Deena Metzger
Deena Metzger is a writer, storyteller and healer living at the end of the road in Topanga, California. She developed therapies (Healing Stories) which creatively address life threatening diseases, spiritual and emotional crises, as well as community, political and environmental disintegration. has spent a lifetime investigating Story as a form of knowing and healing. As a writer, she asks: Who do we have to become to find the forms and sacred language with which to meet these times? She conducts training groups on the spiritual, creative, political and ethical aspects of healing and peacemaking, individual, community and global, drawing deeply on alliance with spirit, indigenous teachings and the many wisdom traditions.
Her books include the novels La Vieja: A Journal of Fire, A Rain of Night Birds, La Negra y Blanca, (2012 PEN Oakland award for Literature ); Feral; Doors: A Fiction for Jazz Horn; The Other Hand; What Dinah Thought; Skin: Shadows/Silence, A Love Letter in the Form of a Novel and The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take the War Out of Them—a novel in the form of a play. The latter is included in Tree: Essays and Pieces, which features her celebrated Warrior Poster on its cover testifying to a woman’s triumph over breast cancer.
Her books of poetry include, The Burden of Light, Ruin and Beauty: New and Collected Poems, A Sabbath Among The Ruins, Looking for the Faces of God, The Axis Mundi Poems and Dark Milk.
Writing For Your Life: A Guide and Companion to the Inner Worlds is her classic text on writing and the imagination. Two plays Not As Sleepwalkers and Dreams Against the State have been produced in theaters and various venues. She co-edited, with Linda Hogan and Brenda Peteson, the anthology, Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals, one of the first testimonies to the reality and nature of animal intelligence and agency. Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing, and From Grief Into Vision: A Council examine the tragic failure of contemporary culture and provide guidance for personal, political, environmental and spiritual healing.
Deena is a radical thinker on behalf of the natural world and planetary survival, a teacher of writing and healing practices for 50 years and a writer and activist profoundly concerned with peacemaking, restoration and sanctuary for a beleaguered world. She has been convening ReVisioning Medicine—aligning medical people and medicine people, bringing Indigenous medicine ways to heal the medical world—since 2004. She originated the genre, the Literature of Restoration, and the Training program 19 Ways for the 5th World to promote spirit based, earth-based writing free of the seeds of extinction and climate collapse and as as foundations of a new viable culture. She introduced Daré, (Council in the Shona Language to North America in 1999, a unique form of individual, community and environmental healing based on Indigenous, contemporary medicine and wisdom traditions. She lives at the end of the road in the Santa Monica mountains, with Coyote, Bobcat, Mountain Lion, Squirrel, Owl, Raven and more on land she and the community have designated as a sanctuary for all beings, and regularly meets with African Elephants in the wild.
