Book | Writing and Healing

It’s a tortoise. It’s slow. It’s in process. And this is the page where any progress on the book will be posted.

(Would it be at all relevant to say that I am working right now on publishing a book of my students’ work? The book is a collection of essays and poetry and letters on the American Dream and through the process I’m learning a lot about formatting a book and publishing at Create Space. I’m going to go ahead and think of this book on student work as a steppingstone—and keep moving.)

The photo is of an Aldabra giant tortoise. Very giant. The male weighs up to 550 pounds. Most of them live on islands in the Indian Ocean. They are described as “characteristically slow and cautious,” but “capable of appreciable speed.”

I continue to hope that this metaphor will bode well for my book—and that my book might soon discover its capacity for appreciable speed.

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Photo from Wikipedia, where you can also learn more about the Aldabra giant tortoise

November Update: Writing and Healing

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 2, 2011 in Blog, Book

I’ve just now posted my third chapter of One Year of Writing and Healing: Healing as Quest. I’m trying in this chapter to get at this notion of once one begins to consider that anything along the way might be part of the quest–instead of just pure chaos–something begins to shift. Chapter 3 OYWH Yesterday I posted an excerpt from the chapter, in which I write about Jonathan Shay’s fine book, Odysseus in America. The project I’m featuring in my Healing Corridor is HODI: Soldiers of Peace. This is an inspiring project a woman has begun in Kenya where young men and women are offered healing alternatives to violence. There’s a moving video about young men from different tribes playing soccer rather than destroying each other. Well worth a look. I also did some close reading of the poem, Kindness, a couple weeks ago. It’s a poem I’m trying to keep in the back of mind–and sometimes the forefront–as I go into the month of November. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend. Wishing for you kindness in this month....