Behind Us The Way Grows Wider
Sheila Bender’s body of work over three decades is a life story told in poetry. Poets have called her work “windows of light,” “three square meals,” “comfortable as an old sweater and as welcome,” words that “gives form to what has no body,” and “places where we can rest.”
From Sheila Bender’s volume of new and collected poems 1980 to 2013:
Poetry
You have refused to come to me when I have called you
or come joking in a fool’s chiming rhymes.
You have dropped phrases here and there
leaving me to find the puzzle they complete.
You have distracted me from living the way
others think I ought to.
You have ignited desire in me when boredom
was the companion I thought I preferred.
You have made me cry in public and you have
left me speechless in front of students.
You have come to me unbidden in the mail,
on bus placards and city steps, hooking
me and reeling me in until I flutter and gasp.
You have made me search you out
in books I’d never heard of.
You have made me a lover of frogs in ancient China,
a collector of words I like the sound of like antecubital.
You have widened my circle of friends to old
men in Chile and young girls in Greece.
You have made as foreigners those
closer to home who don’t understand the calling.
I have reminded you that I must earn a living,
I have asked you to wait so I can sleep,
rolling away from the pad and lighted pen.
I have turned my head because I was lazy,
watching television or reading Sunday’s Parade.
I have sometimes committed to organizations
hoping deadlines and databases would keep you away.
Yet there are no vows that can I break with you,
my fated life companion, you who sometimes comes
hidden under armor and sometimes naked in a waterfall,
who sometimes seems afraid of light yet is as agile
sighted as an eagle, who is unpluckable
as a shooting star but as harvested as pinion nuts,
ethereal as the ocean’s spindrift, muscular as its undertow.
is the newest edition of Sheila’s popular book on shaping personal experience for the page. It is available thorough the publisher, 
Whether for high school, college or pleasure creative writing, you need to know the basic elements of the craft.
With this guide, you can reach new levels of self-knowledge and revelation. A Year in the Life gently lead you through one full year of introspective writing, using weekly prompts and topics as a springboard into your deepest feelings. A respected teacher, author, and dedicated journaler, Sheila Bender provides the perfect blend of structure, guidance, and creative freedom, motivating you to begin writing today and continue on throughout the year with zest and satisfaction. Her guidance also take you beyond ordinary journals, helping you reap more from the writing process. With the close of each season, Bender helps you analyze what you’ve written, allowing you to understand your memories, feelings, and relationship as you never have before. Imaginative, supportive and liberating, A Year in the Life is more than a guided journal, it`s a writing path to inner balance and peace. 
A correspondence between two writers reveals how their personal lives and daily experiences inform the writing process. Sheila Bender and Christi Killien meet at a writing conference and later decide to produce a book about writing. Living in different cities, they begin by writing each other letters that capture their approaches to writing, how they find the “starting place” for new work, and the ways they make it through the nonlinear process of telling their stories. Writing In a New Convertible with the Top Down is the second collection of their letters, and it has been used widely in writing classes and workshops.
Writing Personal Poetry: Creating Poems from Your Life Experiences
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