When Your Heart Says Go: My Year of Traveling Beyond Loss and Loneliness

(Paperback)

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What sort of mad longing besets a womannearing fifty and recently widowedto sell everything she owns, buy an around-the-world airline ticket, pack a single suitcase, and set off alone on a year-long journey without a plan or agenda When Your Heart Says Go answers that question.

Set in 199091, Judys story takes readers from San Diego through eleven European countries, the then-Soviet Union, and finally India, during the lead-up to the first Gulf War.

Explorations of foreign locales and interactions with strangers and acquaintances who become a lifeline to friendship are interspersed with occasional flashbacks to Judys life with her beloved husband, Tom, as well as his illness and death. Descriptions of sites historic and current serve as both daily life and background for Judys struggle to find her way as a sober, single, independent woman in the vast world as it edges toward the collapse of the Soviet Union and war in the Middle East. The outer journey serves as a container for the inner; the more Judy experiences of the world, the more she learns about herselfand the closer she gets to realizing her lifelong dream of being a writer.

Reviews

Reeves recounts in loving detail the globe-hopping she embarks upon to chart a new path after the death of her husband. It is in these detailsa perfect cappuccino at a caf in Amsterdam, a moonrise in Mykonosthat she reveals how we carry on after lossand take loss with us as we carry on.
Sue William Silverman, author,How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences

In gentle, gorgeous, and elegiac prose, Judy Reeves pulls the reader into a journey of quiet courage and insight that shines from her paragraphs in this memoir of midlife journey. Against a backdrop of foreign countries, her reverie on recoveryfrom alcohol, intimate losses, young widowhoodshows emergence in a woman who has spent the thirty years since then guiding others through reflection and self-inquiry. Reeves contributions as a teacher of the writing life are known to thousands: this is her origin story.
Christina Baldwin is the author,Lifes Companion,Storycatcher,and other titles

As Judy Reeves goes lightly and quickly across Europe and India, her private grief for losing her husband sharply interrupts the journey. This diary-like memoir is haunted by his death and the nagging refrain that Reeves is unsure shes a writer while she journals her wonder, often in exquisite detail, at the undiscovered world. Her search for meaning and connection is to find and let go of connection, to begin asserting her feminist self, and to finally own the necessity of being alonea prcis for the writing life that is and also awaits her.
Thomas Larson, author ofThe Memoir and the Memoirist

In scenes of quiet brilliance, Judy Reeves crafts a dazzling memoir of a woman in search of herself after the death of her husband. As she travels around the worldParis, Athens, Moscow, Bombay we discover the geography of her life, with its griefs, sensual joys, challenges, and dreams. This isEat, Pray, Lovefor women who know that the greatest journey of all, is the one that points inwards. I savored every page.
Mary Reynolds Thompson, authorofA Wild Soul WomanandReclaiming the Wild Soul

Never have I felt so carried off inside a dream with all the sensual details, encounters with fellow travelers and citizens of society than when readingWhen the Heart Says Go.Both a love story, and a tale of grief Judy writes with achingly provocative descriptions of her around-the-world trip, taking us along on her intimate journey to heal from a tragically lost love. I fell in love with every word, just as she fell in love with who she would become.
Amy Wallen, author ofHow to Write a Novel in 20 Pies and When We Were Ghouls

There are many compelling travels in Judy Reevess captivating memoir. She introduces us to people, places, trains, and moments that define her year of travel. More so, she takes us up close into her inner journey of grief, loneliness and deciding who she was going to be and how she was going to live her life after the death of her husband. Reevess writing speaks to something universal about loss, longing, and the human spirit. While reading her story, I was drawn into myselfa sign that a gifted writer is leading the way.
Lynda Monk, Director, International Association for Journal Writing, IAJW.org

Written in luscious poetic language by a master wordsmith this memoir is filled with exquisite sensory details, colorful settings, and interesting personalities she encounters along the way. I highly recommend it!
Jill G. Hall, author of the Anne McFarland Series

Through eloquent and finely articulated details of her travels,painting images from words and hoping to insulate herself from the depth of heartbreak,Reeves realizes that no matter how many different landscapes she traverses,outer change is a futile substitution for inner healing and freedom from unbearable loss. When Your Heart Says Gocaptures the meandering lostness of losing ones beloved,and the compassionate joy which eventually emerges to hold it. Reevess book is a reminderof the truth of life creating itself newly.
Laura Basha, PhD, author of The Inward Outlook

" Reeves shares from her heart as she processes the death of her soulmate, taking us along on an adventurous around-the-world journey. She writes deftly and poetically from exotic cities where she not only discovers herself again but ultimately her calling in life.
Leslie Johansen Nack, author ofFourteen

What an inspirational journey! In her memoirWhen Your Heart Says Go,Judy Reevess vivid descriptions take us with her as she encounters the places and people that help her open up and become a fuller person. Reevess beautiful book is a testament to the power of writing as well as the human capacity for resilience.
Sandra Marinella, author of The Story You Need to Tell

Go on a mind-expanding, heart-expanding journey with Judy Reeves as she recounts her worldwide journey of exploration after the death of her husband.
Eric Maisel, author ofThe Coachs Way

Author Bio

Judy Reeves is an award-winning writer and teacher whose books include A Writers Book of Days (named "Best Nonfiction" by the San Diego Book Awards and a Hottest Books for Writers by Writers Digest), Writing Alone/Writing Together, The Writers Retreat Kit, and Wild Women, Wild Voices. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared many journals and anthologies. A long-time teacher of creative writing, she previously taught at UCSD Extension and has led community-based writing practice groups for thirty years. She teaches at writing conferences internationally and at San Diego Writers, Ink, a nonprofit literary center she cofounded. Her awards include those from the San Diego Writers and Editors Guild, San Diego Writers Festival, and The African American Writers & Artists Association. Mayor Jerry Sanders declared July 24, 2010 Judy Reeves Day in San Diego. Judy lives and writes in San Diego, amid bulging bookshelves and an ancient Underwood typewriter that claims its own social media fan base.