Writing Grief

In this conversation, we tried to talk about structure in storytelling, the craft of writing a memoir. What are we talking about when we talk about story structure? Listen to find out…

At the end of the episode, we share a few structure-related prompts for you.

• Meli’s reading Doretta Lau’s short story collection How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun (Nightwood Editions, 2014)
• Meli mentioned that Doretta Lau was a recent guest in our writing community (at RachelThompson.co) and when endings came up, Doretta recommended The Last Fifty Pages: The Art and Craft of Unforgettable Endings by James Scott Bell (Compendium Press, 2019)
• Rachel references The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick (Macmillan, 2002) and we refer to the book a few more times throughout the episode
• Rachel references Voltaire’s often quoted line, “The secret to being boring is to leave nothing out.” (Which is a translation of, “Le secret d’ennuyer est celui de tout dire,” from the essay “Sixième discours: sur la nature de l’homme” in his book Sept Discours en Vers sur l’Homme, 1738)
• Meli mentions a writing prompt she received from the writer and editor, Dinty W. Moore
• Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative by Jane Alison (Catapult, 2019)
• Rachel refers to her podcast Write, Publish, and Shine where she interviews literary editors about publishing
• Rachel took a memoir outlining course with writer Lilly Dancyger with Catapult
• These memoirs come up once again: Wild by Cheryl Strayed and Liar’s Club by Mary Karr
• Meli mentions Wild Game by Adrienne Brodeur; the audiobook Meli mentions with an interview at the end that clarifies Brodeur’s mother’s present condition is narrated by Julia Whalen
• Rachel references The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy (Random House, 2017) and her essay Thanksgiving in Mongolia in The New Yorker
• We also talk about Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (Riverhead Books, 2017)
• Meli mentions Glennon Doyle’s two books Carry On, Warrior (Scribner, 2004) and Untamed (The Dial Press, 2020)
• And Meli talks a bit about Alain de Botton and his School of Life
• At the end of the episode, we quote from Thinking About Memoir (Sterling Publishing, 2008) by Abigail Thomas
• We also reference Zami, A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde (Persephone Press, 1982)

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

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].

Your hosts and grief-writing friends Meli and Rachel talk about the question of self-pity and its place in memoir writing or writing that is meant to be read.

As always, we suggest listening on your own terms, with safety and care.

We dig into topics in our own memoirs in progress and as a result, we would like to issue some content warnings for this episode because we deal with pregnancy, child loss, childhood trauma, mental illness, lightly touch on suicide.

A single f-bomb is dropped toward the end (so you might want to cover those sensitive ears around you).

At the end of the episode, Meli has a writing prompt for you.

• The title and themes from this episode come from Joan Didion’s memoir on grief, The Year of Magical Thinking (Knopf, 2005)
• Rachel slightly misquotes Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “My own heart let me more have pity on”
• Rachel descibes the fictional character Eeyore from the Winnie-the-Pooh books by A.A. Milne as an example of a self-pitying character archetype.
• Rachel quoted the authors Regina Brooks & Brenda Lane Richardson from this article about the two deadly sins of writing; the first “sin” is self pity.
• Rachel has a lot of quotes in this episode, another one is from Alysia Abbott, author of Fairyland: A Memoir Of My Father (WW Norton, 2014)
• The Alysia Abbot quote is found in the book Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma by Melanie Brooks (Beacon Press, 2017)
• Rachel has yet another quote, one from Debra Gwartney who wrote, Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love (Mariner Books, 2010)
• Rachel and Meli discuss Betsy Warland’s “Coma Story” from Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing (Cormorant Books, 2010)
• Rachel and Meli credit the Untitled Dad Project Podcast by creator Janielle Kastner and director Carson McCain (Spoke Media) for inspiring their pod.
• 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].

Why write a memoir about grief…other than the run of the mill, burning (irritating!) drive to write. Is it enough to say, “We want to…? We just do.”

Here we are in our third episode. Writers Rachel Thompson and Meli Walker ask themselves: 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 this episode, we mention residential schools, which were part of the genocide of Indigenous people on Turtle Island. Meli said she would fact-check when the last residential school closed in “Canada”. It was 1996.
Here are some cultural resources:

• Indian Residential School Survivors and Family: Phone 1-800-721-0066 or 604-985-4464 and irsss.ca
• First Nations and Inuit Hope for Wellness Help Line: Phone toll-free 1-855-242-3310 or chat online at hopeforwellness.ca

One extra warning: this episode has some cursing, so headphones may be a good idea here.

• Rachel mentioned reading articles about how introverts did not “do better” in the pandemic. Here’s one from The Conversation, and another from BBC
• Meli mentions The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde (Aunt Lute Books, 1980)
• Mary Karr comes up again! Meli mentions her three different memoirs Liar’s Club, Cherry, and Lit
• Meli mentions Rachel’s book, Galaxy (Anvil Press, 2011)
• Meli shares a story about seeing the children’s author, Robert Munsch tell one of his stories seventeen years before it was published as Purple Green and Yellow (Annikins, 2007)
• Rachel quotes Anais Nin who said, “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
• Meli vaguely claims that there’s research showing writing helps us heal. You can read more about this in Writing as a Way of Healing by Louise DeSalvo (Beacon Press, 2000)
• Meli mentions The Diary of Samuel Pepys which you can read for free at Project Gutenberg.
• Theft By Finding: Diaries (1977-2002) by David Sedaris (Little, Brown and Company, 2017). You may also decide to read *How I Found My Way Back to Journaling (With a Little Help From David Sedaris)* by Laura Studarus at Shondaland.com
• Rachel mentions morning pages in The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron (TarcherPerigee, 1992)
• Meli quotes Roxane Gay on writing trauma. Both quotes from a speaking event presented by the 92 St YMCA in March 2021, Roxane Gay in Conversation with Soledad O’Brien to discuss Roxane Gay’s Writing into the Wound: Understanding Trauma, Truth, and Language
• Rachel mentions Oprah Winfrey’s March 2021 interview with Meghan Markle (we were recording around the time of the interview).
• Meli talks about Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May (Riverhead Books, 2020)
• We talked about the create more than you consume challenge which is from Rachel’s writing courses
• In each episode, we recommend Settler non-Indigenous writers do research about the lands they write from. (Start at native-land.ca.)

