Making Sense of Our Lives Through the Power and Practice of Story
Christina Baldwin
2005
Website
Review of Christina Baldwin's writing retreat

Baldwin, one of the visionaries who started the personal writing movement, has written another beautiful book about how authentic being leads to real connection, this time in relation to telling and writing our stories. 

The book explores three premises about story:

• How we make our experiences into story determines how we live our personal lives.
• What we emphasize and re-tell in our collective story determines whether we quarrel or collaborate in our community.
• What we preserve in larger human story determines what we believe is possible in the world.

Baldwin does this, of course, through stories—lots of them, and they become a framework for simple questions that are designed to get the reader’s story flowing as well. She says:

I cannot imagine my life without writing. Writing has changed everything about how I live, though it's hard to say exactly how because I have no comparison self who doesn't write. The reason I spend thousands of lifetime hours creating something 99 percent of which no one else is likely to ever read is that writing itself is the gift. Writing organizes the mind and the actions that lead from the mind. Over time, the decisions and choices we make in the rush of the moment are informed by the self- knowledge our story gives us. We learn that if we have practiced articulating our story, if we have honored the path to this moment by writing it down, the choices we make are congruent with who we say we are. This is one of the primary promises of story: it was true in oral form and remains even more true in written form. For in writing we live life twice: once in the experience, and again in recording and reflecting upon our experience.

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