Category Archives: Writing as Sacred Journey

A critical but usually unspoken component to writing well is the quality of the human being who writes.  Is he or she smart?  Thoughtful?  Curious?  Provocative?  Original?  Has he or she done emotional research to undergird the story?  “Living a conscious and reflective life is a prerequisite for writing a memoir of substance,” writes Judith Barrington.   Likewise with poetry and fiction.  The written word may be wiser than the human who wrote it, but never by much. Writing classes don’t address these questions, for good reason; little can be done in a school setting to address a student’s basic nature.  Perhaps when writing teachers despair of ever being effective, this is why.  Unfortunately, many writing teachers shy away from teaching revision as a result.  Creating writing prompts is easier than helping writers to jettison egos, generate new narrative structures, and discover the emotional undercurrents that will become unifying themes. But…

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Here’s an observation to chew on:  A few times in my career as a writing instructor, I’ve coached retired therapists in writing their memoirs.  These are people who have worked with their personal stories over decades; they’ve had extensive experience in therapy and have continued to explore their stories through supervision groups and continuing education.  And yet, when they sit down to pen their life experiences, they’re shocked.  They remember details that have never before emerged.  They pair memories in surprising ways, revealing new perspectives on events.  They discover recurring themes that bring unity to their story they never knew existed. This phenomenon is not unique to therapists.  Many authors who have done extensive therapy or told their stories multiple times in twelve-step groups make the same observation:  writing an experience down changes us in different ways than telling it aloud. Why? Here’s my theory.  When keep our stories to…

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During my first years of serious writing, I labored under the conceit that I was writing a book.  The thought was bracing; it motivated me to climb out of bed at 5:30 so I’d have a half-hour of solitary creativity before I had to face a classroom of seventh graders.  Only as I entered my third and fourth years on the project, having given up public school teaching and discovered that my memoir was not an adventure story about biking through Wales but rather an uncomfortably revealing story about reconciling bisexuality with my Christian upbringing; only as I revised the book a dozen times did I begin to understand what was really happening.  The book was writing me.  The primary creation was the self I became because of the writing—a self humbled by the truth of my story and yet less afraid to own this truth; a self no longer…

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