Thank you for listening to another episode of Writing Grief!

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

In this conversation, we talked about how and whether writing stories from our lives is like 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 include references 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:

• Suicide hot lines
  US: National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
  Canada: The Canada Suicide Prevention Service
  International: International Suicide Hotlines
  
• 5 Action Steps for helping someone who may be suicidal
  
• Accessing sliding scale therapy resources
  US: Therapy for Every Budget: How to Access It
  Canada & US: Open Path Psychotherapy Collective
  International: What is Sliding Scale Therapy and Do You Qualify?

• Rachel is reading The Right to Write by Julia Cameron
• We mention Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing by Betsy Warland (Cormorant Books, 2010)
• Meli mentions Roxane Gay‘s MasterClass, Writing About Trauma and Writing into the Wound: Understanding Trauma, Truth, and Language by Roxane Gay (Scribd, 2021)
• Rachel mentions an exercise from the Mary Karr’s book, The Art of Memoir.
• Rachel mentions this interview she did with Alicia Elliott for the Write, Publish, and Shine Podcast and shares the idea that Alicia shared with her to “write around the trauma” which came to her via Canisia Lubrin. Alicia Elliott is the author of the memoir A Mind Spread Out on the Ground (Doubleday Canada, 2019)
• Meli wanted to share this TED talk with Nadine Burke Harris about trauma as the greatest unaddressed public health threat.
• Meli couldn’t remember which Brené Brown book talks about how she has a group of friends help her write her book. It was Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown, Random House, 2017

Meli: Hello. 

Rachel: Hi Meli. 

Meli: Hello, Rachel. 

Rachel: We’re going to talk about memoir as therapy today, or as we put it in our title and our notes [00:02:00] “memoir equals therapy question mark?” 

Meli: How are you feeling about your memoir? You were saying before we started recording that you you were talking about writing the damn thing. 

Rachel: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s kind of the whole point of our project. Well, it’s part of it. I mean, it’s to find our community of other grievers who are writing grief, memoirs but a big part of what needs to be happening in tandem for me is writing the damn thing. And I find I’m still kind of avoiding it. So in this episode, I guess it preamble, I’m going to commit to getting my hands messy again, go back to at least my outline and start thinking about where I need to start writing again, the sections I need to expand. How about you? 

Meli: Yeah, I think actually you saying about returning to the outline is probably a good [00:03:00] place for me to go back to I’ve right now I’m working on smaller pieces. I still don’t know if I’m going to have chapters or a collection of connected pieces. So I guess I don’t have to decide that, but it would be good to go back to an outline for sure. 

Rachel: Yeah, that feels like a later decision that you don’t need to make yet. I know we’re both reading Betsy Warland’s book on revision, Breathing the Page and how she talks about the form kind of the writing knows the form that it wants to be in. 

Meli: Yeah. 

Rachel: So to me that feels just right. And then you’re going to see what form it wants to take. 

Meli: You mean I can’t plan it all out ahead of time. That’s disappointing. 

Rachel: Yeah, for sure. Well, for me too, cause I took a whole course on planning it out. Like that’s why I have an outline. I took a course on outlining [00:04:00] and it’s useful in its own way, but it hasn’t manifested magically into a memoir. Now, since I have that outline. 

Meli: Do you think there’s value to making an outline, knowing that it might change, but at least you feel like you have something like you’re going somewhere? Like having a way through the woods. 

Rachel: I think it’s helped very helpful scaffolding. Like, yeah. It’s like, I have a general idea of where it can go, but I also think I still have to find where I’m going to begin and where I’m going to end, even though I’ve declared that in this outline. But again, I want to keep it loose. It’s like the pencil sketch version. And it’s going to change when I keep sketching, erase some lines, add paint, but I have to be doing those damn things. That’s the thing that’s frustrating me right now is I’m not. But you know what? I also am living in 2021 [00:05:00] as a woman who’s got a lot of personal responsibility, so it doesn’t help me to beat myself up about it, but the desire is there. I might go to some looser kind of mapping like of visual, you know, brainstorm kind of, what do they call that mind mapping that might be where I go now? 

Meli: What is the, when you write all over the page in no order, what’s that called? There’s a word. I not remember. 

Rachel: I think it’s a mind map too, right? Where you do little bubbles and they all kind of feed off each other.

Meli: I was thinking like when you write around the outside of the page or you write sideways or you make shapes out of the text. I learned about that in a writing workshop once. 

Rachel: I don’t know this. 

Meli: Anyways, I don’t know 

Rachel: if we find it we’ll link to it in the show notes or we’ll explore it in a future episode because I’m super curious about that.

Meli: Yeah. 

Rachel: So today, we’re talking about therapy. 

Meli: I was going to, [00:06:00] I was going to try for a transition. I mean, authentically, I did think like when you were saying you know, still figuring out what the story is it just, it does kind of remind me of how. Seeing a therapist, whether it’s talk therapy or not, it’s like you are, I am working out my story and telling myself my story and then saying like, is that my story? Like, there is something similar there where you’re kind of like re you’re looking at the story that you thought you had and kind of like wondering whether you could tell a different one or tell it in a different way. I didn’t see that connection before, but I liked that. 

Rachel: Yeah. And like in therapy or kind of trying to understand the significance of events and examining each one. And I mean, for sure my experience in therapy is like, Oh, you know, why did this recent experience bother [00:07:00] me so much? Is it like that time when my mother, so, you know, look, it’s always making those kind of connections back to childhood. 

Meli: Yeah. Yeah, so we have, I actually don’t know how, when did you start therapy? 

Rachel: Oh yeah. Good question. I started in my thirties, I’m in my forties now. I’m not currently in therapy, but I have done, I guess, several years of therapy with different therapists, some with different like somatic type practices, some who are more like cognitive behavioral therapy type people are more of a mixed bag though. Not like solely that. And yeah, I mean, some that I didn’t really get on with in the end and some that I really liked. And I mean, it was really useful for me to explore for a lot of reasons. I mean, through therapy, I just even learned [00:08:00] how I feel like emotions were not accessible to me until, you know, and so until my thirties, I didn’t know whether I felt sad or mad or yeah, tired even like, I just didn’t know how I felt. Cause I didn’t know how to experience feelings and listened to my body and understand what they were. So those are all great tools for writers to have to know. 

