The New Diary is about a completely modern concept of journal writing. It has little to do with the rigid daily calendar diary you may have kept as a child or the factual travelogue you wrote to recall the Grand Canyon. Instead, it is a tool for tapping the full power of your inner resources.
The New Diary is as much for those who already keep a journal as it is for those who have never kept one. It does not tell you the "right" way to keep a diary; rather, it offers numerous possibilities for using the diary to achieve your own purposes. It is a place for you to clarify goals, visualize the future, and focus your engergies; a means of freeing your intuition and imagination; a workbook for exploring your dreams, your past, and your present life.
It is for everyone seeking concrete methods for dealing with personal problems. It is for women and men interested in achieving self-reliance and inner liberation, for artists and writers seeking new techniques for overcoming blocks to creativity.
Tristine Rainer, Ph.D, is a pioneer in the fields of contemporary journal writing and narrative autobiography. Her book The New Diary, how to use a journal for self-guidance and expanded creativity has sold over 200,000 copies and has been used as a text in university Psychology and Occupational Therapy courses, although her degree was in English Lit. After a quarter of a century in print The New Diary will see a new, revised edition in 2004. Her book Your Life as Story, Writing the New Autobiography, published in 1997 hit the Los Angeles Times bestseller list and is presently being used as a text in many college writing programs.
Rainer is the founder and director of the Center for Autobiographic Studies, a non-profit educational organization that encourages the creation and preservation of autobiographic works. A founder of UCLA’s Women’s Studies Program, Rainer was also a grad student there. She taught personal writing for 25 years through the English Departments at UCLA and at Indiana University, with her friend and mentor Anaïs Nin for International College, through the UCLA Extension Writers program, and privately as a writer's coach to a diverse array of clients, many of whom have successfully published autobiographic books with her assistance. She is currently an adjunct professor within the Masters of Professional Writing Program at USC. http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/mpw
The Center for Autobiographic Studies (CAS) is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit educational organization dedicated to promoting the knowledge, appreciation, creation and preservation of contemporary autobiographic works. These works may be written for self-understanding, for preserving family and cultural history, or for pooling the wisdom to be gained from diverse individuals' life experiences.
In a whole separate life, Rainer wrote and produced four award winning network movies for television based on true life stories. It was this experience of shaping stories in the trenches, she says, that gave her the key to how teach anyone to transform their own life experience into a compelling story.
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