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.

• Rachel and Meli again refer to the concept of “the coma story” from Betsy Warland’s Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing (Cormorant Books, 2010)
• Rachel mentions an exercise in The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr (Harper, 2015)
• Meli describes a prompt she was given in a writing workshop by Allison K. Williams, Writer, Speaker, Coach http://idowords.net and Author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book (Woodhall Press, 2021)
• The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr (Penguin Random House, 1995)
• *Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail* by Cheryl Strayed (Knopf Doubleday, 2012)
• On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler Ross (The Macmillan Company, 1969)
• On Grief & Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss by Elisabeth Kübler Ross and David Kessler (Simon & Schuster, 2014)
• Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief by David Kessler (Scribner, 2019)
• In each episode, we recommend Settler/non-Indigenous writers do research about the lands they write from. (Start at native-land.ca.)

The transcript for this episode is available upon request from [email protected].