Meli: Yes. 

Rachel: You know, how a person feels. 

Meli: Yes. And then to be able to share that with the reader in a way that is processed and is clear. I mean, I always say, I always joke that I thought that emotional intelligence was just having a lots of emotions. But eventually realizing that like, you know, being able to kind of locate the emotion and examine it if like, and then what to do with it and how to react and how to how to [00:09:00] express and emotions pointing to be to needs or unmet needs. And you know, just like having needs was a whole revolutionary thing. 

Rachel: When did you start therapy 

Meli: I started therapy when I was 15. My mom made me go and And then I’ve basically been in therapy on and off since then. , right now my therapist is she does somatic experiencing therapy it’s about the body and it comes from Peter Levine and the idea that , trauma lives in the body and, yeah, so I’ve definitely talked a lot and I think that’s great, but I can talk around issues pretty well. And in fact that. It has been part of my coping is to perform intellect and to perform insight. And so once I was in therapy that connected me to my body and [00:10:00] wasn’t about, you know, saying the right thing. That’s when things really started to move for me. 

Rachel: Hmm. Yeah. Like just that deep listening to your body and how you feel. 

You’re reminding me, I, I did do like, art therapy, I guess when I was about 15 as well. And it was really profound. It could help me with a lot of, it was like a one session thing, but when like, you know, guidance counselor and then, but then didn’t do it for a long time because of the layers of shame associated with it in my family too. It’s like, 

Meli: yeah. 

Rachel: It’s like, it was an insult. You need therapy. Yeah. Was always like bandied back and forth within our family. And in truth everybody did, but we use, we hurled it at each other. Like, there’s something wrong with you. Certainly the beliefs, probably the, the culture society that I grew up in at the time [00:11:00] was like, if you’re in therapy, something is wrong with you, 

Meli: but something is wrong. Something is wrong. I mean, but yeah, totally. There’s like that, you know, don’t portray the family secrets and I think a lot of families have that or, or even you know, it’s, it’s fine to go to therapy, but like. You know, like, I don’t want to hear what you’re saying about me or whatever, you know, or not being able to debrief with family about therapy because it’s more of a intellectual concept than something they’re willing to practice.

Rachel: Yeah. Or in my case, it was often like any kind of vulnerability, right? It’s like, yeah. Becomes a weapon. So just the fact that you’re in therapy, but then to dare even say what’s happening in that [00:12:00] therapy would be hard. , I think you’re really onto something in terms of there was a real fear associated, what would happen in therapy? What kind of things would I expose about our family too? 

Meli: Yeah. And don’t disrupt the story. I mean, isn’t that a BetsyWarland thing too, like the comastory or the keeper of the story? Am I quoting that? Right? 

Rachel: The it’s the authorized version. Yeah. The family has like an authorized storyteller. And so if you dare and always. I mean, having spoken to her about this, she said, it’s always not the writer. The writer is telling the unauthorized version of the story, because we need to assert ourselves as having a story because there’s this dominant story that consumes us really.

Meli: Do you think that going to therapy and then writing memoir about your story, does it having said [00:13:00] those things aloud to a therapist or having processed those things? Is it easier to write the really scary stuff on the page? Like, you know, that feeling before you write something you’ve never written before and you get that kind of like, Ooh, am I allowed to do this? Even though, you know, you’re allowed to like, intellectually, but there’s that like, Oh, like it’s the first time you write it? I think that probably primed me a bit more to be able to write, because I had seen. In my therapist, eyes that, you know, I wasn’t a monster or, you know, like I, that this was a, a worthwhile thing to examine.

Rachel: Yeah. Yeah. I definitely think so. I think, like I was saying before, it helped make connections for me too, or it’s like, okay, this is like this. And so there’s something there that has like, yeah. Meaning-making that I could do in, in the writing. 

Meli: Yeah. I mean, I, I I’m writing more than [00:14:00] ever now. And I think it’s because of my current therapist. And I’ve even shared a piece with her which I was quite nervous about what a good feel, make me feel seen. I just didn’t want to put it on her. Like she had to congratulate me or give me critiques. So we had very clear, I just made it very clear that I was sharing of myself. Like this was another way of me to be, for me to be in connection basically rather than wanting her feedback. And I’ve, I think, cause I’ve had therapists kind of like not show any interest in my creative side. But the last two therapists who were both trauma informed, both doing the previous one was doing EMDR. And so yeah, both of them were really under really encouraged my like creative life and seemed to understand how [00:15:00] important it was to me, whether I published what I’m writing about or not. 

Rachel: Yeah. I wonder about the flip of that. Like, so, and that I know that’s definitely something we want to get into is like, is writing, is the writing itself deepening and supporting the therapy? Like you’re getting the benefits of the therapy to be able to tell. The story. And then how I’m curious, how therapeutic you find writing to be?

Meli: I think one of the things that talking out these memorable stories does with a therapist or feeling into them or revisiting them in a safe way that isn’t retraumatizing it validates my experience and probably just helps me have more self-compassion. You have given me feedback about my writing that I need to do a self-compassion revision. So I need help with that obviously. And understanding that what I did to cope [00:16:00] was. My survival, a tactic or a series of survival tactics. And that, that was a form of wisdom. And I don’t have to like shame myself for that. And also a therapist can say, Oh yeah, that’s common for you as a , that traumatic experience that you had, this reaction that you’re having, where, you are acting recklessly or, those things you did in your mid twenties were related to this childhood story, and then a therapist can also put it in the context of not just how we process or work these things out emotionally and in our lives, but also social context, bring a social context to an experience that makes me feel a little less special or freakish or whatever, so that I can say, Oh, actually I would love to read a story about what [00:17:00] I’m going through. And this is something that maybe would help other people who have survived these types of things. So it kind of has helped me focus on what I am coming to see as the goal, which is to offer your story with a purpose, like. With the purpose of connecting to other people and helping readers as much as, you know, as much as one can. But yeah, 

Rachel: that answers the kind of why publish question, why, why not just write in a journal, but how you’re feeling versus publishing and yeah, I’ve heard that referred to as kind of like the invisible woman or something , it doesn’t have to be gender that way, but under the invisible person who has maybe had a similar experience or just similar feelings who maybe needs to hear that story because it’s somewhat like their own.

