The Tradition
They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

Writing Creativity and Soul

From the bestselling author of The Secret Life of Bees and The Book of Longings: an intimate work on the mysteries, frustrations, and triumphs of being a writer, and an instructive guide to awakening the soul.

When Sue Monk Kidd was in high school, a home economics teacher wrote a list of potential occupations for women on the blackboard: teacher, nurse, librarian, secretary. “Writer” was nowhere to be found. On that day, Kidd shut the door on her writerly aspirations and would not revisit the topic until many years later when she announced to her husband and two children that she was going to become a writer. And so began her journey into the mysteries and methods of the writerly life…

In Writing Creativity and Soul, Sue Monk Kidd will pull from her own life and the lives of other writers—Virginia Woolf, Maya Angelou, Harper Lee, and many others—to provide a map for anyone who has ever felt lost as a writer. At the heart of this book is the unwavering belief that writing is a spiritual act, one that draws inspiration from the soul, that wellspring of creativity between imagination and feeling. Once you tap into that part of yourself, said Maya Angelou, there are only three more things you need as a writer: something to say, the ability to say it, and, perhaps most difficult of all, the courage to say it.

Equal parts memoir, guidebook, and spiritual quest, Writing Creativity and Soul is a pilgrimage and a touchstone, a journey into the transformational force of the imagination and the creative genius that lies in the unconscious.

More Adult, Non-Juvenile Books

  • Matt Daly’s lineage links back to Puritans from the early colonial period who helped set the course toward many of the destructive and shameful practices that Anglo-American culture has enacted on people and ecosystems around the world. The Invisible World strives to address this history, not to redress its wrongs, but at least to face them in the hope of making sense of how we might live beyond their influence. Exploring the writings of his ancestor, Matt saw an articulation of wildness as the habitat for evil. The American continent was cast as a place to be purged of its darkness. [...]

  • Morally intricate, graceful and suspenseful, The Keepers of the House has become a modern classic.

  • This family saga chronicles the fortunes of the wealthy Amberson family in the Midwest and their stubborn resistance to the burgeoning modern era.

  • These perspectival, character-driven stories center on the margins and are deeply rooted in New Orleanian culture.