Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives [Hardcover]

Louise DeSalvo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 3, 1999

Acclaimed author Louise DeSalvo draws on her own experience and the lives of others to examine the healing power of the writing process. In this landmark work, DeSalvo uses her twenty years as a teacher of writing to explore how the creative process can in fact be a restorative tool. She looks at the cutting-edge scientific research on the subject and presents dozens of anecdotes of famous writers and beginners in the field to illuminate her theory that writing can repair pain--and keep our demons at bay.

In Writing as a Way of Healing, DeSalvo also develops a detailed program of exercises that shows writers and nonwriters alike how to "open up" to themselves through writing, write regularly in a relaxed way, and achieve a state of personal acceptance through writing. DeSalvo's techniques will provide a solid foundation for writers to benefit both physically and emotionally from telling their stories.

DeSalvo writes with remarkable insight of a wide range of writers who have found that their work helped them to heal, including Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Kenzaburo Oe, Djuna Barnes, Peter Handke, Jamaica Kincaid, and Mark Doty. In these pages, we become familiar with writers' stories of healing: Isabel Allende deals with the anguish of sitting near her comatose daughter's bedside by beginning to compose a letter to her that eventually becomes the memoir Paula. Henry Miller, despondent when his wife, June, left him for another woman and contemplating suicide, instead works through the night on a story that details his life with June. This brief outline, written during a time of Miller's sharpest despair, serves as the inspiration for his greatest novels.

DeSalvo illustrates how writers can findsolace in their work if they ensure that they have a safe environment and a deliberate plan to approach the writing process. She also discusses what went wrong for writers "at risk" like Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, and she warns of the danger of using writing as a call for help instead of seeking help. According to DeSalvo, the way to responsibly write, to heal, is to make an effort to understand our experiences as we write about them. The healing power comes from the reflection on the pain we are living through.

In this inspiring book, highly acclaimed author and teacher Louise DeSalvo reveals the healing power of writing. Based on her twenty years of research, DeSalvo show how anyone can use writing as a way to heal the emotional and physical wounds that are an inevitable part of life. She draws on the journals, diaries, letters, and works of dozens of famous writers and students of the craft to illustrate how people "change physically and psychologically when they work on projects that grow from a deep, authentic place." With insight and wit, she illuminates how writers, from Virginia Woolf to Henry Miller to Audre Lorde to Isabel Allende, have been transformed by the wiring process. Writing as a Way of Healing includes valuable advice and practical techniques to guide and inspire both experienced and beginning writers.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

A professor of creative writing at Hunter College and a frequent guest on National Public Radio, DeSalvo (Vertigo: A Memoir, LJ 7/96) brings 20 years of writing experience to this work. She recommends writing in spare moments, uncensored, and asks her students to write five pages per week. She advises writing every detail as a reporter to move beyond a trauma. Writing links feelings of pain, grief, and loss to an event and speeds healing. DeSalvo presents seven stages of writing, from preparation/germination to completion/going public. She suggests writing a process journal so the work flows smoothly and warns against self-sabotage in the form of missed deadlines and last-minute scrambling. When the writing is completed, sharing stories in a group with other empathetic writers will sharpen the narrative. DeSalvos work is similar to Julia Camerons The Right To Write (LJ 1/99), though more academic. Camerons work is recommended for public libraries, while DeSalvos is better for higher-level writing classes.Lisa S. Wise, Broome Cty. P.L., Binghamton, NY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

How writing can be used to recover from trauma and as a tool for personal growth: encouragement and suggestions from a professor of literature and creative writing. DeSalvo (Hunter Coll.) is working here from her own experience: a tumultuous childhood, the loss of her mother and sister in adulthood, and severe health problems left her in turmoil that began to calm when she wrote about her experiences (Vertigo: A Memoir, 1996). Years of seeing her students find similar succor has further convinced her of the special value writing holds as a therapeutic tool. It's cheap, doesn't take much time, is self-initiated and flexible, can be private (or public), is easily portable, can be done in sickness or in health; ``writing to heal requires no innate talent, though we become more skilled as we write, especially when we pay careful attention to the process.'' DeSalvo is careful to caution throughout, howeever, that writing mustn't become a substitute for medical care. DeSalvo refers extensively to James W. Pennebaker's Opening Up; he and colleagues studied in depth the relationship between writing about difficult feelings and improving health, and then specifically what kind of writing led to healing after traumatic experiences. DeSalvo especially cites Virginia Woolf, Isabel Allende, and Alice Walker as practitioners of therapeutic writing. She argues strongly that writing ``is a very sturdy ladder out of the Pit to reach freedom and safety.'' Her guide is a reasonable starting point for those who hope shes right. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 226 pages
• Publisher: HarperOne; 1st edition (March 3, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0062515195
• ISBN-13: 978-0062515193
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #170,880 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #10 in Books > Self-Help > Journal Writing

