Ever since she was a child, Linda Joy Myers felt the power of the past. As the third daughter in her family to be abandoned or estranged by a mother, she carried the traumas in her own body and was obsessed with the need to find out what happened to the mothers in her family. Thanks to the stories her great-grandmother told her in a featherbed in Iowa, Myers received a gift that proved crucial in her life: the idea that everyone is a walking storybook, and if you listen carefully, you can find the clues to understand the past.

Song of the Plains: A Memoir of Family, Secrets, and Silence (She Writes Press | June 20th, 2017 | $16.95) is a weaving of family history that starts in the Oklahoma plains and spans seven generations. Myers combs through dusty archives, family gossip, and genealogy websites to uncover the stories that reveal the secrets of her family’s past—when and why the mothers abandoned their daughters, the harshness of life on the Plains, and the dreams of escape. Her poetic elegy to the power of nature and history shows how you can change your family story from inheriting patterns from the past to create a legacy of forgiveness, healing, and love.

 

 

As a memoirist and memoir teacher, Myers believes we all carry the imprint of the generations that come before us; if we excavate our hidden truths, we can unlock a deeper understanding about the past, and create a more positive heritage for our descendants. The memoir takes you on a journey from a childhood of abandonment to an adult perspective that finds compassion for the mothers in her family as she walks in their shoes through the early twentieth century.