Healing Books

A large number of books could be offered here as potentially healing. I’ve chosen a handful–well, a rather large boxful–that resonate especially well with writing and healing.

The list begins with books of general interest. Following that, books are listed according to the month of One Year of Writing and Healing with which they best fit. Underlined titles link to a brief piece in which I’ve written about the book–or in which I’ve written about a topic that springs from the book.

Books of General Interest

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

Writing Without Teachers by Peter Elbow

Opening Up by James Pennebaker

The Writing Cure by Stephen Lepore

Month One: Creating a Healing Place

Fern Garden by Deborah Schenck

Soul Garden by Donald Norfolk

Writer’s Retreat Kit by Judy Reeves

Noah’s Garden by Sara Stein

Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

Month Two: Gathering Resources

The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner

Frederick by Leo Lionni

Still Life with Chickens by Catherine Goldhammer

Month Three: Finding a Healing Language and Healing Images

Healing Circle An anthology edited by Patricia Foster and Mary Swander

Poemcrazy by Susan G. Wooldridge

Speak the Language of Healing by Susan Kuner, Carol Matzkin Orsborn, Linda Quigley, and Karen Leigh Stroup

Month Four: Writing through and with Grief

Broken Vessels by Andre Dubus

A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton

What the Living Do by Marie Howe

When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron

Keeping Katherine by Susan Zimmermann

Writing to Heal the Soul: Transforming Grief and Loss by Writing by Susan Zimmermann

Month Five: Discovering Form(s)

A New Path to the Waterfall by Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher

What You’ve Been Missing by Janet Desaulniers

Wishes, Lies and Dreams by Kenneth Koch

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

Month Six: Figuring Out the Good Part

I Had Brain Surgery, What’s Your Excuse by Suzy Becker

Staying Alive, a poetry anthology edited by Neil Astley

White Oleander by Janet Fitch

Month Seven: A Different Perspective: Thirteen (or More) Ways of Looking

The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene

Writing with Power by Peter Elbow

Month Eight: Writing and Healing as a Quest

The Wounded Storyteller by Arthur Frank

Swimming to Anarctica by Lynne Cox

The Boy Who Drew Cats by Margaret Hodges

Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Estes

Month Nine: Two Steps Forward and One Step Back: Writing in the Face of Resistance

Long Quiet Highway by Natalie Goldberg

The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness by Karen Armstrong

A Path with Heart by Jack Kornfield

The Resilient Writer by Catherine Wald

Month Ten: Healing Conversation

Altars in the Street by Melody Chavis

The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones

Jamesland by Michelle Huneven

84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

When Words Heal: Writing Through Cancer by Sharon Bray

Month Eleven: Deep Revision and Creation

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock

Month Twelve: Looking Ahead: Writing About Dreams and Goals

Stronger than Dirt by Kim Schaye and Chris Losee

Everything, a Found Poem

Posted by Diane Morrow on December 20, 2011 in Blog, Healing Books, Healing Poetry

Often I am asked, Who taught me to write? Everything All the blank times, the daydreaming, the boredom, the American legacy of loneliness and alienation, the sky,the desk, a pen, the pavement, small towns I’ve driven through. Writing became the tool I used To digest my life Not because everything was hunky-dory But because we can use everything we are. We have no choice. Our job is to wake up to everything. ____________________________________ from Natalie Goldberg’s Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America (p. 19, Bantam trade paperback) Photo from FlickRiver...

Odysseus in America: A Book for Healing and Writing

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 1, 2011 in Blog, Healing Books