Meli: Yeah. 

Rachel: And then be able to provide that book. Both of us would say that we’ve read books like that too, that have [00:18:00] made us feel less alone and 

Meli: yeah. 

Rachel: I would argue. That’s kind of why we read in general too. Sometimes we read to escape, but I think , the deeper literary writing tends to be more about, Oh, I’m not the only one who felt this way. And it’s the place where we get to say, to say those things that we can’t say. I mean, talking about being too much in our previous episode where we’re not allowed to say those things or it’s considered too much in a book, it’s not, it’s like, that’s what we’ve picked up this book for. We want to feel things with you.

Meli: Well, and it feels like there’s a kind of a consent. Like if I pick up a book that on the cover of references, I don’t know, sexual trauma or something like that, I have consented to that kind of story. I’m like, okay. Yes, I’m in. And so something about that [00:19:00] feels A little more I don’t know, protected than social conversation you know, in which I quiet the room and silence the room because I’ve said something too dark, which happens.

Rachel: Yes. I’ve been there. I’ve know that. Speaking of a moment of shared experience so when it comes to writing, though, when some of the things we wanted to talk about here too, is like in writing circles, there is a tension with this idea of writing as therapies of writing equals therapy question Mark, a lot of people would say no, that this isn’t a therapy session, which I think as you put it before, it can be both respectful to the writer because it’s like, we’re not going to talk about. Your trauma and make you, go through that but it’s also, it can be really disparaging too. I’ve heard it used disparaging, like, Oh, this is this, person’s writing this. And it’s just a journal entry and they [00:20:00] shouldn’t be sharing this here in this space.

Meli: Yeah, and there’s almost I would feel very self-conscious about that guess that’s why we’re having this conversation, but I would, I would feel self-conscious about saying, Oh, this story, or this essay was a form of therapy , or even which I don’t think I would say that, but even to say, like, is it a word thing, to say this was therapeutic. This was helpful in my healing. I admire when other writers say that, especially when, in my opinion, the story is pretty processed and it feels like they’ve done a lot of work. So I respect that, but I would feel, I feel nervous saying that because of the I don’t know the judgment but that’s also a bit silly because aren’t, I allowed to find healing in my art. I don’t know

Rachel: this super amounts of shame associated with that. Like how dare [00:21:00] you work out your feelings in your art on the one hand, and then on the other I’ve seen non-writers like interviewers. Talk to someone about a memoir that handles grief or trauma and be like, oh, it must’ve been so therapeutic for you to write this. And both of those feel really discounting and really reducing the art to just one, one or the other. And in my experience has definitely been both. Yeah. Like I think therapy is therapy. I don’t think writing is therapy, but then writing is, and writing is writing, I guess too part of writing is like coming to understand things more deeply. And so that has had positive impacts for me I go to therapy so that I can own my story so that I can challenge these narratives and personalities that have been imposed on me, character flaws. And, for self-esteem [00:22:00] issues and processing, trauma both know historic, like more complex PTSD type of trauma. And then, the intensity of, of my traumatic experience that I’ve, that I’m centering a lot of my memoir around. And I don’t know if the writing helps specifically with PTSD, but I guess it just like, it’s like practice to be able to talk about it, look at it from a distance and kind of separate yourself from feeling in a good way, you know, not in a disassociative way, but just more like, here’s like the external version of what happened. I can actually put it somewhere and even imagining that someday, someone’s gonna read that too.. And it’s like here’s the story it’s contained in this place. 

Meli: Yeah, containment. That’s an interesting word. 

Rachel: It’s like control, right? It’s like feeling this, a lot of these [00:23:00] feelings, trauma can feel like a lot of loss of control and, and I’m get, I get to harness it. This is a world that I make the rules in and I can tell it in the way I want to. Yeah. Now of course, I want to make it readable to there. You know, it can’t wield that power is so Willy nilly. I definitely want to respect the reader too. And not just, it’s not a journal entry that I want to publish. I want to publish something that’s not just processed, but revised, thoughtfully and carefully and belongs to a tradition of craft and storytelling.

Meli: I guess the question is, and this is maybe an intuitive thing, but what, I mean, I don’t know if we can really name it, but how do you know what’s processed and what’s a [00:24:00] draft and I mean, I’m not actually asking that, but there are certain markers that say this is someone being responsible with their story. I think one of the things, if I read another writer’s trauma story in draft form I want to be respectful of the person’s process, but also, Oh, I don’t know where I’m going and got lost. 

Rachel: I wonder if where you’re going, because this is where I went to is thinking like, as an editor, I read a lot of work that isn’t processed and I’m making that evaluation. So you know, who am I, but I am and reading it and going, Oh, this is just so raw. And there isn’t really again, a craft to it. The writer feels out of control and I mean, I think [00:25:00] I feel very touched that people trust the magazine that I’m editing with. And then me, therefore, me as an editor to read their deeply personal traumatic stories, or like you said, we’re working with other writers in a workshop setting and having them share that work, but. Not, but, but, and, I would wish for them to have a chance to get a little more control of their narrative, as I say that, I feel like I’m saying, get control of yourself and stop feeling all over the place, but there’s a tension between what I want to say and 

Meli: The word that I think of that came to me when I was in a storytelling workshop. We were preparing to tell out loud, working on these stories about personal experiences and somebody in the workshop talked about sexual trauma that they’d had in childhood. And as they read their draft in [00:26:00] the workshop setting the word careening came to mind, it’s like just kind of coming down the Hill fast with no, with no moves with no equipment with no, I don’t know. It just, it just felt you know, I mean there’s when someone comes on stage and after a string of people who are nervous and, you’re kind of like cringing for them and hoping they do the best, and then somebody with real performance skills comes on stage and you can just feel the whole crowd relax, because there is a, there is a feeling that like, okay, like we can all relax. Like this person we’re in good hands. We trust this. I mean, I guess memoir is similar. Like you’re a tour guide or, we trust this storyteller to take us through because it’s like, they’ve been along the path before this isn’t the first time they’re going down the path. like they’ve, they’ve [00:27:00] burrowed away through the mountain to the other side kind of thing. Like as opposed to, Oh, we’re going, we’re all on this, on this expedition for the first time. None of us has been here before and, and that’s where it feels. I mean, maybe it’s almost like a bit embarrassing. It’s like this person doesn’t know what they’re doing yet. Like maybe at some kind of like empathetic slash judgmental cringing

