Writers both new and experienced will appreciate [Fletcher's] clear and straightforward advice on how a writer's notebook can be used to find one's own voice and inner truth.
- KLIATT

Keeping a notebook may be the single best way to survive as a writer. It encourages a greater sensitivity to your world, inside and out. It serves as a haven for new ideas until they are strong and mature enough to face the harsh light of rational judgment. It gives you a quiet place to catch your breath and begin writing.

Breathing In, Breathing Out is a book for the writer in each one of us, however lost, however buried. Ralph Fletcher takes a probing look into the nature of a writer's notebook, examining what it is, how writers use it, and what makes it tick. You will discover why writers like Naomi Shihab Nye and Dorothy Allison consider their notebooks so important to the work they create. You will also read snippets from Fletcher's notebook, where he reveals the "displayed self" of a writer whose innermost workings he knows best.

To Fletcher, keeping a writer's notebook is as natural an activity as breathing so he has organized his book in a way that illuminates two basic aspects of the process. Breathing In refers to the way the notebook can serve as a receptacle for selected insights, lines, images, dreams, and fragments of conversations. In this way it helps you pay closer attention to your world. Breathing Out is intended to suggest the notebook as an ideal place to use what you have collected and spark your own original writing.

This book is for new writers as well as those who may have once loved to write but have lost the spark along the way. It will help you find a natural rhythm for using a notebook and in the process start living the life of a writer.

Writers both new and experienced will appreciate [Fletcher's] clear and straightforward advice on how a writer's notebook can be used to find one's own voice and inner truth.KLIATT

Ralph Fletcher takes a probing look into the nature of a writer's notebook, examining what it is, how writers use it, and what makes it tick.

RALPH FLETCHER is a nationally known educational consultant and speaker. He is the author of What A Writer Needs, Walking Trees: Teaching Teachers inthe New York City Schools, and BreathingIn, Breathing Out: Keeping a Writer's Notebook, all from Heinemann. His short stories and articles have appeared in Redbook , People , Cosmopolitan , and the Wall Street Journal , and he has published his third book of poetry, I Am Wings (Bradbury Press, 1994). He has worked with teachers and children across the United States, in Europe, and in the Middle East. He spent three years as a senior member of the Teachers College Writing Project in New York City involved with staff development. Ralph's talks are humorous, anecdotal, and practical. His work with teachers has its roots in his classroom experience as well as his own writing. He has the utmost respect for the difficult, important job teachers havein helping students find their voices for the writing that will shape the

A Place to Write

What Moves You? What Matters?

The Language Angels

Thirteen Drops of Wine

Triggers: Bits, Lists, Lines, Questions

Breathing in the Physical World

Talk

The Echo of the Past

Necessary Words

A Place to Write Badly

Compost and Transformation

Divining Rod: Summoning the Deep Water

Escaping the Monkey Trap

The Set Piece: Something Small and Beautiful

Writing About Writing

Writing at the Border: Dangerous Words