The Poetics of Peace: To Heal, Write a Memoir
- Teresita "Angela" Terga
- Aug 17
- 8 min read
To learn how to write a memoir, set up an appointment with us.
Email us at: light@camp1.org. We are a charity and want to hear your history and help you write it.
Hi! I'm Angela Terga, founder of TAT Productions and Conscious Arts Media Productions, a nonprofit organization helping artists like myself fund their dreams. We offer several writing services (translation, adaptation, ghostwriting, memoir, and non-fiction coaching). Our Blog: Memoirs of a "Mad" Teacher brings readers an insight into the life of a teacher who gave up her post for the sake of freedom to create.
At CAMP, we offer coaching in writing your memoirs for personal or business purposes. We want to help you tell your story from the inside out by guiding your writing journey. Everyone's story is important because we all contribute to the collective consciousness. CAMP also looks to help business owners share what and how their business was built and inspire others.
To share the best and worst times of your life means to unveil and unravel your life's purpose. Sometimes we need to let go, other times we need to hear a message from our higher consciousness. Share your journey for the sake of the future. Every story deserves to be told. It's your story. Write what you lived. It's your legacy.
Angela is a seasoned writing coach who has helped countless students of all ages write stories. What we pass down and bring to the light helps to build society's consciousness. She believes that to do so is our responsibility. She has written several short stories and poetry memoirs, among other types of writing, including novels, screenplays, copywriting, blogging, and academic articles.
Most often, memoirs are in first or third person: Here's a memoir about overcoming the breaking point.
how Angela became a mad teacher
She got mad, alright! Yep, she had no planning period, but was told so when she signed her contract, days into the planning week before the first day of school. She was not going to say no right then; she had already moved.
One thing she would let them know later was that she did not work for those who tried to take advantage of her.
So, she had no choice but to accept the position of teaching Language Arts to two different grade levels, 7th and 8th, which required each an X-tra amount of planning hours a week. Plus, she was also teaching Journalism and oversaw the cage with all the equipment Univision had brought in for their educational experiment. She was excited about opening their mind to the idea of becoming a journalist. (Univision must be attracting a younger audience for future Spanish TV programming, she thought."
The Univision journalists participating in the Program were mainly on-camera, on-site personnel, all of them women who looked alike and talked about the same thing every time. They were very friendly, knowledgeable, pretty graduates, and well spoken. Two exceptional ones had produced remarkable news content.
Students enjoyed their talks on the power of the press as the fourth power column of democracy, and they loved practicing the 5Ws they were taught to apply to every news subject. (But they had only been exposed to the 5Ws since 3rd grade). The students got restless after a month of the same routine. They wanted more. But the editors came only twice in six months.
At the beginning of the year, she, the moirist, the teacher, passed out a long list of media terms that needed to be read, defined, and applied. "They could be learning around those words all year long, so there will always be something to fall back on with industry jargon and consciously internalize being a journalist.
Every class period, they worked in assigned groups on assignments and created a news story every week. But when several 'studios' were going on at once in the classroom, it got chaotic. It can get wild 'real quick' in middle grades. One child was acting as if she were a mosquito (based on current news). That's the one news story so bizarre she couldn't forget. Laugh and cry!
The MG 7-8 graders would then present their news bit on video and turn in a written script. But the class never got past the beginning stage of shooting the video and into editing with special effects, intro, outro, and other whistles. Camera work was another thing. They were frustrated. No one came to help them edit and shoot. The journalists just wanted to tell them stories about their journalistic experience.
With an easier editing ai app, the students would have done much better. Only a few could edit their videos on the app after 6 months. But we did our best and made some progress. The worst part was losing equipment, misplacing it, missing the memory cards, and having a new kid dropped into your class, reassigned there for who knows what good reason. All because the administration failed to sign out the equipment, she spent hours worried and tracking the equipment, only to find out that they just took it for whatever reason, whenever, without leaving behind a note.
She did not have a planning period and taught three classes, all of which were new curriculum, too. She spent countless hours planning and grading. She went to work, she slept, she ate, she showered, and twice a week, she did a 3-mile walk at 5 and went to kundalini yoga once. That helped.
But the breaking point came when the District offices mandated that Language Arts teachers would, from then on, be responsible for entering and managing all the students' Reading (online program) grades, if they were also in that teacher's Language Arts class.
At that MG school, most 7th-8th-grade students had to take Reading because they were at least two grade levels below. Some were past the three-year ESOL threshold and still couldn't read grade-level school material in English (or Spanish), due to a lack of interest among parents, media, teachers, and students. It certainly wasn't brains!