Rachel: yeah. It’s like a vicarious discomfort. Yeah. And I think, I mean, I do believe as a writer, you need to trust your reader and your reader needs to trust you. That’s like fundamentals of writing. And it’s hard to trust someone when they’re not clear, like you said, on where they’re going with this. And it’s like, you’re not sure if they’re okay and if it’s [00:28:00] even safe for them, but you know, it’s such a line that’s hard to define because I like art that makes me uncomfortable and challenges me where I need to be challenged too. But I do think fundamentally the artist in that case, Kind of knows that they’re doing that and the person who’s sharing that work, like when I’m reading it as an editor, I definitely feel like, Oh, this is the first person they’ve ever trusted with this story. Again, it’s really beautiful to have that kind of trust. But then it’s also like, I guess in that case, I do feel it, this isn’t therapy and, and I guess, you know, it’s such a privilege to be able to have any form of therapy too. So not everybody has access to that. So, and certainly the, you know, the pieces probably that I’m reading, that’s the case.

Meli: Yeah. Yeah,[00:29:00] 

Rachel: I mean, I would love to have a workshop space where it’s okay to share on unprocessed work. I mean, I think you said in our, our notes setting this up too, is like, how can we ever. Fully processed things. We’re not even allowed to talk about them publicly where there’s so much shame and kind of covering up happening. I would love to have a workshop space where people didn’t feel embarrassed or feel like they had to do, you know, the other thing that they do, which is like put someone on a pedestal. You’re so brave, all the things you survived and instead just like human to human. It’s great that the person survived and, and to celebrate that, but without kind of saying that there’s some kind of, not like in here dehumanizes them because it’s like saying that they’re somehow a superhuman for having survived , again, I think that’s reductive, just trying to say that people who have survived to certain experiences are somehow [00:30:00] superhuman. 

Meli: That’s someone not willing to talk about the work. Like I hear someone’s I dunno, it’s almost like people pleasing taking over, like, I’m going to congratulate you on, on doing this. Like, I can’t believe you did this. Wow. It’s like when, when people tell women of size or fat women that they’re so brave, it’s like, well, no, this is just me existing. I’m just being in my body and I’m not having shame. And I don’t need to be like congratulated for that. But the tension between being vulnerable, also. You’ve used the word control, which is probably yeah, it’s, it’s probably the word, but I also think, as a reader, you can also tell when when you feel like you’re being controlled, like you’re being led to some kind of conclusion that doesn’t feel authentic, or the writer is trying to present something that doesn’t really seem to be there in the, [00:31:00] in the text. And I guess in terms of like what you said about wanting to have a workshop where those stories are safe I mean, that’s something that we all, hopefully agree to when we enter a workshop, but maybe there is space for workshops where. Not only are we presenting drafts that need work, but we are saying, okay, this is one of those stories that I have been trying to write, but I haven’t shared yet. And so I would kind of hope that the person didn’t write the memory out yesterday and then present it to workshop the next day. But that there is some kind of like in between the first writing and, you know, even considering publishing something. You know, that we would all, if we were, if I was in that situation, I would know what I was getting into. And I guess that’s just setting up the expectations of a workshop and, and consent really like everyone consenting to be there. [00:32:00] 

Rachel: Yeah. 

Meli: But yeah, but grief is not grief. Isn’t tidy. So. 

Rachel: Yeah, that’s the challenge. Yeah. I like, I kind of feel like there’s no. So we’re not going to come here with a, some kind of instruction manual for how to write about grief. I think, I mean, for what’s helped for me is finding readers who have also had, you know, want to write about trauma and then be able to share that with them. And also maybe like for me also discernment of feedback I have done, you know, the outline course I was talking about , there were a lot of people in the course and, and, you know, in that case, I’m not creating the community around me. There’s just kind of random people who signed up for the course and not everybody in that who read my outline was my reader. [00:33:00] And then some people really were. And so to have the people who respond really well, who don’t just say again, like definitely got feedback. Like you’re so brave for sharing this, but people who were like, Oh, wow, I’m really feeling this. And it’s incredible because it’s such a traumatic experience. But again, I think we’re, you know, praising the, the fact that there was kind of this authorial, like there was a voice and an arch to some of the sections. I shared feel a bit egotistical, but anyway, but you know, and I guess like for me as the grief memoir writer, and who’s trying to get feedback and trying to improve my writing knowing that not everybody is going to be able to go there and, and read the work as work, especially when I do feel it has, is mostly processed work. You know, and actually there are cases where it’s not, and I’m still like a, I would call it [00:34:00] like litigating. Sometimes, sometimes I’m like just trying to argue the fact that I deserve to have a story and arguing against other narratives and I like people identifying that for me too, but the kind of feedback I really dislike is like that kind of, , this is so hard , this must’ve been so hard for you or just, well, obviously I’m writing a memoir about something that’s really hard on purpose. Like it’s, I don’t need you to tell me that it was hard. 

Meli: Well, it’s like, it’s like, they’re saying, Ooh, that’s so ugly. I can’t believe you’re doing that. Like it’s like there. They may as well say this kind of fucked me up, but I don’t want to admit it. It’s like, they’re there. I don’t know. Yeah. It’s and I think it comes from fear sometimes. Like, yeah, like I think people want to elevate people and [00:35:00] say that, Oh, they’re the brave, strong person who survived these things, because then that means it’s external to them. And not something that could happen to them. 

