Writing for Your Life

By Deena Metzger

Deal Ends: Tue 12th May

A poet and therapist helps readers access the healing power of writing in this inspiring guide to creative self-reflection.In Writing for Your Life, Deena Metzger gives readers the tools to experience the wonder of self-knowledge and the joy of creation, while healing what is fragmented, injured, or suppressed within us. In this resource for writers and nonwriters alike, Metzger helps us explore ourselves and our creativity through journals, autobiography, stories, fairy tales, dreams, and myths. She offers stories and suggests numerous exercises to show readers how writing shapes and informs our lives, and how our "silence" hinders us. Amazon.com Review Writing for Your Life is an inspiring companion for any writer, professional or personal, who sees writing as a spiritual act. Early chapters on creativity and story would appeal to anyone interested in breaking through self-imposed boundaries, by encouraging the writer to "set yourself the task to write not only what you know but more especially what you don't know." We've all heard this before, but Deena Metzger (A Sabbath Among the Ruins) provides such resonant anecdotes and enticing exercises that it begins to seem not only doable but fun. "Even when writing about ourselves or an event that we know well," she says, "we sometimes find that the story ... is taking a direction we never expected. As it is always possible to come back to the known, it is politic, under these circumstances, to see where the story wants to go." Later chapters help writers access their inner worlds through meditation, spirit guides, mythology, tarot cards, the muse, visions, nature, and dreams. To follow Metzger's book closely requires a great deal of hard but rewarding, work. "Maintaining a spiritual practice is an ordeal like climbing a mountain," Metzger warns, "and it demands the same of us: commitment, discipline, endurance, focus, and awareness. There at the top is the sky and, perhaps, the large vision, but ultimately the meaning is in the climbing." --Jane Steinberg Review "A deep and valuable book about writing and the creative life that stimulates the imagination."--Linda Leonard, Ph.D., author of"Witness to the Fire From the Back Cover In the tradition of Annie Dillard and Natalie Goldberg, this resource for writers and non-writers alike shows the act of writing to be a dynamic means of knowing, healing, and creating the body, mind, and spirit.