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Imagine a little girl, hiding behind a sofa, snuggled under her covers, or sitting on a rock in the forest, nestled among the trees.
Her eyes are closed. She’s turned on the theatre in her mind’s eye and sees the stories she tells herself—saving children from a flood, rescuing children from a devastating fire, fighting and winning a battle against giants… The stories help her live through trauma, abuse, abandonment, never feeling safe or loved or cared for. Years later, now a grown woman, I not only tell stories to myself, I tell them in memoirs, novels, plays, and essays. Both in the US and abroad, I have taught and led workshops in schools, universities, mental hospitals, prisons, recreational centers, battered women’s shelters, and staff development programs, always with the goal of helping participants rediscover and reclaim their creativity and imagination. I have used my experiences of powerlessness to create imaginary worlds where characters find ways to become empowered. The stories I tell, no matter the form, are about people, often women, who encounter “bumps in the road”. I’m interested in how characters face these bumps.
It's not about happily ever after
It’s about the journey to discover what they need to do, what they need to acknowledge, in order to make meaningful choices, to be the people they want to be. At the end of my novels and plays, characters know more about themselves, have faced and moved through fears, more ready to meet whatever challenges life presents.
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Nancy King's Latest
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The Cracked Pot's Gift: Stories to Challenge and Comfort is an enchanting collection of age-old tales from around the world, each illuminated with the author's own captivating stories. A rich and wide-ranging banquet of a book meant for browsing, inspiring, comforting, challenging—a book that invites sharing; stories that invite telling and re-telling.
Each world tale is followed by stories that delve into what it means to be human, to be fallible, and to encounter new and unexpected situations with curiosity and the courage born of an open heart. Each story is uniquely paired with an intriguing question to contemplate, a roadmap that encourages readers to discover and recover their own stories. Unique and to be treasured, The Cracked Pot's Gift offers up tales that have the power to heal, to touch hearts and minds, to gift us with our most ancient and delicious ways of understanding what it means to be who we are and who we want to be. |