Dwelling Places [Paperback]

Vinita Hampton Wright (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: HarperSF (2006)
• ISBN-10: 0060852607
• ISBN-13: 978-0060852603
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,452,528 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

To see what Vinita is doing currently, you can find her posting regularly on her own blog (http://vinitawright.typepad.com)and on Days of Deepening Friendship: An Online Spiritual Journey (http://deepeningfriendship.loyolapress.com). These days she is editing, blogging, giving workshops and retreats, and working on a new novel (yet to be named and too young and fragile to be exposed to the outside world). She's also on Facebook and Twitter, although "I tweet only sporadically, which probably defeats the purpose entirely--sorry about that, Tweetlings!" She's begun building a book shelf on Shelfari and hopes to connect with like minds through the books people are reading.

Vinita Hampton Wright has been a book editor for nearly two decades, currently senior editor at Loyola Press in Chicago. She leads workshops around the country on the creative-spiritual process--The Soul Tells a Story grew out of this work. Of her full-length novels, Velma Still Cooks in Leeway won a Logos Book-of-the-Year award, and Dwelling Places was selected by Christianity Today as Best Fiction of 2007.

Wright recently published an updated edition of Simple Acts of Moving Forward, and her most recent nonfiction, Days of Deepening Friendship, focuses on the spiritual experience of women. She now leads retreats on this topic (contact her at [e-mail]).

Vinita loves to cook, walk the city of Chicago, and watch movies. She and photographer/designer Jim Wright have been married 18 years. They share a bungalow on the far South Side with 2 cats and 2 dogs, all of them rescues, all spoiled, and--depending on the day--helpful or not to Vinita's creative process. Vinita is finally learning to garden and now adds homegrown tomatoes, peppers, and herbs to her little feasts.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent...as always, February 6, 2006

By 

Gob (USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Dwelling Places: A Novel (Vinita Hampton Wright) (Hardcover)

`Dwelling Places' begins with vivid and rich descriptions, and doesn't really give up from there. Much like her two previous novels `Grace and Bender Springs' and `Velma Doesn't Cook In Leeway,' Wright gives a Christian message without moralizing. It is rich in characters, lush in storytelling, and filled with words that sway poetically at times on the page. What's always worked so well in Wright's storytelling abilities is you don't have to be a Christian to enjoy them; they're about families with problems everyone has: the children who are both crying out for help in radically different ways, the husband who is having a midlife crisis, the wife whose doesn't know how to fix her marriage, and the grandma who shows up as the foundation to the family. In many respects, her stories are like parables; she gives the reader a good moral message, but it's up to the reader to discover why it's moral.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another lovely, big-hearted story, July 11, 2006

By 

Earlene Fowler "Earlene" (Southern California, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dwelling Places: A Novel (Vinita Hampton Wright) (Hardcover)

I've enjoyed all of Ms. Wright's books including her non-fiction books on creativity and writing. Dwelling Places is truly something special. She has deftly and lovingly written about mental illness in a way that should open the eyes of anyone who reads this book. It is a sticky subject, something many people still feel awkward and uneasy about. But with her unflinching eye and obvious caring for people, she reveals the characters in Dwelling Places in such a way that it would be difficult for a person not to acknowledge and sympathize with the pain experienced by mentally ill people and the people who love them. I congratulate and applaud her for tackling a tough subject in such a graceful manner.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars dearness, humor, wisdom and depth, July 4, 2006

By 

S. H. Britton (middle of california) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dwelling Places: A Novel (Vinita Hampton Wright) (Hardcover)

I loved dwelling in this book. The story unfolds from several points of view and each is distinct and unique and of interest. The context of the book, the failure of family farms, is rendered as well as the story of a family towed under by losing their farm. This book relates some tragic stuff, but reading it didn't make me sad--because there's humor, and tenderness and warmth in the telling of the story. I actually found myself yearning to be part of a farm family, to have that kind of closeness to each other and the land. The depiction of the teen characters was especially good I thought. And best of all were these wise sentences, places where the writer went deeper and I learned something.
Many of the characters have lost their faith, and this loss is placed against the words of some incredibly beautiful hymns used at the begining of chapters. I wanted the characters to regain their faith and some of them did, but what they regain is different and seems less and thinner than the faith expressed in the hymns, and the faith the characters had before their losses, and this is hard to read as an evangelical Christian.
Also, the end of the story was quite abrupt. I don't believe I have ever read a good book that ended so abruptly before. It was as if someone had cut off the real ending and misprinted the book.