Mini Memoir Writing Workshop led by Noel Nguyen
Join us for the Mini Memoir Writing Workshop led by Noel Nguyen—trauma-informed writer, adoptee, and author of My Life in Mud: A Path to Choosing Love—this five-session memoir essay workshop (January–February 2026) offers a guided space for Vietnamese adoptees and community members to reflect, write, and share their stories. Rooted in compassion and resilience, the workshop explores identity, family, origin, love, and healing.
Noel draws from her own journey as an Operation Babylift adoptee, blending personal experience with her companion workbook to create a safe and supportive environment. Together, participants will transform memories into written narratives that honor both individual truths and our collective history.
This five-week virtual workshop invites adoptees and allies to shape personal histories into powerful memoir-style essays. Through guided prompts, reflective journaling, and peer exchange, writers will discover their authentic voice and craft essays that balance personal detail with universal resonance.Each participant will complete a polished essay that both honors their lived experience and contributes to our shared legacy.
Selected works will be featured in the April 2026 Invisible Threads Gathering and Gallery, ensuring these stories are preserved, remembered, and celebrated.
Noel Nguyen is a Vietnamese adoptee, writer, and transformational guide whose work bridges lived experience with deep spiritual and healing practices. She is the author of *My Life in Mud: A Memoir*—a lyrical journey of abandonment, adoption, identity, and becoming—and *My Life in Mud: A Path to Choosing Love*, a companion workbook guiding reflection, journaling, and self-discovery through the symbolism of the lotus rising from the mud.
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As a survivor of early loss and displacement through Operation Babylift, Noel writes from the intimate space of lived experience, exploring themes of identity, love, family, origins, and healing. Her work speaks directly to the adoptee journey—honoring both the silence and the voice, the fracture and the wholeness—and invites others to reclaim their own stories.Her philosophy: “We are not defined by the mud we come from—we blossom because of it”.
There is an invisible thread—soft as breath, strong as the roots of an ancient tree—that binds us together. Woven not by hands, but by longing, unanswered questions, and stories left untold, it stretches across time, place, and memory.This workshop is born of that thread. It invites adoptees and community members to transform personal histories into memoir-style essays that honor identity, family, resilience, and belonging.
Guided by Noel Nguyen, participants will explore memory and meaning through writing, reflection, and sharing.These stories are more than individual accounts. They are strands in a collective tapestry—histories half-whispered, faces searched for in reflections, truths carried across oceans of silence. By writing them down, we give voice to what has been quiet, we preserve what has too often been overlooked, and we remind each other that none of us has ever truly walked alone.
This is not just writing.
This is reclamation.
This is connection.
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This is the weaving of Invisible Threads into something lasting—a legacy of love, hope, and resilience that will not be forgotten.Together, we continue the story.
Together, we keep the thread alive.
Format & Flow
5 live, virtual sessions (1 hour each, weekly)
Weekly journaling + prompts from
Peer feedback & facilitator mentorship
Final essays presented in April 2026 at the Invisible Threads exhibit
Integration with the Operation Babylift Digital Archive (oral, written, and digital preservation)
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SUGGESTED DONATION: $150
(5 scholarships for the first 5 registrations)
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