Writing to Save Your Life: How to Honor Your Story Through Journaling - Softcover

Unless you count my brief childhood delusion that I would grow up to be a prima ballerina floating across the stage in a pale pink tutu on the Ed Sullivan Show, I have wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember.

Writing for me has always been a way out of the cave, an illumination to help keep me moving forward in my life. I have been interviewing and writing articles for newspapers and magazines since I was 13 years old writing teen features for the local weekly newspaper. But it wasn't until I began to write honestly about my own life that I saw the worth of my words as more than a means to a paycheck or a byline. My words have helped to heal me. Your words can help to heal you.

When you honestly put your thoughts down on paper, you validate your experiences and can begin to analyze and organize your thoughts in a way that is profoundly meaningful and therapeutic. Just writing for 20 to 30 minutes a day won't help. Writing in a pointed fashion with the goal of self-discovery will help you to unearth some feelings and to lay to rest the pebble in your shoe you have not been able to shake.

Writing can save your life not only as rescue but as preservation. We all lead lives worthy of preservation. Our stories need to be told, if to no one else, then only to ourselves. We need to place on paper what we know to be true. We need to honor our stories and use our words well.

Trust the process and begin to write.

An award-winning journalist for more than two decades, Michele Weldon writes regularly for the Chicago Tribune and her work has appeared in hundreds of major newspapers and national magazines. Her first book, I Closed My Eyes, has been translated into French, Spanish, and Dutch. In 2000, Weldon earned the International Women's Peacepower Media Award for nonfiction as well as the Individual Courage Award from Rainbow House in Chicago.Her work has appeared in two anthologies, Joyce Carol Oates: Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates in 1989 and Belly Laughs and Babies in 1997. Weldon has appeared as a guest on TV shows on NBC, ABC, and BBC as well as on several local network and national cable stations. She has been a featured guest on more than ninety radio stations across the country and in Canada.She is a lecturer at her alma mater, the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she has taught at the graduate and under-graduate levels since 1996. Weldon gives Writing to Save Your Life workshops in Chicago and around the country and is a frequent keynote speaker to local and national groups.Living in the Chicago area with her three sons, Weldon serves on the board of directors of Sarah's Inn, a domestic violence services agency in Oak Park, Illinois, and is a member of Children's Memorial Guild, a fund-raising arm of the medical center. She is a member of the Journalism and Women Symposium as well as the Association for Women Journalists.