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Reviews
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Here are some published reviews of Write For Life:
Frank McCourt
Pulitzer prize-winning author of Angela's Ashes
In my high school teaching days I told my English classes, "When in doubt, tell a story. 'Once upon a time' was good enough for the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault and James Joyce and it's good enough for you and me." I would also quote Jesus, "Be as little children," even though my students were mostly Jewish.
I was telling my classes these things because they were resisting a simple assignment: Keep an account of your life. That's all. One hundred and fifty words a day. Would it kill you?
Yes, they said. It would kill them, and that was because nothing happened in their lives, nothing worth writing about. They envied me for having had a miserable childhood and plenty to write about, and all they had was going to school every day and taking various tests and exams for college and putting up with parents hounding them about one thing or another.
That often irritated me and I told them so. "I'm trying to get you to open your eyes and ears and all you do is whine, whine, whine."
That's where I lost them and that's where I wanted to tell them I was sorry. I wanted to tell them that even though I was in my forties I was backward in my ways, a slow learner who had a long way to go. Yes, yes, they did whine but there was a genuine substratum of despair in their complaints. There was a genuine questioning as to what the hell is it all about? They were looking for meaning in their lives but feeling trapped.
"All right," I said. "All right. Get it on paper. Let it all hang out" if that's something you can do on paper. And remember what D.H. Lawrence said, "Write it, and write it hot."
Of course I was talking to myself. Much of teaching, especially when it's English, is talking to yourself. I was whining inwardly, desperate as any teenager, till the teacher part of me said, "Write it."
I could tell the story of a relationship with my journals that went back to my middle twenties. While I think of it I might go and burn those journals because even though they are a record of certain activities and experiences they are nothing but one long lament over the futility of it all, etc., etc.
But then I recall reading extracts from the journals of Tolstoy, a litany of despair and disgust with his own gambling and boozing and fornicating self and if he could be such a fool then there was hope for me.
In my twenties I knew nothing about the kind of healing Sheppard Kominars writes about in his warm, wise and wonderful book, Write for Life: Healing Body, Mind and Spirit Through Journal Writing. The only healing I knew about was what the church had told me: confession. You sin, you confess, you are forgiven. There was some relief in alcohol and sex, but that was ephemeral, and there was always a hangover, physical, emotional, spiritual.
The subtitle of Mr. Kominars' book is "Healing Body, Mind and Spirit Through Journal Writing," a compendium of experience, learning and practical advice for anyone embarking on a journal or anyone who has been at it for years.
Why, oh why, didn't someone walk up to me when I was twenty-five and stumbling, and hand me a book like this? Would I have been smart enough to take it to a quiet place, not merely to read it like an ordinary book, but to savor it and learn from it, slowly, slowly.
That is how you have to read Write for Life: Healing Body, Mind and Spirit Through Journal Writing. There's no hurry. Reading this book is a way of being good to yourself and you can't take it all in one greedy gulp. It took a while to get to where you are. It took a while to be what you are.
I have had a lover's quarrel with my journal. In bad times I have scribbled in it as if my life depended on it. (Maybe it did!) At other times I feel as if I have an obligation to write in it, as if I were a college student with a term paper hanging over his head.
And all the time, dear journal, you wanted to be my friend. You wanted to be the safe repository of my ecstasies and my miseries, my hymns and lamentations.
If former students of mine were to read this I would say to them, "Please forgive my short temper back then. When I asked you to keep an account of your days I should have talked about those days. They were—and are—unique as fingerprints, and you'll never have them again. Those days were like jewels: Sunday, sapphire; Monday, emerald; Tuesday diamond, and so on. All days are jewels, aren't they?
Pacific Church News
December 2007 |
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Writing to Renew and Reinvent Your Life
By Dr. Richard G. Petty, MD, author of Healing, Meaning and Purpose: The Magical Power of the Emerging Laws of Life
Storytelling is one of our most fundamental and enduring needs. Our stories define us. They are the vehicles of meaning and they serve as the narrative of our views about our world and ourselves. We all constantly tell stories that shape virtually every human activity from our emotions to our personal relationships and our politics. One of the casualties of the pharmacological eclipse of the "talk therapies," has been that many people are no longer being encouraged to explore the meaning of their distress.
Writing our stories introduces another dynamic: most of us find that putting out thoughts and feelings down on paper helps to give us mental and emotional clarity.
This book is not the first to discuss journal writing as a method of healing, but it is one of the best that I have read.
In the foreword by the author of Angela's Ashes: A Memoir, Frank McCourt says, "Why, oh why, didn't someone walk up to me when I was 25 and stumbling, and hand me a book like this?"
