Writing From The Heart

With warm, lively, often humorous anecdotes, advice, and lessons, this unique approach to creative writing as a path to healing the self shows how to reverse the damaging effects done to writers in school, where red pens disciplined grammar and taught them to mistrust their natural ability as storytellers--freezing them in their creative tracks NPR sponsorships .

How do we get students to "ache with caring" about their writing instead of mechanically stringing words together? We spend a lot of time teaching the craft of writing but we also need to devote time to helping students write with purpose and meaning. For decades, Georgia Heard has guided students into more authentic writing experiences by using heart maps to explore what we all hold inside: feelings, passions, vulnerabilities, and wonderings. In Heart Maps, Georgia shares 20 unique, multi-genre heart maps to help your students write from the heart, such as the First Time Heart Map, Family Quilt Heart Map, and People I Admire Heart Map. You'll also find extensive support for using heart maps, including: tips for getting started with heart maps writing ideas to jumpstart student writing in multiple genres from heart maps suggested mentor texts to provide additional inspiration. Filled with full-color student heart maps, examples of the resulting writing, along with online access to 20 different uniquely designed reproducible heart map templates, Heart Maps will be a practical tool for awakening new writing possibilities and engaging and motivating your students' writing throughout the year.

The best story is one that comes from the heart. The library is having a contest for the best story, and the quirky narrator of this book just has to win that rollercoaster ride with her favorite author! But what makes a story the best? Her brother Tim says the best stories have lots of action. Her father thinks the best stories are the funniest. And Aunt Jane tells her that the best stories have to make people cry. A story that does all these things doesn't seem quite right, though, and the one thing the whole family can agree on is that the best story has to be your own. Anne Wilsdorf's hilarious illustrations perfectly capture this colorful family and their outrageous stories in Eileen Spinelli's heartfelt tale about creativity and finding your own voice.

Best-selling New Zealand author Joy Cowley, author of hundreds of books, including the classic Mrs. Wishy-Washy, offers an indispensable manual for those who are called to write for children. Brimming with down-to-earth advice and keen insight, the book draws on Cowley's lifetime of writing and teaching writers. From plot to dialogue, and on through discipline and humor, editing and presentation, Cowley reveals the whys and hows of telling stories that will captivate young readers. Above all, Cowley reminds writers to "keep your serious adult voice under control, and let the child within you grow wings to fly with the child out there."

A New York Times Notable Book Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award A personal, lyrical narrative about storytelling and empathy, from the author of Orwell's Roses Apricots. Her mother's disintegrating memory. An invitation to Iceland. Illness. These are Rebecca Solnit's raw materials, but The Faraway Nearby goes beyond her own life, as she spirals out into the stories she heard and read—from fairy tales to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—that helped her navigate her difficult passge. Solnit takes us into the lives of others—an arctic cannibal, the young Che Guevara among the leprosy afflicted, a blues musician, an Icelandic artist and her labyrinth—to understand warmth and coldness, kindness and imagination, decay and transformation, making art and making self. This captivating, exquisitely written exploration of the forces that connect us and the way we tell our stories is a tour de force of association, a marvelous Russian doll of a book that is a fitting companion to Solnit's much-loved A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

The subtitle of Maggie Ross's new book captures its essence, for it is about silence and our need to behold God. Beholding is a notion that we are in danger of losing. It is often lost in translation, even by the NRSV and the Jerusalem Bible. Beholding needs to be recovered both in theology and practice. Ross is very aware of "poor talkative Christianity." There is a twofold plea to enter into silence--for lack of silence erodes our humanity--and to behold the radiance of God. This is a book full of deep questioning and the testing of our assumptions. Throughout there is a great love for the world and for our humanity, accompanied by sadness that we are so easily distracted . . . . We are invited into a silence that is not necessarily an absence of noise, but is a limitless interior space. Ancient texts are used in new and exciting ways, and many of our worship practices are challenged. She is in no doubt that "the glory of the human being is the beholding of God." --adapted from a review in The Church Times (London) by Canon David Adam.

In a heartfelt and conversational style, Holmes provides advice, inspiration and examples on writing and selling personal essays.

This book explores a new model for the production, revision, and reception of Biblical texts as Scripture. Building on recent studies of the oral/written interface in medieval, Greco-Roman and ancinet Near Eastern contexts, David Carr argues that in ancient Israel Biblical texts and other texts emerged as a support for an educational process in which written and oral dimensions were integrally intertwined. The point was not incising and reading texts on parchment or papyrus. The point was to enculturate ancient Israelites - particularly Israelite elites - by training them to memorize and recite a wide range of traditional literature that was seen as the cultural bedorck of the people: narrative, prophecy, prayer, and wisdom.