With warm, lively, often humorous anecdotes, advice, and lessons, this unique approach to creative writing as a path to healing the self shows how to reverse the damaging effects done to writers in school, where red pens disciplined grammar and taught them to mistrust their natural ability as storytellers--freezing them in their creative tracks NPR sponsorships .
The best story is one that comes from the heart. The library is having a contest for the best story, and the quirky narrator of this book just has to win that rollercoaster ride with her favorite author! But what makes a story the best? Her brother Tim says the best stories have lots of action. Her father thinks the best stories are the funniest. And Aunt Jane tells her that the best stories have to make people cry. A story that does all these things doesn't seem quite right, though, and the one thing the whole family can agree on is that the best story has to be your own. Anne Wilsdorf's hilarious illustrations perfectly capture this colorful family and their outrageous stories in Eileen Spinelli's heartfelt tale about creativity and finding your own voice.
How do we get students to "ache with caring" about their writing instead of mechanically stringing words together? We spend a lot of time teaching the craft of writing but we also need to devote time to helping students write with purpose and meaning. For decades, Georgia Heard has guided students into more authentic writing experiences by using heart maps to explore what we all hold inside: feelings, passions, vulnerabilities, and wonderings. In Heart Maps, Georgia shares 20 unique, multi-genre heart maps to help your students write from the heart, such as the First Time Heart Map, Family Quilt Heart Map, and People I Admire Heart Map. You'll also find extensive support for using heart maps, including: tips for getting started with heart maps writing ideas to jumpstart student writing in multiple genres from heart maps suggested mentor texts to provide additional inspiration. Filled with full-color student heart maps, examples of the resulting writing, along with online access to 20 different uniquely designed reproducible heart map templates, Heart Maps will be a practical tool for awakening new writing possibilities and engaging and motivating your students' writing throughout the year.
In his first edition of Write from the Heart, Hal Zina Bennett presented a spiritual approach to writing that showed both beginners and seasoned authors how to overcome blocks, unleash their creative voice, and see their books in print. In this edition, he gives readers an even more interactive experience by incorporating exercises he's developed during his many years conducting workshops. An all-new chapter on supportive critiquing shows readers how to make contacts in the all-important community of writers and how to get help with the process of writing and refining. This revised edition also includes an updated section on getting published that addresses print-on-demand, electronic books, and the Internet.
Best-selling New Zealand author Joy Cowley, author of hundreds of books, including the classic Mrs. Wishy-Washy, offers an indispensable manual for those who are called to write for children. Brimming with down-to-earth advice and keen insight, the book draws on Cowley's lifetime of writing and teaching writers. From plot to dialogue, and on through discipline and humor, editing and presentation, Cowley reveals the whys and hows of telling stories that will captivate young readers. Above all, Cowley reminds writers to "keep your serious adult voice under control, and let the child within you grow wings to fly with the child out there."
This book explores a new model for the production, revision, and reception of Biblical texts as Scripture. Building on recent studies of the oral/written interface in medieval, Greco-Roman and ancinet Near Eastern contexts, David Carr argues that in ancient Israel Biblical texts and other texts emerged as a support for an educational process in which written and oral dimensions were integrally intertwined. The point was not incising and reading texts on parchment or papyrus. The point was to enculturate ancient Israelites - particularly Israelite elites - by training them to memorize and recite a wide range of traditional literature that was seen as the cultural bedorck of the people: narrative, prophecy, prayer, and wisdom.