Let me begin with a story about Bear. Bear served one tour in Vietnam as a sergeant in the infantry. During that single tour he was ordered to slit the throat of a wounded enemy soldier. He followed orders. He saw close friends die, including one particularly horrific incident when his platoon, after a night ambush, discovered two headless bodies of their own men; a ways out they came upon the two heads set up on stakes. His platoon went berserk after the incident, cutting off the heads of enemy soldiers, collecting ears. They became known as the headhunters. Back home, a full thirty years out from military discharge, Bear is afraid he’s “losing it”. Bear sleeps on the couch, separate from his wife, with a knife under his pillow. He “walks the perimeter” of his land at night, looking for snipers and ambushes. His job at the post office is in jeopardy because of numerous incidents of violence. He attacks people, sometimes without any provocation. More than once, he’s had to leave work in order to keep himself from killing someone. Jonathan Shay, author of Odysseus in America, looks at this violent man and sees a deep and resonant connection with the Greek hero, Odysseus. I teach high school English now. When I was first starting out, two years ago, I found myself looking for ways to take classic works that are taught in high school—works like The Iliad and The Odyssey and Oedipus Rex—and make them relevant for fifteen and sixteen-year-olds. My search yielded more than I’d hoped for. It led me to the work of Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who works with war veterans in Boston and who has won for this work the prestigious MacArthur award. Shay was forty years old and conducting research in neuroscience at Massachusetts General Hospital when he suffered a stroke that left him temporarily paralyzed on his left side. While recovering, he decided to read classic works that he’d never gotten around to. He read, among others, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Following his recovery, and with his research stalled, he took a temporary position filling in for a psychiatrist at an outpatient clinic, counseling troubled vets. Connections became apparent—and then multiplied. Shay began to see Achilles in every soldier who’d ever felt betrayed by a commander. He saw Odysseus in every soldier who was having difficulty returning home. Odysseus, Shay reminds us, is the last soldier to make it home from Troy. It takes him ten full years, and for at least some part of the journey he, like Bear, remains in “combat mode.” His first act following combat is a violent one in which he and his men raid the coastal city of Ismarus. Odysseus subsequently travels to Hades, the underworld, where, walking among the dead, he must confront his sense of loss and guilt. He is forced to maneuver between the twin dangers of Scylla and Charbydis. What Shay came to realize is that this ancient story could make a soldier who was struggling with readjustment to civilian life feel less alone—part of something much larger. Shay speaks to this in an interview. “One of the things they appreciate,” he says, “is the sense that they’re part of a long historical context—that they are not personally deficient...

The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife’s Memoir by Patricia Harman

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 6, 2011 in Blog, Healing Books

Oh, I do love this book. Reading it has been like coming across a lovely song—a voice—that I didn’t know existed. A surprise on a late summer day. This summer I took several crates of books to the used bookstore to trade for credit. Much of my credit I’m saving for when students start putting in their requests off my booklist, but while I was there the other week I idled through the shelves and came across this memoir by midwife and nurse practitioner Patricia Harman. I opened to the first line: I have insomnia…and I drink a little. I might as well tell you. In the middle of the night, I drink scotch when I can’t sleep. Actually, I can’t sleep most nights; actually, every night. Even before I stopped delivering babies, I wanted to write about the women. How can you not like a book that begins this way? I suppose I feel a connection because it’s the kind of memoir I had at one time thought I might write, and then never did. It also takes me back to the summer I spent in West Virginia between my third and fourth years of medical school, working in a clinic and getting to know some of the lay midwives in the county. And then in Washington, DC, when I worked as a family physician, I was fortunate to work alongside midwives. I’ve more than once dreamed about them. At different times during my life, when I’ve been in need of help or company, I’ve dreamt about a midwife and it’s always been such a healing dream. So I have a tender spot for midwives. This the reason I bought the book, and was predisposed to like it. And then I took it out to the porch on a summer afternoon, one of my last summer afternoons before returning to school—I’d been awake that morning uncharacteristically at 4 AM, unable to get back to sleep, anxious like a kid before the first day. I took the book out to the porch and I read beneath the fan and drifted into sleep and it was like spending time with the midwives again. Waking with that kind of calm rested feeling like you’ve just been with someone who knows something and this something that they know—you might not even be able to put your finger on it—but it’s just what you need. I’m realizing something—I’m writing everything about my experience of reading the book, and not so much about the book itself. This is not turning into a book review. But sometimes that’s the way it is with a book. It’s the feel of a book that matters. The voice and the images become what matters. A nurse midwife in West Virginia. The women who come to see her and they strip off their clothes and put on that thin blue cotton gown for the exam—and they tell her things. Stories. And then the midwife and her stories become a kind of good company....

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