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars She understands the power of writing, July 15, 2001

By 

Anita "anitareads" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives (Paperback)

This is the only book I know of that teaches a disciplined form of writing for the purposes of therapeutic healing. This is very different from writing in a journal, which many books have covered. The author describes a process which she has used herself and taught to many students. The first part of the book goes into the concept of how writing can be healing. She has one simple principle, which is that the writing must include both events and feelings about the events. Either one by itself will not have the same effect. She uses examples from her own writing and authors such as Virginia Woolf and Isabel Allende to show how this combination of events and feelings works.

The second part is all about the process and she guides the reader through the steps, with caring and encouragement, just as if you were in one of her classes. The process begins with preparing, planning, and germinating, which are basically about choosing one story to tell, letting ideas come to you, taking notes. The next steps are working, deepening, shaping, ordering, and completing. This is where you dive in and give structure to your story. This stage contains at its center one piece of modest and practical advice, which is to write five complete pages per week. If you do that, and by the time you finish the book you will believe that you can, within just a couple months you'll have completed a 40 page memoir.

61 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Writing as a Way of Healing, April 14, 2002

By 

Cassandra Barnes "Cassandra" (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives (Paperback)

Louise DeSalvo, Ph.D. says, "writing has helped me heal. Writing has changed my life. Writing has saved my life." In her newest book, Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives, DeSalvo provides readers with detailed instructions on how they, too, can heal themselves.

Unlike most authors, DeSalvo doesn't advise writers to free-associate, or write whatever comes to mind in whatever order it comes, as a way of healing. She recommends, instead, choosing a traumatic event and fully exploring it. She says "to improve health, we must write detailed accounts, linking feelings with events."

She cites numerous studies showing that people who wrote about traumatic events, and included the details of their emotions, initially had negative feelings to overcome, but then experienced many long-term positive benefits. Those benefits were both mental and physical, including improvements to the immune system. She says "when we deal with unassimilated events, when we tell our stories and describe our feelings and integrate them into our sense of self, we no longer must actively work at inhibition. This alleviates the stress of holding back our stories and repressing or hiding our emotions, and so our health improves."

A researcher into the therapeutic benefits of writing for more than twenty years, DeSalvo has filled her book with examples, including the effect of her mother's severe depression on her life, excerpts from diaries and journals of people like Virginia Woolf and Isabel Allende, and numerous essays from her writing students.

"This book is an invitation to engage with your writing process over time in a way that allows you to discover strength, power, wisdom, depth, energy, creativity, soulfulness, and wholesomeness. . ." DeSalvo says. She recognizes that people are busy and asks only that they commit fifteen minutes a day, four days a week, to writing the story of their lives. We can use the "tiny pockets of time throughout our day," like time spent waiting in traffic jams or at supermarket checkouts, if that's all that we have.

Writing as a Way of Healing is meant for anyone who has survived childhood. You don't have to be an experienced writer to benefit from DeSalvo's advice and techniques--the only requirement is a desire to heal your emotional wounds and find the joy in life that is rightfully yours.

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A motivating book on writing, March 25, 2005

By 

JackOfMostTrades "Jack" (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives (Paperback)

No book can teach you to write, unless it is a formulaic recipe, cookbook sort of guide. Writing as a Way as Healing is exceptional because it has a particular point of view regarding the value of writing--specifically, exploring dis-ease through the written word. DeSalvo focuses on PROCESS, which is the simple idea that through writing one discovers how to write, and what particular story one is destined to write. This alone is invaluable advice since much writing is pre-packaged and pre-determined so that it is predictable. Both experienced and inexperienced writers can take this advice to heart since it encourages one not to feel as though writer's block is not having anything to write about, but rather not finding what one needs to write about. The book is supplemented by both references and quotes from well-known writers who have written about pain and illness, and includes empirical data about the healing power of writing. This is a good book. Period.