Writing Toward Home: Tales and Lessons to Find Your Way

Here is a personal and compassionate book for everyone writers, poets, teachers, lovers of life, and especially those seeking to find their writing voices again or for the first time. It is an autobiographical travelogue moving from a volcano in Hawaii to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and places in between, with writing at its heart.

Writing Toward Home offers practical advice on overcoming some of the obstacles writers of all ages face: writer's block, fear of rejection, confronting silencing critics in your head, finding the time to write. Each short chapter speaks to the larger truths about writing and how to truly live the writer's life: how to become more of a risk taker, how to excavate the past as a source, and how to become an acute observer of the world.

Writing Toward Home is a book that will remind you-and help you remind your students-that the true source of writing is the creative self. In this fast culture when most people have so little time to do anything but menial tasks, it will jumpstart you, it will awaken to you the journey within, it will make you want to write.

Confronts the obstacles every writer faces.

Here is a personal and compassionate book for everyone - writers, poets, teachers, lovers of life, and especially those seeking to find their writing voices again or for the first time.

An acclaimed poet and writer, GEORGIA HEARD is the author of Writing Toward Home: Tales and Lessons to Find Your Way (Heinemann, 1995), For the Good of the Earth and Sun: Teaching Poetry (Heinemann, 1989), and Creatures of Earth, Sea, and Sky, a book of poetry for young children. She has also published numerous essays on poetry and writing, and her poems have appeared in a variety of literary journals. She speaks to thousands of people every year at conferences throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and also travels extensively as a writing consultant and poet-in-residence for schools and universities. Heinemann has also produced The Words of True Poems (1998), an audiotape on which Heard reads a selection of her favorite poems, prefacing each poem with a brief introductory comment on its uses in the classroom. Ms. Heard's work has appeared in numerous magazines and professional journals and she has been interviewed on National Public Radio's "P

Raven Man: The Journey Out of Silence

A Conversation with Yourself

Finding Your Way Home 4 . Querencia

Poetry Inside All of Us

Where Does Writing Hide for You?

I Could Not Tell

An Angel on Your Shoulder 9 . Feng Shui 10 . Doing What We Have to Do

Time-Worlds

Keep the Channel Open

I'm Not in the Military

The Rumble Beneath Your Feet

The Education of the Eye: Staring

Don't Try and Avoid the Rocks

Let Writing Lead the Way

The Intent, Not the Recipe

For the Sake of a Single Poem

Incarnadine Seas

Everything Including the Kitchen Sink

Writing Is like Making Tortillas

Picking Up a Stone

Digging in the Earth

Fall in Love at Least Three Times a Day

From an Onion to My Grandmother

The Fire Within: Writing from Anger

Ten Observations a Day

Layers

First Memory

Rivers of Memory

The Full Picture

Visual Archaeology

Layers of History

Gannon Hill

Stones and Sorrows

Listening to the Corn

In That Time

Writing from Behind the Scenes

The Family at the Next Booth

Back from the Mountains, a Yellow Handrail

Whispering into the Air

Ancestors

Synchronicity: Connecting the World

Dreams

Song to a Fallen Chestnut: Odes

Found Writing

Prayers: Words with Winged Feet

Walk

Lessons from Art

Blind Contour Drawing: Revision

Tapping into Words