Show and Tell: Healing From Trauma Through Art

Local Author’s debut memoir is “a clear-eyed examination of life and personal

Linda Litteral is proud to announce the release of her debut memoir, Show and Tell: Healing from Trauma Through Art, which is available through Empress Press and Amazon. It is a highly personal, richly illustrated book about Litteral’s journey as a survivor of incest, rape, and domestic violence who found a way to heal through the practice of art.

In her publisher’s notes, Jennifer Leigh-Selig, an author and publisher of Empress Publications, hails Show and Tell as “a courageous memoir.”

“Show and Tell is the story of a survivor of incest and rape who used art to heal from the destruction of the body and spirit that comes from physical and sexual abuse,” Leigh-Selig writes. “In this courageous memoir, Litteral shares the story of her abuse, spanning eight years of incest perpetrated by her grandfather, a rape she experienced in high school, and physical and verbal violence she suffered at the hands of her first husband. She offers an in-depth psychological profile of the effects of abuse, including silence, shame, invisibility, powerlessness, guilt, and difficulties with trust and identity. She also illustrates how the body remembers abuse through symptomatology like dissociation, anxiety, chronic illness, and other post-traumatic stress responses.

“Yet Litteral has done more than survive her past—she’s found a way to thrive in the present. She generously catalogs all the healing modalities she has experienced in her decades of undoing the destruction of her past, including talk therapy, meditation, yoga, breathwork, Tai Chi, and somatic-based therapies like acupuncture, EMDR, sacral-cranial therapy, and Thought Field Therapy. But it’s when Litteral discovers the power of creating and