Product Description Highly acclaimed author and teacher Louise DeSalvo offers the first detailed writing program designed for healing. DeSalvo shows how anyone can use writing as a way to overcome the emotional and physical wounds that arn an inevitable part of life. She culls journals, diaries, letters, and works of dozens of famouns 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 with, she illuminates how the writing process has transformed authors such as Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller, Audre Lorde, and Isabel Allende. WRITING AS A WAY OF HEALING gives valuable advice and practical techniques to guide and inpsire both experienced and beginning writers.
Groundbreaker for healing and writing August 28, 2008 This book was a turning point for me in my writing. I found it fascinating to hear the stories behind established authors whose painful beginnings were the sources of their writings. It helped me understand the significance of story, my story included, which created a new confidence in writing. I often refer it to people who express a desire to write but who feel no one wants to hear their story. This book was very interesting to read and full of significant information about specific authors/writings.
Way above and beyond the call March 24, 2008 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Despite being a writer, it's so hard expressing the extent to which this book has touched my soul. I came to it desperately in need of guidance, already knowing DeSalvo's reputation as a Woolf critic I've greatly admired. I knew her book would be useful. I had no idea it would be life-changing. This is one of the most influential books on my life I've ever read, and it may even be the most influential on me. I've never found any book on this topic to truly cut to the heart of what it is to need to find healing, much less a book with as much practical advice as this one. DeSalvo doesn't spew platitudes and feel good metaphor. She presents empathetic real advice on how to free yourself from the horrors of the past. I hope to meet Louise DeSalvo one day and thank her for this book. It's touched me to the core.
At The Top Of My List of Favorites December 16, 2007 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I have read a great many books on writing, and written a few myself. But Writing as a Way of Healing has gone straight to the top of my list of favorites, and I suspect that it will stay there for a very long time--perhaps for all time. But in the process of reading this book, I discovered I had to read the book that went before it, and now I want to tell you about both.
Louise DeSalvo has been teaching English and creative writing for nearly twenty years. The first in her working-class Italian family to graduate from college, she escaped a soul-deadening home life--a depressed mother, an angry father--by reading, going to the movies, and dating, dating, dating. It wasn't until the late 1980's, when she wrote a scholarly book about the impact of childhood sexual abuse on the life and work of Virginia Woolf that she began to come to terms with her own childhood traumas and the lingering shadows of her mother's death and her sister's suicide. She dealt with her pain, anxiety, and depression in a memoir called Vertigo (now available in paperback, published by Plume), in which she explored her own story. Vertigo isn't a pleasant book, or easy--it's about hidden pain and the depression and despair into which a woman can fall when she attempts to avoid self-knowledge. But it is a necessary book, for through it, DeSalvo learns that the process of life-writing is also the process of healing. What she discovered in Vertigo, and what she subsequently put to use in her own teaching, is the subject and object of Writing As a Way of Healing.
DeSalvo's section and chapter titles, by themselves, are helpful clues to the book's significance. The first section is called "Writing as a Way of Healing," and contains four chapters: Why Write, How Writing Can Help Us Heal, Writing as a Therapeutic Process, and Writing Pain, Writing Loss. Section Two is called "The Process/The Program," and has four chapters: The Healing Power of the Writing Process, Caring for Ourselves as We Write; and Stages of Growth I and II. The third section, "From Woundedness to Wholeness Through Writing" contains two chapters: Writing the Wounded Psyche and Writing the Wounded Body. The Epilogue is called "From Silence to Testimony." Each of the chapters contains suggestions for writing, examples (from such writers as Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, Isabel Allende, Djuna Barnes), discussion, and ideas--lots of ideas, so many ideas that you'll find yourself wanting to stop reading and start writing (something that DeSalvo herself, no doubt, would applaud).
DeSalvo refers extensively to a favorite researcher of mine--Dr. James Pennebaker--whose book Opening Up has been an important influence on my own understanding of the healing power of the writing process. When we use writing to explore traumatic or anxiety-provoking events in detail, together with the feelings that arise from those events, the writing process can help us to understand more clearly, cope in a more balanced way, and even feel better physically. Seen from this point of view, life-writing becomes a lifetime project, as we unravel the meanings of events and explore our responses to them. When we commit ourselves to this very important lifelong project--recognizing that we don't write our story once and for all and forget it!--we commit ourselves to a lifetime of learning, growing and healing.
by Susan Wittig Albert for Story Circle Book Reviews www.storycirclebookreviewsorg reviewing books by, for, and about women
Very Inspirational April 19, 2006 6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Although the book was not quite what I was expecting, i.e. a book that teaches you how to journal, I found it exceptional nonetheless. It was inspirational as it shared stories of other writers who write to save their sanity and souls. It also offered useful techniques to get you thinking about your memories and how to record them.
I highly recommend this very readable book.
Validation Personified April 2, 2005 19 out of 20 found this review helpful
My daughter Debbi gave me this book for my birthday. I read Ms. DeSalvo's book when I was in the final stages of confronting the tragic suicide of my father that happened two days before my high school Senior Prom. For nearly fifty years after the day my entrepreneur father put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger his death gnawed at me. By facing what happened to me on that dreary spring day in Boston and trying to make sense of my Pop's state of mind on the day he died I was able to dig down deep into my soul and describe how I felt. I opened up my heart and was able to face a time only years had kept at bay. By writing about my heretofore-suppressed feelings I began to sob over the keyboard and took my first steps to understand why my father died. Desalvo's book validated my earlier conclusion that writing is truly a way of healing.
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