Healing Travel

+Meet the Author - Map of a Heart with Jacque Gorelick on May 6 & Memoir Workshops

Writing without a Device

Setting off on a three-week trip to Southern Africa I worried about how I would stay connected with my memoir manuscript.

Before leaving I had almost finished the second draft and wasn’t quite ready to let it go. At the same time I didn’t want to carry a heavy iPad on my travels.

I decided I would let the manuscript simmer for a while, free myself of electronic writing devices and take only an A4 notepad and my journal.

I didn’t even end up needing the notepad.

Southern Africa transports me to a different world. My focus shifts from doing and performing to being, noticing, and letting things happen.

Jotting down notes in my journal, sometimes short reflections, sometimes a sentence or two, and reading are the perfect companions for this receptive and unencumbered mental state. There is something freeing about writing without correcting, the movement of the hand across the page connecting mind and body.

I’ve been visiting Southern Africa (this time South Africa and Botswana) with my husband Trevor since 2013. I love it for its stillness, its openness, its warmth. I feel at home there, completely myself. Maybe because it’s his motherland, or maybe because of my affinity with African cultures. Humanity’s collective motherland.

Buffalo drinking from the Chobe river with happy onlooker

I also appreciated being away from the dominant “west” for a while, visiting countries with their own perspectives, histories, challenges, and priorities.

Traveling in southern Africa reminds me how much we have in the “overdeveloped” world, at the risk of drowning in our own plenty.

When it’s time to come home, I return changed.

And my manuscript calls out to me loud and clear.

---

Meet the Author - Map of a Heart with Jacque Gorelick

The Empowered Women Book Club is delighted to host Jacque Gorelick, author of Map of a Heart: A memoir of love, loss, and finding the way home on May 6!

In this beautifully written memoir, the author recounts the experience of her young husband collapsing from sudden cardiac arrest and the excruciating days that followed at the hospital with her two-month-old baby. At the same time she interweaves reflections on childhood loss and abandonment and the meaning of family and home.

I can relate deeply with the themes of this book and can’t wait to chat with Jacque about it.

We’d love to have you with us on May 6, 2pm EST/6pm UK time. Contact me for details or join our private Facebook group and RSVP on the events page.

---

Upcoming Memoir Workshops in the south of England

If you need encouragement or inspiration to tell your story, come along to one of my upcoming “Write Memoir - Tell Your Story” workshops. I’d love to meet you in person!

Saturday, April 25 - Bournemouth Writing Festival

Tuesday, May 5 - Stories of the Mature Woman, Bannatyne Hotel, Hastings

Saturday, May 9 - Guildford Institute

Tuesday, May 12 - Cranleigh Arts Book Fest

---

Reading Corner: Political Literature

I decided to read Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, while I was in Southern Africa. I have wanted to read to for a while to learn more about the man behind the myth and the complex history that led to his rise. What better place to do so than his country.

He recounts how a man destined by birth to be the advisor to a provincial king became instead the father of the nation. Apart from the complex political landscape he navigates, Mandela shares personal details of what moves him, what uplifted him in prison. He doesn’t hide what he lost on a personal level to make the leap to a national role; the huge personal sacrifices made on the altar of national liberation. And he gives ample credit to his partners and speaks movingly about his relationships to them: people like Bram Fischer, his Afrikaner defence attorney, and his closest friend, Oliver Tambo.

No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite. Nelson Mandela

I learned so much about South African history from reading this book and realised how little we know about countries beyond the headlines.

It moved me in a way few books ever have. Mandela’s personal story will stay with me for a long time and reminded me how important it is to write out stories—whether or not we’re famous.

---

The first book I read on my return was also a political narrative, albeit fictional. Le Mage du Kremlin (The Wizard of the Kremlin) by Giuliano da Empoli is a literary novel about the making of contemporary Russian politics and its “tzar.” It pulled me and didn’t let me go until the end.

---