Judy Reeves - Wild Women, Wild Voices: Writing from Your Authentic Wildness

Praise for Wild Women, Wild Voices

In her fourth book, Wild Women, Wild Voices, master teacher Judy Reevess fortifying, fascinating, liberating exercises reach down to the place where the deep howl resides. Writers and nonwriters alike will find energy and passion as they reawaken the wild self.

Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander and Paint It Black

Judy Reevess books are as wildly wonderful as they come a must-have for every writer and teacher. Hers are the first I reach for when I write. With the addition of Wild Women, Wild Voices, she invites writers at every level to banish shame and cast off their posing gowns. Write on, friends youve got the best of guides in Judy Reeves.

Gwendolen Gross, author of When She Was Gone

Judy Reeves has put together a rich, wonderful brew of ideas, quotes, and exercises to unleash the wild writer within you.

Barbara Abercrombie, author of A Year of Writing Dangerously and Kicking In the Wall

In Wild Women, Wild Voices, Judy Reeves exhorts us to remember the joys and sorrows of our girlhoods; challenges us to examine our relationships with our bodies, our homes, our families, our friends; and invites us to rediscover our inner wildness. Bringing together diverse voices from years of her Wild Women writing workshops, Reeves leads us into a journey toward accessing our most authentic selves, remembering rites of passage, lost dreams, and forgotten selves. With writing prompts, as well as excerpts from beloved writers, this is a book for every woman whether she writes formally or not who longs to find her way back to her untamed, creative roots.

Midge Raymond, author of Forgetting English and Everyday Writing

Judy Reevess help in writing as a path to authenticity is beautifully focused, movingly wise, and truly from womens deepest experiences. You feel her there with you on every page of her book, sharing her knowledge and personal journey in the service of guiding you gently to acknowledge your Wild Woman self and free your voice.

Sheila Bender, WritingItReal.com

This book will help both novice and experienced writers stare down their fears and inhibitions, embrace their wild voice, and write with exhilarating authenticity.

Laurel Corona, author of The Four Seasons and The Mapmakers Daughter

Wild Women, weve been waiting for this book. Now, at last, Judy Reeves validates all our longings and guides us toward their fulfillment. While reading Wild Women, Wild Voices, we follow the quiet hum of our authentic selves all the way to full orchestration. This is a book to buy, tuck under your arm, and head out toward life with, expressing your true self along the way.

Tina Welling, author of Writing Wild

Praise for Judy Reevess A Writers Book of Days

A Writers Book of Days is the best sort of writers book: You feel like writing as you read it! It is a spring-fed fountain of inspiration for the writers in us all. This book dances around the imagination and makes you take out your pens and journal to play.

SARK, author/artist of Succulent Wild Woman and Glad No Matter What

Judy Reeves is a writer who lives in her writing, who lives to write. Her passion and dedication to other writers, her community, and her own process are an inspiration for all of us.

Tom Spanbauer, author of Faraway Places and The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon

A delightful mix of commonsense and inspiration, A Writers Book of Days provides the ongoing voice of the teacher, coach, friend, and support group available on call. I suggest this book to every writing seminar graduate a way to take the experience home and carry on.

Christina Baldwin, author of Storycatcher, The Seven Whispers, Lifes Companion, and The Circle Way

Also by Judy Reeves

A Creative Writers Kit

A Writers Book of Days

The Writers Retreat Kit

Writing Alone, Writing Together

Copyright 2015 by Judy Reeves

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Permission acknowledgments beginning on are an extension of the copyright page.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reeves, Judy, date.

Wild women, wild voices : writing from your authentic wildness / Judy Reeves.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-60868-295-9 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-60868-296-6 (ebook)

1. AuthorshipMiscellanea. 2. Creative writingMiscellanea. 3. WomenAuthorship. I. Title.

PN165.R38 2015

808.02dc23

2014045552

First printing, April 2015

ISBN 978-1-60868-295-9

Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my mother, Evelyn Maxine Sandusky Gray

CONTENTS

A little more than two decades ago, I received a copy of Clarissa Pinkola Estss book Women Who Run with the Wolves. In the introduction I read, a woman is influenced she understands the words wild and woman, intuitively. Something about the way those two words wild and woman were placed alongside each other set up a commotion inside me, a response to a longing I couldnt name. When a woman hears those words, Ests continued, an old, old memory is stirred and brought back to life.

My husband had died a few years earlier, and Id recently returned from a journey in which Id effectively exiled myself to traveling the world solo, with one suitcase and no set itinerary. Call it a quest or a soul search; it was one of those times of psychic if not physical upheaval that most of us experience at some time in our lives. I was easy prey for seduction by such an old, old memory.

At the time, Id taken up with a circle of women who were studying the old religions and folkways and creating celebrations to honor the seasonal cycles of the earth the solstices and equinoxes. While it was not exactly primal, there was in our work a deep and intuitive connection to the wild feminine. And though we didnt actually break any laws, we did leave a few muddy footprints on some rules spoken, written, and implied of what the present culture defines as acceptable.

At each of our meetings we set aside a generous amount of time for writing in our journals or notebooks. Wed respond to exercises or prompts that invited explorations into our experiences, our memories, our stories. Wed write in silence and then, if we wanted, read aloud what wed written. There was no feedback on the writing, but you could feel in the room how one womans words affected the whole. A web, strong and silky as a spiders, connected us. And though Ive been a lifelong daily journaler, it was the prompts, questions, and explorations initiated by our work that took me into the deep waters of memory and experience, where I knew how to swim as if by instinct and swore I could breathe underwater. I wrote with a passion I had only rarely experienced, though Ive been writing since I was a child. Words poured from my pen onto the page in a language I didnt know I could speak. There was no struggle, no questioning, no doubting just this unrestrained, ferocious, sometimes funny, always passionate wild voice. And it wasnt just me. Other women in the group found themselves writing with this same freedom and depth, each in her unique and powerful voice.