THE BOOKS
Sandy’s writing has been informed by the women’s liberation movement and deepened by her spiritual practice. She published her first book of short stories about women in 1975. Later, bringing her experience as a fiction writer to nonfiction, she published a book about Midwestern women in 1982. Since her serious involvement with Buddhist
practice and teachings, she has published six books combining her feminism and her spiritual perspective. If you want to know what it’s like to follow a Buddhist path, to confront cancer, to engage with the embodiment of compassion, choose from the books described below.
She Appears! Encounters with Kwan Yin, Goddess of Compassion
Apr 15, 2005, ISBN paperback: 978-0983346661​
“This extraordinary book is a vivid testimonial to the appeal the East Asian Buddhist ‘goddess’ Kwan Yin holds for Westerners. These first-person accounts of how Kwan Yin entered people’s lives and the artwork and poetry about her that they produced are unique, and uniquely inspiring.
Rita Gross, teacher and author of Buddhism AfterPatriarchy
Dancing in the Dharma: The Life and Teachings of Ruth Denison
Beacon Press, 2005. hardcover, ISBN: 0-8070-7318-0
Dancing in the Dharma tells the remarkable life story of one of Western Buddhism's early pioneers. The unique, colorful, and gracious qualities of Ruth Denison as a person and of her teaching style shine in this compelling biography.
Sharon Salzberg, co-founder of Insight Meditation Society and author of Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience
Hidden Spring: A Buddhist Woman Confronts Cancer
Wisdom Publications, 2000. paperback, ISBN: 978-0861711710
This is the story of a woman's boundless courage in the face of illness...the life sustaining nature of her spiritual practice...and the tremendous importance of friends. Sandy Boucher sends loving kindness to us, her readers, through her graceful, poignant writing and her new found wisdom. This story can be savored by everyone, not just people who are confronting cancer.
Ann Webster, Ph.D., Director, Mind/Body Cancer Program, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Discovering Kwan Yin: Buddhist Goddess of Compassion
Beacon Press, 1999. paperback, ISBN: 978-0807013410
A book of ruminations, meditations, prayers, and chants; Sandy Boucher skillfully and engagingly brings the goddess Kwan Yin in her many guises from the East to the West - and into our hearts - in this wonderful book.
Rick Fields, author of How the Swans Came to the Lake: A History of Buddhism in America
Opening the Lotus: A Woman's Guide to Buddhism
Beacon Press, 1997. paperback, ISBN: 978-0807073094
Here is a trustworthy traveling companion for the countless Western women who desire, and deserve, to venture on the Dharma path.
Joanna Macy, author of World as Lover, World as Self
Heartwomen: An Urban Feminist's Odyssey Home
Harper & Row, 1982. hardback, ISBN: 978-0062500953
The women in this book I call 'heartwomen' not simply because they live in the center of the country...It seemed to me that they gave themselves to their lives wholly, without holding back -- that they lived, one might say, from the heart.
Sandy Boucher
The notebooks of Leni Clare, and other short stories (The Crossing Press feminist series)
Crossing Press, 1982. paperback, ISBN: 978-0895940773
“From the farmland of the Midwest to the hiking trails of the Sierras to the San Francisco of early Lesbian relationships, this book of stories continues Sandy’s explorations, offering striking excursions into our hearts and minds.
Sandra Butler, author of Cancer in Two Voices.
Assaults & Rituals Stories
NA, 1975. paperback, ASIN: B000SHO31C​
After a period of intense political activism, I began writing again—this time not in the clenched isolated way I had done it before, but with an awareness of the people with whom I want to communicate, whose realities I want to evoke. These stories are my gift to women.
Sandy Boucher
Turning the Wheel: American Women Creating the New Buddhism
Beacon Press, 1993. paperback, ISBN: 978-0807073056
Essential reading for anyone wanting to understand feminism, Buddhist practice in America today, and where and how these two movements
meet.
Susan Griffin, author of Chorus of Stones and Women and Nature
