Writing From the Heart: Tapping the Power of Your Inner Voice
By Nancy Slonim Aronie ’63
This enduring guide, now in its seventh printing, presents creative writing as a path to self-healing, encouraging writers to search their souls and take risks. Writing From the Heart grants individuals permission to tell their own stories in their own voices, using their own styles.
The book, originally published in 1998, provides inspirational exercises and methods for overcoming writer’s blocks, and includes chapters like “Before you knew everything, everything was new” and “Are you there, gut? It’s me, Margaret.” Aronie promotes a “safe” creative environment that urges writers to let go of the red-pen discipline they learned in the classroom and gives them freedom to trust their own creativity.
“If you feel safe, you can do anything,” Aronie said on the website for the Chilmark Writing Workshop she founded in 1986 on Martha’s Vineyard, where she lives with her husband. “Here is where we stop the inner critic in his tracks. I know it’s possible because I have seen it happen…over and over again.”
Wally Lamb, author of the Oprah’s Book Club choice She’s Come Undone, said of Aronie’s book, “I loved Writing From the Heart for its warmth, its wit, and its celebration of the ups, downs, and unexpected swerves of the writing journey.”
Aronie has taught at Harvard University, written a column for McCall’s magazine, and been a commentator for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.
Published by Hyperion/Little, Brown and Company