Writing for Bliss: A Seven-Step Plan for Telling Your Story and Transforming

Writing for Bliss is most fundamentally about reflection, truth, and freedom. With techniques and prompts for both the seasoned and novice writer, it will lead you to tap into your creativity through storytelling and poetry, examine how life-changing experiences can inspire writing, pursue self-examination and self-discovery through the written word, and, understand how published writers have been transformed by writing.
Poet and memoirist Raab (Lust) credits her lifelong love of writing and its therapeutic effects with inspiring her to write this thoughtful and detailed primer that targets pretty much anyone interested in writing a memoir. Most compelling here is Raab's willingness to share her intimate stories (e.g., the loss of a relative, ongoing struggles with cancer, a difficult relationship with her mother). Her revelations are encouraging to writers who feel they need "permission to take... a voyage of self-discovery." The book's seven-step plan includes plenty of guidance, including on learning to "read like a writer," and on addressing readers as if "seated across the table ." She also helps readers with the important step of "finding your form."

--PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY
"Writing for Bliss is about the profound ways in which we may be transformed in and through the act of writing. I am grateful to Diana Raab for sharing it, and I trust that you will feel the same as you read on. May you savor the journey."

--from the foreword by MARK FREEMAN, PhD
"By listening to ourselves and being aware of what we are saying and feeling, the true story of our life's past experience is revealed. Diana Raab's book gives us the insights by which we can achieve this through her life-coaching wisdom and our writing."

--BERNIE SIEGEL, MD, author of The Art of Healing
"Only a talented writer who has fought hard to overcome life's many obstacles could take her readers by the hand and lead them through

the writing process with such enormous compassion, amazing insight, and kindness. Diana Raab is a powerful, wise, intelligent guide

well worth our following."

--JAMES BROWN, author of The Los Angeles Diaries and The River
"Writing for Bliss is far more than a 'how-to manual'; it enlightens the creative process with wisdom and a delightful sense of adventure.

Bravo to Bliss!"

--LINDA GRAY SEXTON, author of Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton
"Uniquely blending inspiring insights with practical advice, Diana guides you on a path to discover the story that is truly inside you and yearning to be told."

--PATRICK SWEENEY, coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Succeed on Your Own Terms
DIANA RAAB, PhD, is an award-winning memoirist, poet, blogger, workshop facilitator, thought provoker, and survivor. She's the author of nine books and over one thousand articles and poems. She lives in Southern California.
Learn more at Loving Healing Press Diana Raab, MFA, PhD, is a memoirist, poet, blogger, workshop facilitator, thought provoker, and award-winning author of seven books and over a thousand articles and poems, as well as the editor of two anthologies. Her passion and expertise is in writing for healing, transformation, and self-empowerment. She is very interested in creativity and what drives the creative process. Her early inspiration came from reading the journals of Anaïs Nin, as she was impressed by Nin's candor and honesty.

Raab has been writing since childhood, when her mother gave her a Kahlil Gibran journal to help her cope with the loss to suicide of her beloved grandmother. Raab's MFA is in nonfiction writing from Spalding University, and her PhD is in Transpersonal Psychology from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (aka Sofia University), where she researched the healing and transformative aspects of memoir writing. She is also a registered nurse and was a medical journalist for more than twenty-five years.

For decades, Raab has been a motivating force, inspiring others to write the stories and narratives of their lives. She has worked with those from all walks of life, including esteemed writers, business people, published and emerging writers, cancer survivors, and those surviving various types of trauma.

A world traveler, Raab was born in Brooklyn, New York, and has lived in Montreal and Florida. She currently resides in Southern California with her husband of four decades. She has three grown, creative, and entrepreneurial-driven children and two grandchildren. When not writing or offering workshops, she may be found meditating, hiking, nurturing her bonsais, or sitting on a cliff or by the sea crafting poems and musings in her journal.

Raab serves on a number of boards, including that for Poets & Writers, and she is a trustee at the University of Santa Barbara (UCSB). She blogs regularly for Psychology Today, PsychAlive, and The Huffington Post.
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