Right. Or that if it did that, you know, that they would be as, as brave. Like, you know, I guess that’s the most generous side of it that there is a way through, but yeah, I think it’s a fear thing. I kind of pushing away. Like you don’t want to catch it. It’s like a cold. So you kind of distance yourself from it instead of. Which I mean, that can also be a form of safety. I mean, sometimes I think the people that react like that are in awe because they are not working on their own shit. So they’d rather congratulate 

Rachel: writing a memoir about something else . And ignoring the lava of pit in the middle of their [00:36:00] life that they haven’t faced, which is fine too. I mean, I think , there is the Mary Karr exercise from her book on Writing memoir, where she talks about whether you’re ready to write a memoir about a difficult subject. And the exercise is to start by just writing the hardest part. And then seeing, and not that you’re going to have no emotional reaction to it, but you may, but just like how hard was the reaction? Did you go to bed for a week? Did you cry for an hour? I literally recall doing that, sitting on my bed in Montreal, where I lived at the time and I did cry for an hour, but I didn’t go to bed for a week. So I thought, okay, I think I can do this soon. Like I’m getting there. 

Meli: And you’re saying that it’s reminding me of an intense feeling of elation I had at writing out one of one of these like core memories [00:37:00] of, of, you know, shame and you know, which could also be alarming, right? Like the kind of like high of of releasing something that has not been so far articulated the way that I wanted it to be like. That could also be like something to notice. Let’s just say and I’m not trying to make it negative. I just, you know, those extreme reactions say something about where you’re at with it. And 

Rachel: cause you feel like you were, there was like a denial to it somehow from being so elated.

Meli: I think what it is is part of my tendency, which I’m trying to get away from sharing things before they’re ready. Like it’s still like, okay, that’s the first time I wrote it out and it feels, I feel elation because I feel like there’s space inside of me or I’ve [00:38:00] relieved some thing that was going to eventually come out. But not sharing that too quickly. Which is something I used to do. I used to like share it with, other artistic friends. I guess, 

Rachel: I think a lot of new writers do that, I guess that’s like part of a maturity of writing is knowing when to go, okay, this is first draft. I mean, a lot of just new writers don’t realize how many drafts it takes to finish . And so, because there’s the myth of the first draft perfection, you know, the genius, the artistic genius. You can just put it down and now it’s ready to publish. There’s something to be said for kind of writing it and then keeping it close to you. And then you being the next person to read it fresh after. 

Meli: Yeah. 

Rachel: Sometime. And that’s, I guess probably the work that we’re talking about to the work that the careening work, the work that you read, and you’re just like who you sh you [00:39:00] know, I don’t want to say should on people, but you sh you would have served not just the writing, but yourself more to have given this a little bit more space and reflection.

Meli: Yeah. That’s the kind way to say it for sure. 

Rachel: And I do think, I mean, I think I kind of want to defend that person too, though. You know, I’m not like laughing at them in their artlessness. I think they could get there and certainly have as much potential as any of us. We just, you know, the writing, the work of writing is the work. It’s like the only way you’re going to improve its writing is to work, but I want to defend them because again, like. Therapy ain’t free, , it’s not cheap and it’s definitely accessible. And then also like finding a therapist who gets the intersection and perspective that you’re coming from . Is hard. I had a hard time and, , I’ve had [00:40:00] all white therapists and who came from a similar, more middle-class background like I do. So yeah, I guess I kind of feel like there’s a place for that. Being able to write that, but then I w I want, I want to also invite , those people to both write, write their traumas down and use it as a way to heal, but then. You know, part of like the thing with sharing it outside of yourself too, is it’s kind of like approval seeking a bit too. So yeah. So writing it down and then just sending it out right away is like, now I’ve written out the worst thing that ever happened to me. And now I want someone to say that, you know, to give some kind of stamp of approval and published it and yeah. And that’s not, I don’t feel like that’s healthy for anyone. And then it’s also not [00:41:00] artistic and it’s not going to be evaluated as, as art.

Meli: Which is too bad because there is still value in connection. I mean, just as humans like people share difficult things, I think, because they want to feel close to someone or they do feel close to someone. And in the context of workshop, it’s maybe difficult to, to see it as something closer to being done, but I, yeah, I agree. I think I appreciate the times when I’ve received a really raw story from someone, even if it’s made me feel uncomfortable. I think also that’s like part of my responsibility and maybe something, again, my privilege of having been in therapy of having someone say to me, notice that, okay. Noticing that like all those kind of like [00:42:00] mindfulness type practices that if I’m receiving something like that, I can go, okay, what is this triggering in me? Am I am I unwilling , to give feedback on this? Because I’m uncomfortable that this person is doing this or because it’s reminding me of something I went through and I’m thinking, well, how dare you describe it this way or whatever, I I’m, this is not my best self that I’m describing, but I have received drafts where I’m like, Oh this is very new and fresh. I am truly grateful that the person felt safe to share it with me or share it with a workshop. But I will admit that sometimes if I’ve received something like that in workshop, I have to really force myself to look at the actual words on the screen, on the paper and say, okay, what am I actually finding in the text? And I’m making a judgment about where this person is at [00:43:00] because of what I know about them, or, you know, I don’t know all those little judgments you make about people without meaning to and how can I be useful? By pointing to the text, instead of saying you shouldn’t share this because I mean, that would really shut down the person being willing to work on it. 

Rachel: I guess we’ve probably all been there . I definitely took a more confessional voice in my early writing . That was like almost like a, I dared myself to expose some scary things . But again I hadn’t made those connections yet of what it means, and probably it’s actually therapy that helped me more, like come into myself and own my story in that way and be like, you know, the thing that I’m trying to be cool and show that it didn’t hurt me really did hurt me. It was probably a lot of what was happening in my writing then. 

Meli: I have some Roxane Gay quotes that I wrote down from [00:44:00] an event she recently did around writing about trauma. About the difference between disclosure and an essay that first outpouring of this is what happened to me is not the writing. And so, yeah, I think that’s kind of what we’re talking about is that sometimes in workshops we’re getting the disclosure and that we want to like respect that, but it’s not necessarily a piece yet. But there does. I mean, disclosure is part of it. And I, it also makes me think about how you can tell, I mean, Roxane Gay was talking about this too. You don’t have to describe the actual moment. In the case of like abuse, there are ways to write about abuse and the effects of abuse without describing the worst incidents. 

