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

  • When he was a homesteader in Alaska, poet John Haines moved away from language and institutions to an older and simpler existence.

  • Discover this transcendent middle grade masterpiece about a young black boy whose quiet rural live in the Appalachian Mountains begins to change—winner of the Newbery Medal, the National Book Award, and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award. Mayo Cornelius Higgins sits on his gleaming, forty-foot steel pole, towering over his home on Sarah’s Mountain. Stretched before him are rolling hills and shady valleys. But behind him lie the wounds of strip mining, including a mountain of rubble that may one day fall and bury his home. M.C. dreams of escape for himself and his family. And, one day, atop his pole, he [...]

  • Congressman John Lewis (GA-5) is an American icon and key figure of the civil rights movement. His commitment to justice and nonviolence has taken him from an Alabama sharecropper’s farm to the halls of Congress, from a segregated schoolroom to the 1963 March on Washington, and from receiving beatings from state troopers to receiving the Medal of Freedom from the first African-American president. Now, to share his remarkable story with new generations, Lewis presents March, a graphic novel trilogy, in collaboration with co-writer Andrew Aydin and New York Times best-selling artist Nate Powell (winner of the Eisner Award and LA Times [...]

  • Memory Piece, Lisa Ko’s highly anticipated second novel, is a gripping exploration of friendship, art, and ambition that reflects the complexities of American culture while posing essential questions about the future. Following the lives of three teenagers—Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng—over several decades, the story delves into their evolving definitions of success and creativity in a rapidly changing world.

    Read More about "Memory Piece"...