Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Work of Writing

Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Work of Writing

Author: Susan Wells

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2010-01-21

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780804763080

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Our Bodies, Ourselves, first published by a mainstream press in 1973, is now in its eighth major edition. It has been translated into twenty-nine languages, has generated a number of related projects, and, with over four million copies sold, is as popular as ever. This study tells the story of the first two decades of the pioneering best-seller—a collectively produced guide to women's health—from its earliest, most experimental and revolutionary years, when it sought to construct a new, female public sphere, to its 1984 revision, when some of the problems it first posed were resolved and the book took the form it has held to this day. Wells undertakes a rhetorical and sociological analysis of the best-seller and of the work of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective that produced it. In the 1960s and 1970s, as social movements were on the rise and many women entered higher education, new writing practices came into existence. In the pages of Our Bodies, Ourselves, matters that had been private became public. Readers, encouraged to trust their own experiences, began to participate in a conversation about health and medicine. The writers of Our Bodies, Ourselves researched medical texts and presented them in colloquial language. Drafting and revising in groups, they invented new ways of organizing the task of writing. Above all, they presented medical information by telling stories. We learn here how these stories were organized, and how the writers drew readers into investigating both their own bodies and the global organization of medical care. Extensive archival research and interviews with the members of the authorial collective shed light on a grassroots undertaking that revolutionized the writing of health books and forever changed the relationship between health experts and ordinary women.


How We Fight for Our Lives

How We Fight for Our Lives

Author: Saeed Jones

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Published: 2020-07-07

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1501132741

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From award-winning poet Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives—winner of the Kirkus Prize and the Stonewall Book Award—is a “moving, bracingly honest memoir” (The New York Times Book Review) written at the crossroads of sex, race, and power. One of the best books of the year as selected by The New York Times; The Washington Post; NPR; Time; The New Yorker; O, The Oprah Magazine; Harper’s Bazaar; Elle; BuzzFeed; Goodreads; and many more. “People don’t just happen,” writes Saeed Jones. “We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The ‘I’ it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, ‘I am no longer yours.’” Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir about a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence—into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another—and to one another—as we fight to become ourselves. An award-winning poet, Jones has developed a style that’s as beautiful as it is powerful—a voice that’s by turns a river, a blues, and a nightscape set ablaze. How We Fight for Our Lives is a one-of-a-kind memoir and a book that cements Saeed Jones as an essential writer for our time.


Body Kindness

Body Kindness

Author: Rebecca Scritchfield

Publisher: Workman Publishing

Published: 2016-12-27

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0761187294

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Imagine a graph with two lines. One indicates happiness, the other tracks how you feel about your body. If you’re like millions of people, the lines do not intersect. But what if they did? This practical, inspirational, and visually lively book shows you how to create a healthier and happier life by treating yourself with compassion rather than shame. It shows the way to a sense of well-being attained by understanding how to love, connect, and care for yourself—and that includes your mind as well as your body. Body Kindness is based on four principles. WHAT YOU DO: the choices you make about food, exercise, sleep, and more HOW YOU FEEL: befriending your emotions and standing up to the unhelpful voice in your head WHO YOU ARE: goal-setting based on your personal values WHERE YOU BELONG: body-loving support from people and communities that help you create a meaningful life With mind and body exercises to keep your energy spiraling up and prompts to help you identify what YOU really want and care about, Body Kindness helps you let go of things you can't control and embrace the things you can by finding the workable, daily steps that fit you best. Think of it as the anti-diet book that leads to a more joyful and meaningful life!


Our Bodies Not Ourselves

Our Bodies Not Ourselves

Author: Kathryn A. Kirigin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-08-06

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 0429891253

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In 1970, the best-seller Our Bodies Ourselves was published. The focus of the authors, the Boston Health Collective, was on the youthful female body: on reproduction, sexuality, genitalia, intimacy and relationships in the context of North American cultural expectations. Our Bodies Not Ourselves is also about the female body—but on women aging from menopause to 100. Like its predecessor, Our Bodies Not Ourselves covers sexuality, genitalia, intimacy, gender norms and relationships. But the aging woman's body has many other issues, from head to toe, from skeleton to skin, and from sleep to motion. The book, an ethnography and Western cultural history of aging and gender, draws upon history, culture and social media, the authors’ own experiences as women of 70, and conversations and correspondence with more than two hundred women aged from 60-ish to 100. They consider the cultural and structural frameworks for contemporary aging: the long sweep of history, gendered cultural norms and the vast commercial and medical marketplaces for maintaining and altering the aging body. Part I, The Private Body, focuses on the embodied experiences of aging within our private households. Part II, The Public Body, explores weight, height, and adornment as old women appear among others. Part III, The Body With Others, sets the embodied experiences of aging women within their sexual and social relationships.


These Walls Between Us

These Walls Between Us

Author: Wendy Sanford

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-10-05

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1647421683

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From an author of the best-selling women’s health classic Our Bodies, Ourselves comes a bracingly forthright memoir about a life-long friendship across racial and class divides. A white woman’s necessary learning, and a Black woman’s complex evolution, make These Walls Between Us a “tender, honest, cringeworthy and powerful read.” (Debby Irving, author, Waking Up White.) In the mid-1950s, a fifteen-year-old African American teenager named Mary White (now Mary Norman) traveled north from Virginia to work for twelve-year-old Wendy Sanford’s family as a live-in domestic for their summer vacation by a remote New England beach. Over the years, Wendy's family came to depend on Mary’s skilled service—and each summer, Mary endured the extreme loneliness of their elite white beachside retreat in order to support her family. As the Black “help” and the privileged white daughter, Mary and Wendy were not slated for friendship. But years later—each divorced, each a single parent, Mary now a rising officer in corrections and Wendy a feminist health activist—they began to walk the beach together after dark, talking about their children and their work, and a friendship began to grow. Based on decades’ worth of visits, phone calls, letters, and texts between Mary and Wendy, These Walls Between Us chronicles the two women’s friendship, with a focus on what Wendy characterizes as her “oft-stumbling efforts, as a white woman, to see Mary more fully and to become a more dependable friend.” The book examines obstacles created by Wendy’s upbringing in a narrow, white, upper-class world; reveals realities of domestic service rarely acknowledged by white employers; and draws on classic works by the African American writers whose work informed and challenged Wendy along the way. Though Wendy is the work’s primary author, Mary read and commented on every draft—and together, the two friends hope their story will incite and support white readers to become more informed and accountable friends across the racial divides created by white supremacy and to become active in the ongoing movement for racial justice.


