Mary Allen is a writer living in Iowa City, Iowa. Allen is an MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and published her memoir The Rooms of Heaven in 1999. She received an NEA grant in 2002.
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Life
Mary Allen was born in Northampton, Massachusetts. Because her mother had postpartum mental illness, Allen grew up in the home of a foster family. She received a Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Massachusetts in 1976. She worked in publishing in Boston, at Little, Brown and Company, in the 1970s and ’80s, moved to Iowa City in 1986 to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and received an MFA in 1988. Her memoir, The Rooms of Heaven, was published by Alfred A. Knopf and Vintage Books, she received an NEA grant for work on another literary memoir, Awake in the Dream House. She makes a living as a writing coach.
Writing
Mary Allen writes about spiritual and psychological healing. Her themes are love, addiction and codependency, the nature of life and death, and the ways our states of consciousness intersect with our experiences of reality. She has written about being the daughter of a mother with maternal mental illness and about healing through EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy). She has spoken and written widely about issues affecting writers, including the challenge of finding time to write as well as the spiritual gifts of writing. She has a blog called Harnessing Time, about making peace with time and learning how to use it as an asset instead of fighting with it like an enemy.