A Box of Books for Writing and Healing

When I was in graduate school, one of my teachers, Chris Thaiss, an excellent teacher of writing and of the teaching of writing, had us read a book called, Only Connect: Uniting Reading and Writing.  It's an anthology drawn from a series of talks, each essay exploring connections between reading and writing.  I pulled the book out this morning and am flipping through it and I came across this--a passage in an essay by Gary Lindberg called "Coming to Words":

If words on the page have consequences, then they make a difference.  We change as we read.  That seems like a commonplace observation.  But if we really grasped its implications, it would transform the study of literature.

If words on the page have consequences, then they make a difference.

And how might they make a difference?

And what else might be transformed besides the study of literature?

This is the kind of thing I'm thinking about--the potential for words on a page to make a difference--as I gather the box of books that I plan to take a closer look at over the coming year.  With some of these, it may not seem so obvious how they're connected to healing or to writing and healing, but all of them, as I see it now, are in some way connected to the questions I have as a I begin this new year.

I have this feeling the box is going to change some over the course of the year.  But, in any case, here, in the interest of new beginnings, and of gathering resources--a good September kind of task--is my box of books:

Noah's Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Backyards by Sara Stein

The Magic Land: Designing Your Own Enchanted Garden by Julie Moir Messervy

Speak the Language of Healing: Living with Breast Cancer without Going to War by Susan Kunger, Carol Matzkin Orsborn, Linda Quigley, and Karen leigh Stroup

Radical Healing: Integrating the World's Great Therapeutic Traditions to Create a New Transformative Medicine by Rudolph Ballentine

Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine by Candace Pert

Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi

Intimate Reading: The Contemporary Women's Memoir by Janet Mason Ellerbee

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche

A Buddhist Life in America: Simplicity in the Complex by Joan Halifax

and, added December 2007:

Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir by Elizabeth Andrew

__________________________________________

You can also find a list of the books I read from and wrote about during the first year of One Year of Writing and Healing here.

And please note that I've added a new resource to the left sidebar of this site--a search box for WorldCat.  My newest discovery.  As some of you may already know, what this resource allows you to do is to type in the title of a book you're looking for and it will offer you (if your local libraries participate) a listing of where to find that book in a library near you.  This is especially useful, if, like me, you go back and forth between the public library and a university library.  Apparently, someone has figured out a way to take a good portion of the card catalogs in the world (from 57,000 libraries or so) and put them together into one enormous catalog,and then they figured out how to personalize it just for you and your neighborhood.  A great resource for beginning to gather a box of books.  And you can even use the site to keep lists of books you've read---or want to read.