Writing Toward Home: Tales and Lessons to Find Your Way

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.

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.