Writing Toward Home: Tales and Lessons to Find Your Way

by Georgia Heard

Overview

Here is a personal and compassionate book for everyone writers, poets, teachers, lovers of life, and especially those seeking to find their writing voices again or for the first time. It is an autobiographical travelogue moving from a volcano in Hawaii to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and places in between, with writing at its heart.

Writing Toward Home offers practical advice on overcoming some of the obstacles writers of all ages face: writer's block, fear of rejection, confronting silencing critics in your head, finding the time to write. Each short chapter speaks to the larger truths about writing and how to truly live the writer's life: how to become more of a risk taker, how to excavate the past as a source, and how to become an acute observer of the world.

Writing Toward Home is a book that will remind you-and help you remind your students-that the true source of writing is the creative self. In this fast culture when most people have so little time to do anything but menial tasks, it will jumpstart you, it will awaken to you the journey within, it will make you want to write.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780435081249
Publisher:	Heinemann
Publication date:	10/16/1995
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.36(d)
Age Range:	18 - 17 Years

About the Author

Georgia Heard has taught writing and poetry for over 25 years in urban, rural, and international classrooms. She was the 2023 recipient of NCTE’s prestigious Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children. Her numerous other books for teachers include
Heart Maps, The Revision Toolbox, and Finding the Heart of
Nonfiction. The first edition of Awakening the Heart was heralded as one of “12 Books Every Teacher Should Read” by
Instructor Magazine. Georgia Heard received her M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University and was a founding member of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project.

In addition to her Heinemann professional books, Georgia is the coauthor of the professional titles Poetry Lessons to Meet the Common Core Standards and A Place for Wonder, as well as children’s literature such as Falling Down the Page: A Book of List Poems.

Table of Contents

Contents:
1. Raven Man: The Journey Out of Silence 2. A Conversation with Yourself 3. Finding Your Way Home 4. Querencia 5. Poetry Inside All of Us 6. Where Does Writing Hide for You? 7. I Could Not Tell 8. An Angel on Your Shoulder 9. Feng Shui 10. Doing What We Have to Do 11. Time-Worlds 12. Keep the Channel Open 13. I'm Not in the Military 14. The Rumble Beneath Your Feet 15. The Education of the Eye: Staring 16. Don't Try and Avoid the Rocks 17. Let Writing Lead the Way 18. The Intent, Not the Recipe 19. For the Sake of a Single Poem 20. Incarnadine Seas 21. Everything Including the Kitchen Sink 22. Writing Is like Making Tortillas 23. Picking Up a Stone 24. Digging in the Earth 25. Fall in Love at Least Three Times a Day 26. From an Onion to My Grandmother 27. The Fire Within: Writing from Anger 28. Ten Observations a Day 29. Layers 30. First Memory 31. Rivers of Memory 32. The Full Picture 33. Visual Archaeology 34. Layers of History 35. Gannon Hill 36. Stones and Sorrows 37. Listening to the Corn 38. In That Time 39. Writing from Behind the Scenes 40. The Family at the Next Booth 41. Back from the Mountains, a Yellow Handrail 42. Whispering into the Air 43. Ancestors 44. Synchronicity: Connecting the World 45. Dreams 46. Song to a Fallen Chestnut: Odes 47. Found Writing 48. Prayers: Words with Winged Feet 49. Walk 50. Lessons from Art 51. Blind Contour Drawing: Revision 52. Tapping into Words

Editorial Reviews

[This] is a book for the writer hidden or not so hidden in us all...It is a book for any age, to be read in little bits or all at once, and to be reread regularly.”–Inland

From the Publisher