Product Description

Room to Fly is a unique journalor ongoing memoirby a woman who traces the elusive contours of cultural perceptions East and West, welcoming us into the intimate geography of individual lives. The book takes its shape and direction from a tenet of Japanese Sumi painting: If you depict a bird, give it space to fly. Padma Hejmadi explores the human spaces surrounding language, landscape, literacy and illiteracy, music, dance, legend, the cadence of ancient craft, and the ceaselessly unfolding layers of family relationships. Part autobiography, part lively meditation, Room to Fly represents a new genre with an old diction. Hejmadi's spare, luminous prose combines lyricism with humor and intellectual rigor, drawing us from Bombay to the Bahamas, from Japan to New England, the Greek Isles to New Mexico.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1693297 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 214 pages

Review
"An admirable addition to an increasingly popular genre--the personal memoir. . . . The most fascinating observations concern the author's childhood in a part of India where the spoken language, a variation of Konkani, has no written form. Hejmadi describes the impact of this in graceful, fluid English that is both impressive and startling, and her philosophical concerns regarding the impact of such a situation on the people experiencing it is thought-provoking. In addition to language and literacy, the memoirist's themes include many forms of movement, including travel and transformation."--Choice

From the Inside Flap
"Room to Fly is a feast of great richness and variety, filled with exquisitely nuanced descriptions of places that have shaped the spiritual growth of the author. She brings to the most fleeting encounters her memories, her reflections, and her deep knowledge of Indian history, all woven with consummate skill on the loom of her own life."--Nancy Willard, author of The Mountains of Quilt

"Room to Fly is unique in both form and content. I know of nothing else with which it might be meaningfully compared. This book is a treasure . . . structured with unobtrusive care to record the liberating moments of space."--Hazel Barnes, author of The Story I Tell Myself

"What makes Room to Fly so unusual is its rendering of memory and of the creative process itself. This book is at once a series of prose poems, a philosophy of aesthetics, and an exploration of cultures, written with such vivid immediacy and a language so beautifully crafted that we keep wanting to return to it again and again for the sheer pleasure of its music."--Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, author of Revolutionizing Motherhood

"This book is a gift of joy--a bright tapestry of perception and meditation, woven from threads of nature and art and friendship. Padma Hejmadi's experience of many years, in many lands and languages, is framed by a rich awareness of human possibility--of what it is to be fully alive in the senses, the mind, the heart, and the imagination."--Aileen Ward, author of John Keats

"Brilliant at catching the transitions between understanding and incomprehension, laughter and loss; at capturing transformations where personal experience opens up the world."--from M. Kay Flavell, author of "George Grosz: A Biography." Professor of Critical Theory, art critic, and Director the The Pacific Bridges Project.

From the Back Cover
"Room to Fly is a feast of great richness and variety, filled with exquisitely nuanced descriptions of places that have shaped the spiritual growth of the author. She brings to the most fleeting encounters her memories, her reflections, and her deep knowledge of Indian history, all woven with consummate skill on the loom of her own life." (Nancy Willard, author of The Mountains of Quilt)

Customer Reviews

dont miss this.
this small book contains a huge amount of living, thinking and writing. Please read it and buy it. Your view of the world will expand and your faith in humanity andthe ablilty to think will be greatly enlarged.

A wonderful, sensual storyteller
This is a soaring, remarkable exploration of human consciousness, seen through the filters of time, place, and language. Hejmadi captures the intricacies of human awareness with precision, clarity, wit, and grace. Whether the setting is East or West, Delhi or Taos, Hejmadi's truths about love, life, work & family are reverberant and universal. She has the gift of making you walk her extraordinary path along with her. A wonderful gift for any booklover in your life.

A soaring spirit
AThis is a fabulous book, of special interest to women and sensitive thinkers of all cultures. Padma Hejmadi writes with a clarity and compactness unrivaled in today's literature. She explores the world from her special vantage point, bringing it alive with her gift of visual as well as written language. The scenes imprint themselves on one's memory forever. The gift of this courageous woman is not to be ignored. Read and enjoy!