:
"A wonderfully knowing book, both instructive and inspiring–an exemplary instance of the best of the documentary tradition: a world both explored and rendered by a visitor, but also by those who inhabit it. Here is social truth and personal reflection given a complex, worthy, telling expressiveness–an author’s idealism of intent become a group’s narrative triumph. Here, too, is social science become a moral example–a witness to the redemptive side of suffering."
–Robert Coles
"Heller brings each woman to life in captivating and complex portraits–Mary TallMountain arises in my mind as thunderous, trembling, inexhaustible and large. . . . [This] is an important, insightful book for anyone at any level who wants to understand teaching as an exuberant, potentially propulsive undertaking–full of agony, sweat, certainly, but also filled with the neverending promise of changing our lives."
–William Ayers, University of Illinois at Chicago
"Writing down one’s own story resurrects private memory; reading that story and listening to the written words of others creates community. This the women do in Caroline Heller’s powerful study of an unlikely inner-city women writer’s group. Even beyond the remarkable stories they tell, we are moved by the profound respect with which they view each other’s lives."
–Vivian Gussin Paley, Author and Teacher
In her extraordinary book about the members of the Tenderloin Women Writers Workshop, Caroline Heller witnesses the power of literacy in the lives of these women who gathered weekly in one of San Francisco’s roughest neighborhoods, to share their writing and life experiences. In telling their stories as she came to know them during her three years of attendance, Heller brings the group to life and explores the functions the workshop served for its participants–functions that were social, political, and deeply educational. Her eloquent narrative contributes a fresh conception of critical literacy and liberation education, drawing on the words and perceptions of some of those outside the mainstream of American life, enriching our understanding of how we might more effectively learn in community with one another–and how to connect writing to real life, to our neighborhood, and to social justice and social change.
Chapters: It Turned Into Something True to You • We Want to Create a Record of This World • Mary • You Let It Mature to Splendor • Maria • Until We Are Strong Together • Salima • These Pictures Are in My Mind Constantly • Martha • I’m Tired of Not Hearing from You • Diminished by Your Absence • References
