Guest Profile

Karen Hering

Karen Hering is a writer and a literary minister from St. Paul, Minnesota and the author of Writing to Wake the Soul: Opening the Sacred Conversation Within. Based in St. Paul, Minnesota, she leads a community ministry of words and story, inviting others to engage writing as a spiritual practice and a tool for social action. She has worked in congregational, community and work settings, leading her participants in guided writing sessions that help them listen to their own inner voice and truth.


An ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, she has a lifelong passion for the power of stories and words not only to express our human experience but also as tools for change, personal and collective. The spiritual practice of writing described in her book is based on the idea that our narratives can be opened to new possibilities. She says, "Whether we are writers or not, words help us reach beyond ourselves to find and name and claim our greater wholeness. They help us summon our best possibilities, bridging between the world as it is today and the place of justice and peace that we long for it to be."