We, the LA teachers, took our case to the head of the District Language Arts Department. Nothing could be done about it by HER.
Oh yeah? She simply refused to.
So, she quit. It just so happened that a famous NFL player wanted her to write his memoirs. So she did.
THE END
PS. Today, she wonders whether she did the right thing. It broke her, but didn't stop her from getting herself together again.
It's a memoir.
If you need a friend, count on yourself.
We all have sorrows.
We all have joys.
We all have Self.
We all create.
Life is Art.
Remember Bill Withers' song, Lean on Me? It goes something like this ..... if you need a friend... call me.
But who better to count on than ourselves?. 'Lean on me,' says the Self, when you're not strong and you need a hand. You can be your own best friend.
So when you need help to carry on and no one is there but you, turn to writing, and you'll have a friend right there and then. You and the SELF. But when you get stuck, and you will, we all do, call CAMP.
WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS AND WHAT IS THE SELF: IS THE SELF CONSCIOUSNESS?
While Researching THE SELF, we at CAMP found out that:
In philosophy, the Self refers to an individual's own being, knowledge, and values, distinguishing selfhood from personal identity.
In personality psychology, the self encompasses the individual as a whole, including all characteristics, attributes, and consciousness.
According to Carl Jung, the self represents the totality of a person's being, emphasizing its centrality and significance in psychological development.
Additionally, the self can be viewed as a complex system operating at multiple levels, influencing various phenomena related to identity and behavior.
These perspectives highlight the multifaceted nature of the self in understanding human identity and experience.
who are you?
My favorite icebreakers, the first days of school, were always the ones where the students shared a lot about themselves. That's how you 'get' the person's vibes and idiosyncrasies. That's Bob! or Janet, or Eddie. But now you've got them, and you learned them.
And I always played this song!
Now tell me as many things about your self in three minutes and the winner gets a prize!
CONSCIOUSNESS: ME MYSELF AND I
“Me” vs. “I”: Two Sides of the Self
Back in 1890, psychologist William James introduced a simple but powerful idea: the self actually has two sides — the “Me” and the “I.”
The “Me” is the part of us we can look at — the version of ourselves we notice, describe, and judge. Think of it as seeing yourself in the mirror or replaying how you acted in a conversation. It’s the self as an object.
The “I,” on the other hand, is the one doing the experiencing — the voice in your head, the presence behind your eyes, the self as a subject. It’s harder to pin down, because it’s not something you can step outside of and observe. It’s just the you that’s always “there.”
Recently, this old idea has become popular again in cognitive science, especially in experiments about how we experience being “us.” Researchers often talk about the phenomenal self (the “Me” — the content of consciousness that feels personal) and the metaphysical self (the “I” — the bigger mystery of why any of this feels like my experience).
Some philosophers, like Thomas Metzinger, suggest that even what we often think of as the “I” might really just be another mental construct — another layer in the brain’s model of self. That fits with modern neuroscience theories like predictive coding and free energy models, which argue that the brain is constantly predicting, shaping, and updating our sense of who we are.
So, next time you catch yourself reflecting — “That’s me in that situation” — remember there’s also an “I” behind the reflection, the one who’s aware of it all. And maybe, just maybe, that awareness is the biggest puzzle of all.
WRITE IT ALL DOWN: WRITE WHAT YOU LIVED IN ITS TOTALITY. BE BRAVE.
WRITING OUR REFLECTIONS DOWN HELPS US BECOME SELF-AWARE. JOURNALING HELPS US BREAK DOWN FEELINGs INTO COMPONENTS. WE ARE OUR OWN BEST OR WORST FRIEND: purify the soul. Write it all down -surrender - write your memoirs.
This poem I wrote in 1978 holds true TO THIS today. You can find the poem title FRIEND in my book Sandcastles, on page 115, SANDCASTLES.
What is the brain like on art?
How is writing an art form?
How does writing help us heal?
How does writing help us organize our thoughts?
How does writing help us describe a feeling?
How does writing help us express our anxieties?
How does writing help us relax?
How does writing help us plan the future?
How does writing help us expand our lives?
How does writing help us plan our future?
"By helping people manage and learn from negative experiences, writing strengthens their immune systems as well as their minds" says
Smyth, J., & Lepore, S.J. (2002). The writing cure: How expressive writing promotes health and emotional well-being. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
"Most broadly, The Writing Cure asks: What would it look like to write your way to the end of an analysis? Is it possible to write yourself into the position of psychoanalyst? Is it possible to write your cure?"
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