Joan Grant

Joan Grant wrote and published several novels in the 1930's and 1940's. What her readers didn't know until 20 odd years later was that these novels were not exactly 'fiction'. Joan Grant was a psychic who, she felt, had actually lived her stories.

I've not read any of these novels but I am reading 'Joan Grant - Speaking from the Heart. Ethics, Reincarnation and What it Means to be Human' a selection of her unpublished writings.

Her description of the act of writing caught my attention and had me nodding in agreement.

Here are a couple of paragraphs - - -

'Writing is rewarding to me only when I am certain that my life has overlapped with the lives of others. All of my experiences, all of my senses, have taught me one overriding principal - it is within each of us to be able to help others and to change their lives for the better. This requires a great deal of us...
This is what made writing so complicated for me. The intensity of difficulty I experienced in getting my ideas onto printed pages did not ease up as one work followed another. Certain books, naturally, were written under more pleasant circumstances than others. Some were written quite rapidly. Yet I readily admit that I would find any excuse to put off writing. I'd scrub the kitchen floor, empty bedpans, do anything rather than write. It's a very challenging effort to get an idea into words. When you think you've succeeded, the words are often a shabby imitation of what you really saw or felt. It can be disheartening. Only the tremendous drive of feeling that I had something that needed to be said forced me to persevere, to continue.'

Taken from Joan Grant Speaking from the Heart Ethics, Reincarnation & What it Means to be Human edited by Nicola Bennett, Jane Lahr & Sophia Rosoff

My kitchen floor is looking criminally dirty :o)