A Walk Between Heaven and Earth: A Personal Journal on Writing and the Creative Process - Softcover

Holzer, Burghild Nina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0517880962 ISBN 13: 9780517880968

Publisher: Harmony/Rodale/Convergent, 1994

Synopsis

"Talking to paper is talking to the divine. Paper is infinitely patient. Each time you scratch on it, you trace part of yourself, and thus part of the world, and thus part of the grammar of the universe. It is a huge language, but each of us tracks his or her particular understanding of it." —from A Walk Between Heaven and Earth

Unlike any other guide to journal writing, A Walk Between Heaven and Earth is itself written as a personal journal and as a meditation on the flow of creation. Burghild Nina Holzer demonstrates that the creative process is in fact a large, ongoing movement in our lives and that we may gradually discover the pattern and direction of it by trusting whatever it is we choose to confide to the page. She helps would-be writers recognize the power and importance of opening themselves to the present moment and recording whatever they find there. Holzer's book is both inspiration and model. It will appeal not only to those who wish to explore the creative process as a mystical path, but to all who desire to express themselves through writing.

About this title

Reviews

Holzer's first book, a personal journal on writing and the creative process, is a dreamtime meditation on inner and outer journeying--a walk on a landscape of metaphor, on a spiritual path to self-discovery. "Talking to paper is talking to the divine . . . each time you scratch on it, you trace part of yourself, and thus part of the world, and part of the grammar of the universe." Jewelled with keen-eyed observations, reflective musings and prescriptive insights, this is a passionately companionable guide for those who wish to explore the process of writing. In her journal, Holzer chronicles her experiences as a student of the journal form and as a teacher of creative writing interweaving meditations, exercises and travelogue. She addresses her brother who died tragically, her dying father and a child never born. Unbridled and strewn with New Age locution, the journal entries are often fanciful veering into far-fetched and anthropomorphic terrain. But by and large Holzer's prose has a lovely lyricism, resonance and quiet power. Holzer agrees with Joseph Campbell: "I don't think we are looking for meaning. I think we are looking for the experience of being alive." And at the heart of her narrative is this search for the intensity of aliveness, for the tools and writerly craft necessary "to ride the thunderbolt of the moment and feel that it is real." For fellow questers, Holzer's journalistic walk will sound a clarion call to write.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Informational rather than inspirational, a journal about journal-writing as a spiritual search, by a teacher of creative writing at Foothill College in Los Altos, Calif. From fall 1987 to summer 1988, Holzer kept two journals: one a record of her writing progress, the other a personal chronicle she hoped to keep separate from the first. In the book, however, they overlap; the personal journal creeps into the creative one, which becomes, for her, a mystical journey. She records dreams, her sense of aloneness, winter sorrows; she stops torturing herself about what exactly she is doing by reminding herself ``a journal can be anything!'' Reviewing the ``vision quest'' of her journal, she notes patterns and turns of character. She finds herself preparing for the inevitable end result of her father's lingering mortal illness and grieving for a dead brother, a doctor who was killed by a snow-grooming machine during the Olympic games in Calgary, Canada--a death prefigured by a dream she recorded in her journal. She visualizes his hands being whole, ``his good hands that had held so many.'' Later she refers to another painful memory: ``Perhaps my uterus wants to cry the story of the child I lost, of what wanted to be formed, and what slipped out into darkness before it could be held securely by the arms near the heart....And maybe I need to discover that this big boulder sitting in my throat consists of a huge mass of words, compacted into stone.'' Sometimes she takes her students for a walk in the woods or fields and, to expose them to nature writing, reads them haiku by Basho. Although this is more a public record of private thoughts than a how-to book, the use of Latinate words and catch phrases like ``creative process'' and ``learning process'' at times gives it an academic tone somewhat at odds with the personal nature of the material. Creativity ought to be more interesting than this. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

How else to write a book on journals except to keep a journal? That is just what Holzer has done, exploring in journal form her ideas on how diaries can be used artistically, psychologically, and creatively. The tragic death of her brother during the year she kept this journal adds dramatic tension and depth to her research as she intertwines dreams, fantasies, and everyday life with theoretical and philosophical musings. An innovative, interesting approach to a popular subject. Pat Monaghan

Edition details

• Publisher: Harmony/Rodale/Convergent
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0517880962
• ISBN 13: 9780517880968
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 143