When Your Heart Says Go

What sort of mad longing besets a woman—nearing fifty and recently widowed—to 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 1990–’91, Judy’s 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 Judy’s 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 Judy’s 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 herself—and the closer she gets to realizing her lifelong dream of being a writer.

Judy Reeves is an award-winning writer and teacher whose books include A Writer’s Book of Days (named "Best Nonfiction" by the San Diego Book Awards and a “Hottest Books for Writers” by Writer’s Digest), Writing Alone/Writing Together, The Writer’s 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 Writer’s 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.