The answer is that as far as I know, there was no such book. This one is unique and the fruit of fifty years or regular journaling combined with practical experience of using journal writing for therapy. Sheppard Kominars was first encouraged to use journaling at a time in the mid-1950s when he was suffering from intractable headaches. To his astonishment they began to become more manageable and then to subside. He continued writing over the years, and his writing supported him during the vicissitudes of life, particularly when he developed another kind of physical illness. In recent years he has taken his method on the road, teaching journal writing to a new generation of people with chronic illnesses, in the hope that writing will help them articulate and make sense of their experiences.
In the last few years a small body of evidence has indicated that journal writing may be highly therapeutic for people with some kinds of problems, and it may also act to prevent some psychological difficulties. Sheppard's experience would seem to endorse that research.
The book really does begin at the beginning, even dealing with the kind of book and paper to use. Sheppard then takes us through the practicalities of what, when and where to write.
For many years now I have encouraged people to use storytelling as a method of writing and re-writing their life stories, all the time unaware of Sheppard Kominars' work. So this book particularly fascinated me. The methods that he details not only help people struggling with health problems, but can also be potent vehicles for building our personal resilience to the slings and arrows that are an inevitable part of life.
I hope that this book has a very wide readership and that it becomes the catalyst not only for a wider use of writing in healthcare and wellness, but also that it prompts further scientific investigations into its use.
For teachers, people who would like to maintain their health, as well as people struggling with physical and psychological problems, this is a must read!
Very highly recommended.
Dr. Robbert Bennett
Kenyon Emeritus Professor
I have been journaling steadily for over twenty years, and did my first journal at the age of ten. I have also done a workshop with Sheppard Kominars, which prompted me to write daily on what I find surprising, moving, and memorable. I have kept dream journals. But this book goes well beyond my own previous notions about journaling, positing as it does that writing a journal is a way to heal. (I have tended to see mine rather as an extended prayer). Twenty-four chapters on topics from Legacy Letters to Zen to "Not Yets" to, finally, embracing Death will bring any reader new insight into journaling.
Kominars begins by extensive attention to the basics: the pen, the paper, the place and time of writing, the various blocks that keep us from starting, or going on. A second section explores the idea of the journal writer as a survivor engaged in healing the self. I was most moved by the journal excerpt from Marjorie Fleming, written in the early nineteenth century at the age of seven. Kominars stresses the privacy of one's journal and the importance of realizing you are writing only for yourself, but paradoxically quotes from a number of journal writers whose work has been published posthumously.
Once you have ingested the idea that the journal is an external source for healing and self-understanding, you pass on to Kominar's extensive third section, which treats various kinds of topics that might encourage one's own process of growth. One could write about food, travel, creativity, meditation, or joy, for example, and Kominars presents valuable ideas for lists on which one might write later, such as the topics one sees as taboo. No reader will leave this book without new ideas about how your journal can bring you deeper into yourself and closer to the world around you and those you love. Many exercises guide you in this process, and the bibliography is extensive. I encourage anybody interested in writing a journal to buy and read this book, whether you're just thinking about starting or have been writing for decades. You won't regret it.
Journal-writing
Column by Joan Aragone
San Mateo County Times August 13, 2007
The book is the outcome of more than 50 years of journal writing by Sheppard B. Kominars, 75, San Francisco-based former counselor and professor of literature, who began teaching the process following his own diagnosis and treatment for cancer in 2000.... (read more)
Review appearing in the Kenyon Fall Alumni Magazine
By Traci Vogel
September 2007
Years ago, when Sheppard Kominars found himself held hostage to crippling migraines, he turned to the page for escape. At the suggestion of his family doctor, he began keeping a journal.
At first, Kominars didn’t see the point. “In my imagination,” he writes, “I saw adolescent girls writing ‘Dear Diary’ in their notebooks. That’s just not me! I thought. I can’t do that!” As his writing sessions continued, however, he found that journal writing helped him “launch the day from a better place in myself.” At last, he came to a realization that “I was not a migraine; I was merely having a migraine . . . . In some mysterious way, journal writing helped me find my way not only through health issues but through [other] obstacles as well.”
In Write for Life, Kominars maps out that mysterious way. Journaling, he writes, can be an act of confession, therapy, tesimony, and self-discovery. Most remarkably, medical studies have found that keeping a journal can aid people struggling with illness, anxiety, or depression. Writing about trauma leads to improved immune function, lower blood pressure, and a more optimistic outlook. Write for Life offers a wealth of journaling exercises, designed to give readers permission to express themselves and find their way to health, whether physical, mental, or spiritual. “Beginning today,” Kominars writes, “you can begin to care about what has already happened—not as a source of worry, but as a basis for loving your life in a new way.”
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