WRITING CREATIVITY AND SOUL

A writer’s healing journey.

Kidd is one of America’s most evocative memoirists of the spirit. Her new book looks back over a life of writing to explore the nature of human creativity and the urge we have not just to do something but to make something. Kidd writes: “Humans are wired to express their creativity by bringing forth something new or new combinations of the old….Creativity is an instinct as powerful as the instinct to eat, and it seeks conscious expression in the world.” Kidd tells her story as a harnessing of that instinct—through writing and reading. She builds a canon of books that can help us find our voices. Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Elie Wiesel, Thomas Merton, Henrik Ibsen, and Carl Jung fill Kidd’s bookshelves. It is really Merton and Jung who build the scaffold of her spirit. Kidd digs deep into the archetypes of consciousness. The bees, the trees, the mountains, the plains—all take on new meaning in Kidd’s field of vision. She is a memoirist of things, an allegorist of the ordinary. A tuft of bison fur blown across a prairie becomes a keepsake, “a resonant reminder of the strength, bravery, and empowerment I was seeking.” She keeps the little tuft of fur in a box. Other bits of memories fill up the box: string, a shell, a pebble. Memory becomes that box of precious finds. Writing opens up the box and finds the story behind every substance. Kidd can write some of the lushest clauses in American prose. She can also write a simple declarative sentence. At such points of contact, writing thrills. But it can also heal the fractures in our lives and bridge the gap between the aesthetic and the everyday.

A gorgeous memoir of the creative life, designed to bring out the writer’s voice in all of us.