Description

Writing is more than language and story.
It also involves the creation of self.
Writing is about who we are and who we are becoming.

After taking up writing at the age of thirty, Sue Monk Kidd has created some of the world’s most treasured stories. In Writing Creativity and Soul she shares exactly how she did it – from plunging her innermost depths, to voyaging to sacred spaces, to studying the precise methods of the greats and refining her own. Laying her creative journey bare, Sue explores the moments in which she lost her voice and when she found it again, as well as the profound insights she gained along the way.

Part memoir, part philosophical investigation, part advice to aspiring writers, this is a guide to awakening the soul. Everything that readers loved about The Secret Life of Bees is to be found in the pages of Writing Creativity and Soul – the warmth, the fierce intelligence, the wit, the spiritual hunger, the search for beauty and meaning and, perhaps above all, the rebel heart.

Publisher Review

A beautiful ode to creativity and the inner world of the writer and artist. This book offers a gentle journey through many of Sue Monk Kidd’s own inspirations. I read it in a single sitting and came away both inspired and deeply moved — EMMA GANNON A gorgeous memoir of the creative life, designed to bring out the writer’s voice in all of us * * Kirkus * * Praise for The Secret Life of Bees: A wonderful book, by turns sad, full of incident and shot through with grown-up magic reminiscent of Joanne Harris * * Daily Telegraph * * Charming, funny, moving and unmistakeably from the American South . . . a story that whips together heat, violence, eccentricity, madness and the Gothic * * The Times * * Moving, original, and accomplished . . . wonderfully written, powerful, poignant, and humorous, and takes a line which is – refreshingly – strongly female without being cliche-feminist. It is also deliciously eccentric, which lifts it out of the usual category of a rite-of-passage novel into the realms of real distinction. Do read it — JOANNA TROLLOPE Eccentric, inventive, and ultimately forgiving . . . a truly original Southern voice — ANITA SHREVE Monk Kidd has created a narrative as skilful and sweet as a honeycomb. Uplifting and warm-hearted, this is a moving novel and Lily is a fascinating, funny and clever narrator * * Literary Review * * Lily is a wonderfully petulant and self-absorbed adolescent, and Kidd deftly portrays her sense of injustice as it expands to accomodate broader social evils…August and her sisters, June and May, are no mere vehicles for Lily’s salvation; they are individuals as fully imagined as the sweltering, kudzu-carpeted landscape that surrounds them * * New York Times Book Review * * A wonderfully written debut novel * * Kirkus Reviews * *