Writing Grief Rachel Thompson and Meli Walker

Hosts Rachel & Meli with an update about the pod.

What are we talking about when we talk about story structure?

In this conversation, we talk about writing our worst moments. If you're writing grief you probably have a moment or series of moments that are definitively shocking, devastating, and full of loss and fear. We talk about how to write these so-called worst moments in a meaningful and responsible way.

Leaping off from Joan Didion’s refrain in her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, we examine questions about self-pity and its place in writing that is meant to be seen and read.

Here we are in our third episode. We ask ourselves: why write a grief memoir? Why do we want to write at all? We go way way back to early life. Rachel talks about her teenage writing life and Meli shares memories of her childhood stories. At the end of the episode, Rachel has a challenge for you.

In our second episode of Writing Grief, we talk about how writing stories from our lives is like (and unlike) therapy. What's the difference between disclosure about the more painful events of our lives and making art about a life that includes those events?

A note that we're not psychotherapists, we are not counsellors, but we do talk a bit about our own experiences with therapy and how it has helped us write and make meaning out of our lives.

Again, this podcast and this episode feature difficult or painful topics based on our own experiences, including mental health, grief, and death by suicide. The show notes on our website WritingGrief.com include reference to suicide prevention services and hotlines so please, if you're in crisis, we want you to have resources, which is why we've also included a couple of inroads to accessing therapy on a sliding scale and some organizations who are doing this work to help folks access mental health services.