In this inspiring book, based on her twenty years of research, highly acclaimed author and teacher Louise DeSalvo reveals the healing power of writing. DeSalvo shows how anyone can use writing as a way to heal the emotional and physical wounds that are an inevitable part of life. Contrary to what most self-help books claim, just writing won't help you; in fact, there's abundant evidence that the wrong kind of writing can be damaging. DeSalvo's program is based on the best available and most recent scientific studies about the efficacy of using writing as a restorative tool. With insight and wit, she illuminates how writers, from Virginia Woolf to Henry Miller to Audre Lorde to Isabel Allende, have been transformed by the writing process. Writing as a Way of Healing includes valuable advice and practical techniques to guide and inspire both experienced and beginning writers.
Acclaimed author Louise DeSalvo draws on her own experience and the lives of others to examine the healing power of the writing process. In this landmark work, DeSalvo uses her twenty years as a teacher of writing to explore how the creative process can in fact be a restorative tool. She looks at the cutting-edge scientific research on the subject and presents dozens of anecdotes of famous writers and beginners in the field to illuminate her theory that writing can repair pain--and keep our demons at bay. In Writing as a Way of Healing, DeSalvo also develops a detailed program of exercises that shows writers and nonwriters alike how to "open up" to themselves through writing, write regularly in a relaxed way, and achieve a state of personal acceptance through writing. DeSalvo's techniques will provide a solid foundation for writers to benefit both physically and emotionally from telling their stories. DeSalvo writes with remarkable insight of a wide range of writers who have found that their work helped them to heal, including Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Kenzaburo Oe, Djuna Barnes, Peter Handke, Jamaica Kincaid, and Mark Doty. In these pages, we become familiar with writers' stories of healing: Isabel Allende deals with the anguish of sitting near her comatose daughter's bedside by beginning to compose a letter to her that eventually becomes the memoir Paula. Henry Miller, despondent when his wife, June, left him for another woman and contemplating suicide, instead works through the night on a story that details his life with June. This brief outline, written during a time of Miller's sharpest despair, serves as the inspiration for his greatest novels. DeSalvo illustrates how writers can find solace in their work if they ensure that they have a safe environment and a deliberate plan to approach the writing process. She also discusses what went wrong for writers "at risk" like Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, and she warns of the danger of using writing as a call for help instead of seeking help. According to DeSalvo, the way to responsibly write, to heal, is to make an effort to understand our experiences as we write about them. The healing power comes from the reflection on the pain we are living through. In this inspiring book, highly acclaimed author and teacher Louise DeSalvo reveals the healing power of writing. Based on her twenty years of research, DeSalvo show how anyone can use writing as a way to heal the emotional and physical wounds that are an inevitable part of life. She draws on the journals, diaries, letters, and works of dozens of famous writers and students of the craft to illustrate how people "change physically and psychologically when they work on projects that grow from a deep, authentic place." With insight and wit, she illuminates how writers, from Virginia Woolf to Henry Miller to Audre Lorde to Isabel Allende, have been transformed by the wiring process. Writing as a Way of Healing includes valuable advice and practical techniques to guide and inspire both experienced and beginning writers.
A study of the process of restorative writing draws on both personal experience and the memoirs of Isabel Allende, Audre Lorde, and others to explain how one can use writing to deal with the conflict and turmoil of one's life.
