Writing Without a Parachute: The Art of Freefall

Writing Without a Parachute: The Art of Freefall shows both beginning and experienced writers how to get the thinking mind to step aside, so that writing becomes truly creative - a vulnerable and open-hearted engagement with the moment. Here for the first time, writing teacher Barbara Turner-Vesselago shares in print the method by which, for almost 30 years, she has helped hundreds of writers to publish fiction, memoir, non-fiction and poetry worldwide. By means of five simple precepts, she leads the writer step by step into real trust in writing through the art of Freefall: invoking the courage to fall without a parachute into the words as they come. This book can be used for inspiration, as a reference, or as a sustained, twelve-month course in writing. It will help all writers to connect with their deepest intention in writing, and to write with greater authority and grace.

For the past three decades, Barbara Turner-Vesselago has been leading highly effective Freefalll Writing Workshops throughout the English-speaking world. She brings to the teaching of writing a unique combination of writing and teaching skills, literary knowledge, psychological expertise and insight that has made her workshops popular in centres as diverse as England's Rising Dragon Tai Chi School and the Yale University School of Medicine.

An expert in modern literature, she has a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, and has taught at Girton College, Cambridge, the University of Jos (Nigeria), and the Universities of Toronto, Washington and Western Australia. But having been mentored by Canadian writer, W.O. Mitchell, at the Banff School of Fine Arts in the Canadian Rockies, she left academia to write, and to teach writing. In 1995, she was designated one of six "Voices of the Nineties," by the University of Western Australia.

Barbara Turner-Vesselago's novel manuscript, No News But Kindness, was chosen a finalist for the Chapters/Robertson Davies Book Prize (Canada) and Britain's Short Story Radio First Chapter award. She is the author of Skelton at Sixty (The Porcupine's Quill, Canada) and Writing Without a Parachute: The Art of Freefall (Vala Publishing, Jessica Kingsley Publishers UK; Finch Publishing, Australia). She lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.