"Every writer has advice for aspiring writers. Mine is predicated on formative years spent cleaning my father’s calf pens: Just keep shoveling until you’ve got a pile so big, someone has to notice. The fact that I cast my life’s work as slung manure simply proves that I recognize an apt metaphor when I accidentally stick it with a pitchfork. . . . Poetry was my first love, my gateway drug—still the poets are my favorites—but I quickly realized I lacked the chops or insights to survive on verse alone. But I wanted to write. Every day. And so I read everything I could about freelancing, and started shoveling." The pieces gathered within this book draw on fifteen years of what Michael Perry calls "shovel time"—a writer going to work as the work is offered. The range of subjects is wide, from musky fishing, puking, and mountain-climbing Iraq War veterans to the frozen head of Ted Williams. Some assignments lead to self-examination of an alarming magnitude (as Perry notes, "It quickly becomes obvious that I am a self-absorbed hypochondriac forever resolving to do better nutritionally and fitness-wise but my follow-through is laughable.") But his favorites are those that allow him to turn the lens outward: "My greatest privilege," he says, "lies not in telling my own story; it lies in being trusted to tell the story of another."
The journal of Frances E. Willard nineteenth-century America's most renowned and influential Woman had been hidden away in a cupboard at the National WCTU headquarters, and its importance eluded Willard's biographers. Writing Out My Heart publishes for the first time substantial portions of the forty-nine volumes rediscovered in 1982. They open a window on the remarkable inner life of this great public figure and cast her in a new light. No other female political leader of the period left a private record like this. Best known for her powerful leadership of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), at that time the nation's largest organized body of women, Willard was a world-class reform leader and feminist. How she achieved this stature has been documented. This compelling journal reveals why. Written during her teens, twenties, and fifties, the journal documents the creation of Frances Willard's self. At the same time, it often reads like a good novel. It stands as one of the most explicit and painful records in the nineteenth century of one woman's coming to terms with her love for women in a heterosexual world. Other sections reveal what impelled Willard to reform the nature and depth of the religious dimension of her life a dimension not yet adequately explored by any biographer. Here we see her growing commitment to the "cause of woman." The volumes written in her late middle age give insight into the years when, world famous, she was part of the transatlantic network of reform, battling ill health, dealing with controversy in the WCTU, and grieving for her mother, a lifelong figure of emotional support. This finale concludes one of the most fascinating of the journal's themes: the nineteenth-century confrontation with sickness and death. Drawn from one of the richest sources in documentary history, knowledgeably introduced and annotated, Writing Out My Heart is a biographical goldmine, rich in the themes and institutions central to women's lives in nineteenth-century America.
The subtitle of Maggie Ross's new book captures its essence, for it is about silence and our need to behold God. Beholding is a notion that we are in danger of losing. It is often lost in translation, even by the NRSV and the Jerusalem Bible. Beholding needs to be recovered both in theology and practice. Ross is very aware of "poor talkative Christianity." There is a twofold plea to enter into silence--for lack of silence erodes our humanity--and to behold the radiance of God. This is a book full of deep questioning and the testing of our assumptions. Throughout there is a great love for the world and for our humanity, accompanied by sadness that we are so easily distracted . . . . We are invited into a silence that is not necessarily an absence of noise, but is a limitless interior space. Ancient texts are used in new and exciting ways, and many of our worship practices are challenged. She is in no doubt that "the glory of the human being is the beholding of God." --adapted from a review in The Church Times (London) by Canon David Adam.
"Demystifying the French: How to Love Them, and Make Them Love You is aimed at first-time visitors to France as well as long-term expatriates. Designed to help readers 'crack the code,' avoid common mistakes, and get off on the right foot with the French, the book begins with five easy-to-follow essential tips 'for even brief encounters' by introducing a few French phrases and how to say them that will pave the way for a positive experience in France. The tips are followed by 10 chapters that go into a deeper explanation of French habits, manners, and ways of viewing the world. Hulstrand shares the perspective she has gained in nearly 40 years of time spent living, working, teaching, and traveling in France, and illustrates the principles she is discussing with sometimes touching, and often amusing, personal anecdotes... Reflections contributed by David Downie, Adrian Leeds, Harriet Welty Rochefort, and other well-known commentators on Franco-American cultural differences provide additional perspective and depth. A glossary of French terms that is both substantive and whimsical provides surprising insights into historical as well as cultural reasons for the French being 'the way they are.' Aimed mainly at an American audience, this book will be helpful for anyone who wants to better understand the French, and have fun while doing so."--Amazon.com.
