Published in 2025
209 pages
5 hours and 47 minutes
Sue Monk Kidd is the author of the New York Times bestselling novels The Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid Chair, the memoirs Traveling with Pomegranates, which she wrote with her daughter Ann Kidd Taylor; The Dance of the Dissident Daughter; and When the Heart Waits, and Firstlight, a collection of her early writings. The Secret Life of Bees has spent more than 220 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was adapted into an award-winning movie starring Dakota Fanning, Queen Latifah, Jennifer Hudson, and Alicia Keys. The Mermaid Chair, a #1 New York Times bestseller, was adapted into a television movie. Both of her novels have been translated into more than twenty-four languages. The recipient of numerous literary awards, Sue lives with her husband on an island off the coast of Florida.
What is this book about?
INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER From the bestselling author of The Secret Life of Bees and The Book of Longings: an intimate work on the mysteries, frustrations, and triumphs of being a writer, and an instructive guide to awakening the soul.
When Sue Monk Kidd was in high school, a home economics teacher wrote a list of potential occupations for women on the blackboard: teacher, nurse, librarian, secretary. “Writer” was nowhere to be found. On that day, Kidd shut the door on her writerly aspirations and would not revisit the topic until many years later when she announced to her husband and two children that she was going to become a writer. And so began her journey into the mysteries and methods of the writerly life…
In Writing Creativity and Soul, Sue Monk Kidd will pull from her own life and the lives of other writers—Virginia Woolf, Maya Angelou, Harper Lee, and many others—to provide a map for anyone who has ever felt lost as a writer. At the heart of this book is the unwavering belief that writing is a spiritual act, one that draws inspiration from the soul, that wellspring of creativity between imagination and feeling. Once you tap into that part of yourself, said Maya Angelou, there are only three more things you need as a writer: something to say, the ability to say it, and, perhaps most difficult of all, the courage to say it.
Equal parts memoir, guidebook, and spiritual quest, Writing Creativity and Soul is a pilgrimage and a touchstone, a journey into the transformational force of the imagination and the creative genius that lies in the unconscious.
