Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

writing

“Writing Down the Bones” by Natalie Goldberg

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Subtitle: Freeing the Writer Within

Recommended to me by: finding it in a little free library

Natalie Goldberg combines writing practice and Zen practice in short chapters where she shares about her own writing adventures, and repeatedly admonishes the reader (or herself) to just sit down and write. I appreciated her ongoing willingness to sink into the depths of herself and write whatever showed up. The book veers between writing exercises, Zen wisdom, and her anxiety about eating too many brownies.

“A writer’s job is to make the ordinary come alive, to awaken to the specialness of simply being.”

“If you give yourself over to honesty in your practice, it will permeate your life.”

“We are good, and when our work is good, it is good. We should acknowledge it and stand behind it.”

I wonder if this book would have landed differently for me if I had read it when I was still writing and sending out an article each month. Since writing is not something I’m trying to make a living at, I don’t have the urgency or intensity around it that this book speaks to.

Recommended for people wrestling with being a writer as an identity, a practice, and/or a career.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Your Mindful Journal and Memoir” by Jenny Davidow

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Subtitle: Open the Floodgates to Your Creativity

Recommended to me by: the author

Your Mindful Journal and Memoir by Jenny Davidow has great advice for making journal entries more lively and personal and present. My paper journal is completely private and I’m not trying to improve it in any way, but the tips feel useful for online posts, and could apply to creative writing, too.

I met Jenny at Balkan camp years ago and we corresponded a bit about her book. I was happy to review it on Amazon:

“Your Mindful Journal and Memoir” is good medicine for our frenetic, fragmented modern lives. Jenny Davidow distills decades of experience with mindfulness, journaling, creativity, and teaching into a step-by-step guide full of wisdom and kindness.

For someone new to journaling, the book offers ideas on what to write and how to center it on the present moment even when it is about the past. For someone whose Inner Critic says, “You can’t say that!” or “You’re doing it wrong,” the book offers a shift toward safe experiments and listening inwardly with a kind ear. For someone whose attention is focused on external approval, the book offers fiercely guarded privacy and tuning in to one’s own voice and preferences.

For everyone, the book offers innovative ways to combine journaling with mindfulness and self-exploration, creating a lively personal record. For those who want to share individual entries or publish a memoir, the book offers strategies to do so with creativity and care.

As a longtime journal-writer, I appreciated the gentle invitations to turn events into metaphors, and I enjoyed reading the author’s example entries shared from her own journals.

Highly recommended for anyone who wants to keep a journal but struggles with what to say, or who wants to heal their connection with their creativity, or who wants to create a memoir but doesn’t know where to start.

Available at Amazon.

“You Don’t Look Adopted” by Anne Heffron

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Recommended to me by: an adopted client

Anne Heffron shines a light on the seams that adoption leaves behind, by sharing her story and her thoughts with painful honesty. She was adopted into a “good” (white, middle class, well-intentioned) family and is pressured by her emotionally fragile mother and all of society to act like her adoption was a blip that no longer affected her. But she feels chaotic and terrified inside. When her life has entirely fallen apart, she finally writes the book she always wanted to write.

“In a parallel universe, the universe of my imagination, I was sitting at an entirely different table with entirely different people, eating entirely different food, so it seemed pointless to give myself one hundred percent to my life.”

“I have heard too many stories to think adoption is something that happens at birth or in childhood and then fades into I am part of this family with no repercussions—no emotional issues, no health issues, no fear of future abandonment, no fear of loss.”

“I want to write the book that, if I had read it at seventeen, I wouldn’t have felt so badly about myself, so wrong, so destined for a shaky future.”

The book is written in brief sections with all-caps headers. Distractingly, the headers are sometimes at the bottom of one page and the section continues on the next page. She says the book is written in fragments to express her sense of being fragmented inside.

Highly recommended to anyone who is involved with adoption (adoptee, birth family, adopted family) or wants to understand adoption better.

Anne Heffron’s website.

Available at Amazon.

“Recollections of My Nonexistence” by Rebecca Solnit

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Recommended to me by: Reading her other books, and her talk at Powell’s Books on zoom with Jia Tolentino on March 9, 2021.

Rebecca Solnit is a powerful, clear, lyrical writer. I thought her memoir might be literary and opaque, but instead it is luminously down to earth.

It contains brief descriptions of violence against women as she describes her ongoing dread that one day she would be the target. She shares the process of finding her voice amid the pressure to remain silent and unheard as a woman.

She describes living in a lovely studio apartment in San Francisco for 25 years, and the gentrification she witnessed in her neighborhood over that time. She invites us along on her widening explorations of the western US and the connections she made with environmentalists, anti-nuclear protestors, and Native Americans defending their land.

At the end of the book she comes back around to violence against women, and the writing of her explosively popular essay Men Explain Things To Me, which inspired the term “mansplaining.” She points out that the #MeToo movement was a tipping point built from many women speaking up and gaining power and gaining allies. We don’t know what may follow from our small actions against big problems. Keep taking the small actions that are available to you.

Highly recommended.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Steering the Craft” by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Subtitle: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

Recommended to me by: Justine Larbalestier

A writing manual about the tools of the writing trade: punctuation, grammar, voice, point of view. This compact book is carefully detailed, wryly kind, deeply knowledgeable. It arose out of writing workshops that Le Guin offered, and has been revised for the 21st century with references to twitter and online workshops. She includes sample passages from classics, and tells us what she admires about them. Each chapter ends with a writing exercise and how to learn from it.

I felt in safe hands. I’d like to go back and do the writing exercises sometime, especially with a group. I write essays, not stories, so not everything applies, but I’m sure it would still be helpful.

Highly recommended for anyone who writes stories, or anyone (like me) eager to read anything written by Ursula K. Le Guin, who is sorely missed.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Dreyer’s English” by Benjamin Dreyer

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Subtitle: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

Recommended to me by: Jesse-the-K’s rave review

This book is both a useful guide to writing well in English, and an entertaining quick read that includes the occasional jab at the current occupant of the White House. Benjamin Dreyer is persnickety and opinionated, as befits the Copy Chief at Random House. He holds forth on grammar rules that can be safely ignored and ones that can’t, easily misspelled words, easily misspelled names, and words that tend to be confused with each other.

One can see his process of becoming more educated on social justice issues. There is one inexplicable balk at using work-hours instead of man-hours (seriously?!) but otherwise his language in the book is inclusive of women. He admits that he also balked at using singular they until he had a colleague who uses they pronouns.

Recommended for writers and others interested in the vagaries of the English language.

Available at bookshop.org.