Exploring What Writing from the Heart Means to Me

Since February includes Valentine’s Day, I thought I’d consider what writing from the heart means to me … 

Writing from the heart means writing …

• from where we are the most wounded about our most burning personal truths;

• with empathy for others and an expansive generosity of spirit I call “largesse,” or from the point of view 2018 Nobel Prize winner for Literature Olga Tokarczuk calls “The Tender Narrator” in her Nobel Lecture;

• gently about our ‘villains,’ because even our so-called ‘bad guys’ are only human, after all;

• about other people possessing open hearts and good intentions, like the characters in my memoir tentatively titled, “The House of Good Intentions.” In this house, all of us dwell in the space of our most heartfelt and humane mindset; 

• from within reach of self-acceptance writ large, designed specifically for one particular reader whom we want to understand us authentically–embracing the good and the bad–with implied forgiveness for our shortcomings, not to be confused with overly emotional expressions of sentimentality;

• Finally, today is Sunday, February 26, 2023, and I listened to a fervent televangelist who preached a message that very much struck me as summing up the beating essence of writing memoir from the heart: 

“We learn more in the darkness than we do in the light.”