuberance and inspired to dance by the song and its nonsensical lyrics.