Baring the Truth in Your Memoir When you write a memoir or personal essay, you dare to reveal the truths of your experience: about yourself, and about others in your life. How do you expose long-guarded secrets and discuss bad behavior? How do you gracefully portray your family members, friends, spouses, exes, and children without damaging your relationships? How do you balance your respect for others with your desire to tell the truth? In The Truth of Memoir, best-selling memoirist Kerry Cohen provides insight and guidelines for depicting the characters who appear in your work with honesty and compassion. You'll learn how to choose which details to include and which secrets to tell, how to render the people in your life artfully and fully on the page, and what reactions you can expect from those you include in your work--as well as from readers and the media. Featuring over twenty candid essays from memoirists sharing their experiences and advice, as well as exercises for writing about others in your memoirs and essays, The Truth of Memoir will give you the courage and confidence to write your story--and all of its requisite characters--with truth and grace. "Kerry Cohen's The Truth of Memoir is a smart, soulful, psychologically astute guide to first-person writing. She reveals everything you want to know--but were afraid to ask--about telling your life story." --Susan Shapiro, author of eight books including Only As Good as Your Word, and co-author of The Bosnia List
“We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.” —C. Day-Lewis Writing is one of the oldest and most effective means of self-exploration, self-expression, and self-discovery. In this new guided journal, Mary Potter Kenyon offers readers an opportunity to reflect on the meaning and significance of loss and allows the griever to sort through all the conflicting emotions that arise after a death. By interweaving her own experiences of loss, the proven research behind writing as a method for healing, and blank pages with carefully chosen quotes, Kenyon gives readers space to express the feelings that are sometimes too painful to speak aloud.
These highly personal essays from a range of academic settings explore the palpable moments of discomfort, disempowerment, and/or enlightenment that emerge when we discard the fiction that the teacher has no body. Visible and/or invisible, the body can transform both the teacher's experience and classroom dynamics. When students think the teacher's body is clearly marked by ethnicity, race, disability, size, gender, sexuality, illness, age, pregnancy, class, linguistic and geographic origins, or some combination of these, both the mode and the content of education can change. Other, less visible aspects of a teacher's body, such as depression or a history of sexual assault, can have an equally powerful impact on how we teach and learn. The collection anatomizes these moments of embodied pedagogy as unexpected teaching opportunities and examines their apparent impact on teacher-student educational dynamics of power, authority, desire, friendship, open-mindedness, and resistance.
Celebrating one of the most important Italian American female authors of our time, Personal Effects offers a lucid view of Louise DeSalvo as a writer who has produced a vast and provocative body of memoir writing, a scholar who has enriched our understanding of Virginia Woolf, and a teacher who has transformed countless lives. More than an anthology, Personal Effects represents an author case study and an example for modern Italian American interdisciplinary scholarship. Personal Effects examines DeSalvo’s memoirs as works that push the boundaries of the most controversial genre of the past few decades. In these works, the author fearlessly explores issues such as immigration, domesticity, war, adultery, illness, mental health, sexuality, the environment, and trauma through the lens of gender, ethnic, and working-class identity. Alongside her groundbreaking scholarship, DeSalvo’s memoirs attest to the power and influence of this feminist Italian American writer.
A “groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Gospels” that “shines a new light on the profound teachings of Jesus,” recasting him as a spiritual visionary with a radical vision for humanity (Deepak Chopra) This highly original take on the Gospels offers a fresh, new way of imagining human life and society. It presents Jesus not as the founder of a religion but as a world reformer offering a spiritual path to everyone, from every background. It offers a personal spirituality fit for the twenty-first century, where the individual bears responsibility for meaning and for a creative, convivial way of life. In his examination of the original Greek texts, author Thomas Moore dismisses the cautionary voice of tradition and explores the deeper significance of language, stressing the origins of words and the many levels of meaning in stories and imagery. Through his study, Moore shows that the teachings of Jesus are challenging in a far different way than the moralism often associated with them. Based on being open to life, deepening your understanding, and giving up all defensiveness around your convictions, the Gospels can be the source of a new kind of certainty and stability that cannot be codified and enshrined in a list of rules. Writing in the Sand presents the essence of Jesus’ teachings and offers a way of understanding them intelligently and devotedly in the twenty-first century.
Updated to provide a modern look at the daily stessors evolving in our ever changing society, Managing Stress: Skills for Self-Care, Personal Resiliency and Work-Life Balance in a Rapidly Changing World, Tenth Edition provides a comprehensive approach to stress management, honoring the balance and harmony of the mind, body, spirit, and emotions. Referred to as the “authority on stress management” by students and professionals, this book equips readers with the tools needed to identify and manage stress while also coaching on how to strive for health and balance in these changing times. The holistic approach taken by internationally acclaimed lecturer and author Brian Luke Seaward gently guides the reader to greater levels of mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being by emphasizing the importance of the mind-body-spirit connection.
