The Getting Real with Hilary Show with Hilary Burns

Title: S2 E6 | Mary Allen's Mother's Mental Health Illness Was So Bad Mary Put Herself in Foster Care

Choosing foster care over living at home with her mother shaped Mary's life in a significant way. When her fiancé committed suicide in her 30's, Mary's life was shaken up radically again. But Mary did not let her fear or traumas stop her from living life.

When Mary discovered her calling to be a writer, she boldly declared: "I will be a writer and nothing will stop me." This was the beginning of everything good in her life.

Mary was proud to be accepted into the Iowa Writer's Workshop. In Iowa, she developed herself as a memoir writer. She used writing to make sense of her childhood and her fiance's death. She explored life after death, talking to the deceased and even spent 7 exciting days in the psych ward. Mary has continued to heal through writing and many other healing modalities.

She makes a living as a writer and writing coach which is truly inspirational. Her writing took her on a spiritual and psychological healing journey which helped her overcome her grief and childhood fear.

Mary's experience with her mentally ill mother gives her a deep sensitivity to others. She is a professional writer and writing coach who has helped hundreds of other people become writers as well.

Join us in a spirited and fascinating conversation about Mary's life, her challenges, her tragedies, and her healing. Mary is happily writing and living in Iowa.

Mary can be found at maryallenwriter.com. Her books mentioned below are available on Amazon. She is currently writing her third book which will be released in the next year.

BIO:

Mary Allen is the author of The Deep Limitless Air: A Memoir in Pieces, published in May 2022 by Blue Light Press. Her literary memoir, The Rooms of Heaven, was published by Alfred A. Knopf and Vintage Books. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship and has published short work on the Psychology Today website and in Poets and Writers, Tiferet, Real Simple, Library Journal, The Chaos, CNN Online, and in the anthology If I Don’t Make It, I Love You: Survivors in the Aftermath of School Shootings. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught in the University of Iowa’s nonfiction writing MFA program and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival at the University of Iowa. She currently makes a living as a writing coach and lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Mary Allen’s themes are spiritual and psychological healing, love, the nature of life and death, and the ways our states of consciousness intersect with our experience of reality. Her writing — and broad range of writing topics — reflect her belief that the personal and the practical, the painful and the numinous, the spiritual and the ordinary are all blended together in our lives and cannot be separated from one another without at least part of the truth being lost.

www.maryallenwriter.com
www.iowawritingcoach.com