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Melanie Brooks joins the Writing Your Resilience Podcast to speak about her book, A Hard Silence: One Daughter Remaps Family, Grief, and Faith When HIV/AIDS Changes It All. This is the book she once struggled to write about her father's death.  In today's episode, we'll explore the powerful impact silence has on you and how to break through it. 

Before we get to this conversation, I have a few questions for you. What role has silence played in your writing and in your life? Has it ever been helpful? Has it ever held you back? If you could learn one thing about it, what would that be? How could learning this help you become more resilient? 

Melanie Brooks is the author of A Hard Silence: One Daughter Remaps Family, Grief, and Faith When HIV/AIDS Changes It All (Vine Leaves Press, September 2023) and Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma (Beacon Press, 2017). She teaches professional writing at Northeastern University and creative nonfiction in the MFA program at Bay Path University in Massachusetts. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast writing program. She recently completed a Certificate of Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Psychology Today, the HuffPost, Yankee Magazine, the Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, and other notable publications. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, two children (when they are home from college), and two Labs.

Episode Highlights

• 2:55: The pain of living with secrets
• 5:54: Navigating anticipatory grief 
• 15:45: The transformative power of finishing your story 
• 20:00 The magic of timing and the stories we tell ourselves 
• 26:00 The influence of narrative medicine on Melanie’s story
• 30:00 Marrying two stories into one 
• 37:00 Melanie’s best writing advice 

Connect with Melanie:

Website: melaniebrooks.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/melanie.brooks.1690

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melaniejmbrookswriter

X: https://twitter.com/MelanieJMBrooks

LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/melanie-brooks-504826121
Get Melanie’s book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-hard-silence-one-daughter-remaps-family-grief-and-faith-when-hiv-aids-changes-it-all-melanie-brooks/20151761?ean=9783988320209

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Produced by Espresso Podcast Production