Rachel: I think that’s [00:45:00] probably what does happen between the disclosure draft and the essay too, is like, Okay. Now I have written the harder, hardest part, but now I can write. I know once I interviewed Alicia Elliot, who told, told me, I just really listened to it recently cause I’ve I attributed this to her, but she actually attributed it to Canisia Lubrin the poet that you can write around the trauma that you don’t need to write the trauma itself. And I think that’s a really handy tool, especially when we kind of live or maybe we’re coming out of this time of trauma porn and writing too. Or it’s like, tell me the worst thing that happened to you as what people can read in a way that’s really consuming it and almost being like, Oh, I’m lucky. I’m not that person. And instead like writing around the trauma, I think creates that space of here’s our connection and shared experience because if you known any kind of heartache you’ll know. The heartache that I’m describing here, but you don’t need to hear the sexual [00:46:00] assault or whatever that experience might be 

Meli: well and describing sexual assault in detail is I mean, maybe important for the disclosure part, but it’s not, to me is not the story. I mean, most of the story is providing context. Like how does that type of relationship, how do we love our abusers too like, what, you know, what are some times that we’ve had with our abusers in which they were really kind and loving what are the effects of that? I don’t think that you want to traumatize your readers. And I think that people who have had those types of experiences can infer their imagination, fills it in very well because they know.

Yeah, I think it’s really powerful for me to say you know, my dad [00:47:00] baked bread on weekends and I can still remember the smell of bread or I loved that he took me fishing. There are moments that I love, but there is also the undercurrent of danger. And if that can be expressed, that’s so much more, it just gets at the complexity of being in relationships being in a family and the characters in your memoir get a chance to be real. 

Rachel: Well, I think, disclosure can be about the event and be maybe a bit more extreme in terms of good, bad. And this happened to me. I think there are real villains, so I don’t think everyone needs to be given like a yeah. Benefit of the doubt or something like that. That’s sorry, that’s a whole other episode, but I also think for lesser slights or the ways I’ve been done wrong. I think for sure, first draft for me is very much I’ve [00:48:00] been done wrong and you’re a bad person. And then second, third draft, there’s more perspective of how might that person feel in this circumstance? Or what are the other conflicting emotions? Cause otherwise too, like writing about that, it feels like, well, you know, if you’re billboarding, this person is terrible and they did all these terrible things, then in some ways too, the reader doesn’t trust the writer too, because they’re like, well, why didn’t you see this? Because yeah, actually I think we are a bit off track. I took us further off track in terms of therapy. I’m wondering, could we maybe talk. About our takeaways from, from thinking about memoir equals therapy. Like I think I went into it thinking memoir is memoir, therapy is therapy, but I have seen therapeutic benefits. And I’m curious, how you came into it. And then what you’re [00:49:00] thinking now that we’ve had this conversation. 

Meli: I think I feel strongly that writing is therapeutic and there is a difference as Roxane Gay mentioned, there’s a difference between disclosure and the sort of final work. That both writing and therapy are really privileged activities. I feel really grateful to be having a conversation about writing memoir and about going to therapy. But I think the main thing they share is, and they, and they do it differently. But creating connection. My therapist explained to me that to think of my relational health or my, there’s been an injury to my ability to connect to other people. And that together we’re going to sort of reset my [00:50:00] ability to connect. And so that’s, that’s the processing that I get to do as someone who gets to have therapy, The writing should also, I think, focus on connection. I need to disclose what happened for myself, and then I need to describe how I felt about it around it, after it to connect with the reader. I need them to know how those experiences like reverberate in my body so that they can connect to that as well with ultimately like empathy being part of it. And Hmm. Yeah. That there was something else, but I’ve lost it, but yeah. Where are you at? 

Rachel: Yeah I’m I’m nodding fanatically at [00:51:00] everything you’re saying around, around the connection piece. The goal of connection and that being kind of the connective tissue, I guess, between both writing and therapy. One takeaway, I think from our conversation though, is I’m feeling more reflective on that disclosure writing. Cause I do see it. I mean, I’m both take, people’s work in for critique. Like I do some one-on-one critiques workshops and then as an editor, as I mentioned, and I think I’m going to work. A bit more on how to give more constructive feedback to that kind of writing versus being, I don’t think I was wholly dismissive, definitely felt honored that people shared work with me, but just thinking about how to provide more resources or even just more empathy for people writing, bearing in [00:52:00] mind, I think how privileged it is, like you said, to both be able to do therapy and write. So that’s maybe a shift I’ve taken, but I definitely still feel like, memoir is memoir therapy is therapy, but that I have, I’ve definitely grown a lot and gotten over quote-unquote things through writing about them because of the perspective it’s given me just to really go. You know, to block out a whole scene and a conversation with someone and think, and then being forced to empathize with the, with the person that I’m writing about. Like the interaction I might be writing about has made me think about, you know, maybe not, again, not necessarily forgive people for things they did wrong, but just get a bit more okay, these are the resources they had, and this is why they may have responded this way. Which I feel like [00:53:00] somehow is able to do that more in writing than in therapy, which I think, kind of rightly centers, me and my feelings and thoughts and experiences versus going. You know, I don’t think many therapists will say, well, imagine how that other person must’ve felt and what resources they had , like maybe they would, but it’s all in the service of you and how you know, and how you’re healing. And there’s been something really powerful for me about the writing of things and the empathy, 

Meli: I guess I also, too, wanna acknowledge how much therapy has helped me feel permission and, and see that, that my creative life is important. Whether anyone ever reads what I write it’s still important. And I do like what you’re saying about how to [00:54:00] receive the disclosure drafts respectfully which includes honesty. And I guess one of the ways to do that is to make sure that as much as possible have an understanding where the writer feels they’re at. I mean, maybe it is just that like, I mean, this would require the person receiving feedback to be allowed to speak. But where do you think this story is? 

Rachel: You know, I think it’s okay to identify it as though this is more disclosure than essay, but that also, we all start there. And, and here are some ways to get to the next 

Meli: And I guess sometimes disclosure is about events. So this happened and this happened, this happened, whereas the writing is writing in between this happened, this happened. This happened and I felt this. I used to think it meant this now. It means this. Like, there’s that those kinds of like recognizable [00:55:00] memoir type phrases where it shows reflection distance, like feelings changing over time. I find myself thinking about the first stage of acknowledging trauma and how boundless it can feel. And how therapists have warned me to be careful about who I share with my story. And so then I guess that would go for the writing as well. And so

Rachel: It’s like, write it, but then don’t share it and then look at it again a little bit later, like a week or two or even a month later.