Writing Ourselves Whole

Writing Ourselves Whole

Author: Jen Cross

Publisher: Mango

Published: 2017-08-22

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781633536197

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#1 Amazon Best Seller ─ Creating books that will change your life Healing victims of sexual assault through transformative journaling: One in six women is the victim of sexual assault. Using her own hard-won wisdom, author Jen Cross shows how to heal through journaling and personal writing. Rape victims and victims of other sexual abuse: Writing Ourselves Whole is a collection of essays and creative writing encouragements for sexual trauma survivors who want to risk writing a different story. Each short chapter offers encouragement, experience, and exercises. Sections focus on writing as a transformative practice, embodying our story, how to write trauma without retraumatization, writing joy and desire, and more. How to change your life: When you can find language for the stories that are locked inside, you can change your life. Talk therapy can only go so far for the millions of Americans struggling in the aftermath of sexual abuse and sexual assault, as well as for their partners, families, and caregivers. Survivors of childhood sexual trauma are strong and vulnerable enough to bear witness to each other's truths, to share and learn new languages for our experiences, to throw over the simplistic "victim" and "survivor" narratives that permeate mainstream media in favor of narratives that are fragmented, complicated, messy, and ultimately more whole. Sexual assault survivors can heal themselves: Sexual trauma survivor communities (and their allies) have the capacity to hold and hear one another's stories - we do not have to relegate ourselves solely to the individual isolation of the therapist's office. We do not need to be afraid, as a community of fractured, harmed and healing survivors, of reaching out to and supporting one another. Connect with others who have experienced sexual abuse: Books such as Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones and Louise DeSalvo's Writing as a Way of Healing beautifully describe the power of writing and offer practices for readers to engage with individually. Yet few creative writing or creative recovery books explicitly address sexual trauma survivor struggles to find language for their experience, nor do they describe the empowerment we might find in discovering language and expression for our delight, desire, and joy as well as our loss and pain. Writing Ourselves Whole specifically addresses the power of connecting with others who share our experience and can support us in finding language for subjects we not only are not supposed to talk about in polite company, but aren't even supposed to articulate to ourselves. Transformative journaling: Writing Ourselves Whole acknowledges the radical and profound impact of a creative healing community for trauma survivors, and includes suggestions for those seeking to create a peer writing group in their own communities. Writing Ourselves Whole rises out of the intersection of Natalie Goldberg's groundbreaking Writing Down the Bones, the powerful Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman, and the hopeful, angry struggle of Inga Muscio's Cunt. What You'll Learn Inside Writing Ourselves Whole: How to reconnect with your creative instinct through freewriting How freewriting can help you reclaim the parts of yourself, and your history, that you were never supposed to be able to name How "restorying" the old myths about sexual trauma survivors can set you free How a consistent writing practice can help reconnect you with your creative genius How (and why) to make writing part of your regular self-care routine -- and why, if you don't have a self-care routine, it's time to develop one Why writin


Cleanness

Cleanness

Author: Garth Greenwell

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2020-01-14

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 0374718148

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Longlisted for the Prix Sade 2021 Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize Longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 A New York Times Critics Top Ten Book of the Year Named a Best Book of the Year by over 30 Publications, including The New Yorker, TIME, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, and the BBC In the highly anticipated follow-up to his beloved debut, What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell deepens his exploration of foreignness, obligation, and desire Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. Soviet buildings crumble, wind scatters sand from the far south, and political protesters flood the streets with song. In this atmosphere of disquiet, an American teacher navigates a life transformed by the discovery and loss of love. As he prepares to leave the place he’s come to call home, he grapples with the intimate encounters that have marked his years abroad, each bearing uncanny reminders of his past. A queer student’s confession recalls his own first love, a stranger’s seduction devolves into paternal sadism, and a romance with another foreigner opens, and heals, old wounds. Each echo reveals startling insights about what it means to seek connection: with those we love, with the places we inhabit, and with our own fugitive selves. Cleanness revisits and expands the world of Garth Greenwell’s beloved debut, What Belongs to You, declared “an instant classic” by The New York Times Book Review. In exacting, elegant prose, he transcribes the strange dialects of desire, cementing his stature as one of our most vital living writers.


The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop

The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop

Author: Felicia Rose Chavez

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Published: 2021-01-05

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 1642593877

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The Antiracist Writing Workshop is a call to create healthy, sustainable, and empowering artistic communities for a new millennium of writers. Inspired by June Jordan 's 1995 Poetry for the People, here is a blueprint for a 21st-century workshop model that protects and platforms writers of color. Instead of earmarking dusty anthologies, imagine workshop participants Skyping with contemporary writers of difference. Instead of tolerating bigoted criticism, imagine workshop participants moderating their own feedback sessions. Instead of yielding to the red-penned judgement of instructors, imagine workshop participants citing their own text in dialogue. The Antiracist Writing Workshop is essential reading for anyone looking to revolutionize the old workshop model into an enlightened, democratic counterculture.