Writing for Your Life: Discovering the Story of Your Life's Journey [Paperback]

Deena Metzger (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 20, 1992

In the tradition of Annie Dillard and Natalie Goldberg, this resource for writers and non-writers alike shows the act of writing to be a dynamic means of knowing, healing, and creating the body, mind, and spirit.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Writing for Your Life is an inspiring companion for any writer, professional or personal, who sees writing as a spiritual act. Early chapters on creativity and story would appeal to anyone interested in breaking through self-imposed boundaries, by encouraging the writer to "set yourself the task to write not only what you know but more especially what you don't know." We've all heard this before, but Deena Metzger (A Sabbath Among the Ruins) provides such resonant anecdotes and enticing exercises that it begins to seem not only doable but fun. "Even when writing about ourselves or an event that we know well," she says, "we sometimes find that the story ... is taking a direction we never expected. As it is always possible to come back to the known, it is politic, under these circumstances, to see where the story wants to go." Later chapters help writers access their inner worlds through meditation, spirit guides, mythology, tarot cards, the muse, visions, nature, and dreams. To follow Metzger's book closely requires a great deal of hard but rewarding, work. "Maintaining a spiritual practice is an ordeal like climbing a mountain," Metzger warns, "and it demands the same of us: commitment, discipline, endurance, focus, and awareness. There at the top is the sky and, perhaps, the large vision, but ultimately the meaning is in the climbing." --Jane Steinberg

From Library Journal

Poet, novelist ( What Dinah Thought, LJ 8/89), teacher, and therapist, Metzger presents unique writing exercises geared to liberate one's creativity from the rational mind. She progresses from a series of questions producing self-knowledge to others that result in stories and novels. Metzger is most engaging when she is offering concrete advice and examples from her friends' and students' writings instead of dispensing mystic philosophy. She lost this reviewer in Part 3, where she instructs the reader to meditate in order "to contact the wisest part of yourself and allow it to coalesce into a mythic or historic figure " to serve as an inner guide. However, all readers of this self-help book should be able to find some method here that best allows them to unlock their suppressed imaginations and write more freely.
- Cathy Sabol, Northern Virginia Community Coll., Manassas
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: HarperOne; 1st edition (November 20, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0062506129
• ISBN-13: 978-0062506122
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 0.8 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #413,600 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Deena Metzger is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, storyteller and healer. Story is her Medicine.
Her latest novels are Feral and La Negra y Blanca, both published by Hand to Hand, 2011. La Negra y Blanca won the 2012 Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.

The novels The Other Hand and Doors: A Fiction for Jazz Horn, and also Ruin and Beauty: New and Selected Poems are published by Red Hen Press.

Other books:
Skin: Shadows/Silence A Love Letter in the Form of a Novel, and What Dinah Thought (Viking)
The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take the War Out of Them and the cancer journal Tree, in the volume Tree: Essays and Pieces, (North Atlantic Books) that features the celebrated Warrior Poster on its cover. Tree testifies to a woman's triumph over breast cancer. It is an example of her many formal and spiritual explorations imagining a literature responsive to the complexities and necessities of our time, especially the value of actively respecting the numerous voices that constitute an ecology of mind attuned to a sacred universe.

Writing For Your Life: A Guide and Companion to the Inner Worlds is a classic text on writing and creatitivity that articulates these possibilities for fellow writers and as do her plays Not As Sleepwalkers and Dreams Against the State.

She co-edited the groundbreaking anthology, Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals, one of the first testimonies to the reality and nature of animal intelligence.

Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing and From Grief into Vision: A Council examine the tragic failure of contemporary culture and provide guidance for personal, political, environmental and spiritual healing.

A radical thinker on behalf of the natural world and planetary survival, a teacher of writing and healing practices for almost 50 years, a writer and activist profoundly concerned with peacemaking, restoration and sanctuary for a beleagured world, she is basing her work now on the ideas outlined in the posting, "19 Ways to the 5th World." She also teaches a program, "A Training for the 5th World." She and writer, Michael Ortiz Hill, introduced Daré to North America in 1999. Daré is a unique form of individual and community healing based on indigenous medicine traditions and contemporary wisdom. There are other Darés in the U.S. and Canada. Daré occurs on the first Sunday after the new moon at her home in Topanga, Ca. It is open to the public.

Deena convenes ReVisioning Medicine, a unique collaboration in diagnosis and treatment between medical people and medicine people, physicians and healers. She is also Senior Advisor to the NGO, everyday gandhis that supports grassroots and indigenous peacebuilding activities in Liberia and West Africa.

As a spiritual practitioner, Deena is devoted to the Pathless Path and the No Enemy Way. She has taught and lectured widely, nationally and internationally.

Her website is www.deenametzger.com
Her Blogs are ToConsider.wordpress.com and Deenametzger.wordpress.com

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 39 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars This seven-novel writer's bible for getting off the dime December 3, 1997

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Metzger does the best job I've seen on jump-starting your creativity, and tying your writing into archetypes. There's lots for the reader who wants to think of writing as a spiritual exercise. BUT for me, by far, its great gift is pragmatic. Between books, or when I feel stuck, or at the beginning of a revision, I take out "On Story" and work through all her suggestions as if it were the first time. I always come up with something new and deeper relevant to THIS story--or I come up with a new story entirely. If you are ready to get past Natalie Goldberg to the goods, here's the book. It helped me tremendously with my last novel.

36 of 39 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Beware - read this book and you may start writing your own! July 9, 1996

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Banish writer's block forever with Deena Metzger's Writing
for Your Life. This boldly titled book is packed with
inspirational material for the writer and creative writing
teacher.There are many, many books on the market promising
to unleash the imaginations of beginning writers -
Metzger's actually delivers the goods. Her writing exercises
confront, challenge and provoke. They are tickets to the
most exciting journey of your life - an exploration of the
human heart. If a book could turn a person into a writer,
this is the book. Of course, just reading cannot do that
trick. Metzger, however, makes the idea of writing so
exciting that the blank page no longer intimidates but
invites. If I were shipwrecked, I would take Writing for
Your Life, reams and reams of paper, enough pens for a
lifetime and M F K Fisher's The Art of Eating - but that's
another story....

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A gift for any writer who wants to go deeper February 3, 2009

By Joel Friedlander

Format:Paperback

Deena Metzger's book is generous, spiritual, pragmatic and inspiring. Her exercises and prompts may lead you to deep areas within yourself that are surprising and she is a constant, understanding guide. You won't be disappointed.