Meli: Yeah. And I would even say like, if someone isn’t in therapy and can’t access that, that there is value in disclosing to yourself, that’s part of the steps. And as you say, like to disclose, what’s comfortable for you without retraumatizing [00:56:00] yourself 

Rachel: and it really depends where people are at too with their stories, like, yeah, they might do something like write the hardest thing and then it might be too hard. It might be too soon as well. I would hate to put someone into like, into bed or spiral for a week or something, you know, and it’s already so hard these days. 

 Like planning some care, give yourself some space, if you can, to care for yourself as you write. , I mean, the difference too is when you’re writing the memoir, you, you are, I mean, unless you’re really connected to writing community, you’re doing that on your own. Whereas in therapy, you’re working with someone who’s guiding the process. And so it’s a little more untethered and certainly it’s been good when, for me, when it’s coupled, when I’m doing both, it’s like writing and processing stuff and then. Being able to talk about whatI write about in therapy 

Meli: I don’t know what book it’s in, but Brene Brown [00:57:00] talks about how she’s always trying to write things on her own. And at one point she invites a group of trusted people to her house, I think, and they start talking through creating things together. And I guess that’s another thing. I don’t know if everyone has someone that they can share their feelings with, but maybe they can talk to their cat. I used to do suicide awareness and prevention for teenagers. And so the teaching that we gave was when your friend discloses to you, that they’re feeling suicidal. One of the things you can do. Once you’ve, you know, listened and all that stuff, you can say, I’m going to call you tomorrow. And that’s just the plan. I’m going to call you tomorrow at two o’clock. Then the person who’s feeling badly knows that call is coming at two o’clock . I mean, we’re not talking about suicidal ideation, but we are talking about grief and it can be really [00:58:00] disorienting. And so I guess that’s why I keep emphasizing this, have someone to call or plan to go for a walk with a friend or find a time that you feel stable. But you also have some point of connection because it can be, feel really lonely.

Rachel: Yeah. Like you don’t have to disclose to the person, but just say, Hey, I’m doing something I’m trying something difficult. I’m going to write this thing. I don’t need to talk about it or don’t want to talk about it, but I just kinda need to know that you’re there for me and we can yeah.we can connect connect.

Meli: Yeah. Yeah. How lucky is it to have, I mean, how lucky I feel to be having this conversation and to be making friends who are writing. But everyone wants to tell their stories. The other thing I believe whether they publish or not, everyone wants to be heard. Yeah, that’s a great place to end, I guess.

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Welcome to Writing Grief! We’re new here too.

In our first episode, we get into our grief stories and the messages we received about them being “too much.”

This episode requires a content warning for grief-related subjects such as death, pregnancy, child loss, suicide. If you’re not up for that, this might not be the pod for you at this time. It also might be the pod you were looking for, the place where our grief stories are finally not too much. We offer up a prompt near the end of the episode.

• Meli is reading Chelene Knight’s Dear Current Occupant.
• Rachel talked about Michael J. Fox not finding the positive in the pandemic. ‘I’m out of the lemonade business’: Michael J. Fox on the day his optimism ran out (CBC) Which also references his memoir, No Time Like the Future.
• Rachel mentioned Arabic expression, Alhamdulillah, used by Muslims (like her partner).
• Meli’s story about the day Ellen told her she was going to die in the emerge 19 Anthology
• Rachel loosely quoted Joan Didion (“life changes in the instant” from her memoir on the death of her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking
• Meli mentions Vanessa Martir’s “Writing the Mother Wound Series”
• Rachel used the expression of “writing “from one solitude to another,” which she picked up from Edward Hirsch, who wrote in How to Read a Poem: “In these times, poetry speaks from one isolate to another, connects strangers, links up people who are otherwise disconnected, speaks from one solitude to another.”
• Rachel mentioned publishing her book of poetry, Galaxy.

Meli: [00:00:00] We’re following the plan to talk about our grief being too much. We both write memoir and we both write memoir about grief and we’re examining this idea around toning it down. I mean, do we want to define grief being too much? 

Rachel: Sure. I mean, I love what you said, in our notes for this too, is that aren’t all memoirs really about grief. Like isn’t there something about expectations, which I think is what grief is often about I expected things or my life to be one way and it took this other turn. 

Meli: Yeah. And 

Rachel: and a lot of people don’t want to hear that. They don’t want to hear that life is uncertain and it can take a big turn. 

Meli: Yeah. And I mean, the thing I think about every time I question myself and whether my grief is too much is I want to read about grief. I want to see those stories. So that’s the thing that reminds me. In terms of going back to definitions, even within the scope [00:01:00] of like stories about death, there’s many ways to die and they each come with their own set of particulars for those of us left behind and writing about them. Grief stories are also about, you know, mental illness and trauma and the years they take away from us and the people we love. Grief stories, may be about failed relationships with the living or death of friendships, death of partnerships, endings of companies. I worked for a theater company that went bankrupt and I had a lot of grief around that. And then collective grief around tragic events and you know, the pandemic and climate change and white supremacy. And so it’s not maybe a sexy topic. But it is difficult, so maybe it does have kind of an edge, sort of the willingness to take it on.

Rachel: Yeah. There’s something very sexy about someone who wants to listen to those stories for me. [00:02:00] Anyway, that’s super attractive. It’s like, Oh, if I turn the lights on that high beam and talk about my grief stories then, and someone is like their lights go on high beam too. I’m like, yes. Okay. We can get into this.

Meli: Wow, yeah, yeah. I sometimes am self-conscious that I’m not brave enough to write about happiness. Maybe seems like foolish sincerity and, my ego says I’m too intellectual to write about good things.

Rachel: But I’ve struggled to think of literary writing that is like a happy story. Whether it’s fiction, whether it’s nonfiction that’s not something that drives people to write. And I guess that’s part of why it’s really exciting to find other people willing to meet you there because it’s often finding other writers who people who want to dig into, what does it all mean? And the things that we’re usually sifting through are these moments [00:03:00] when the unexpected happen? 

Meli: Yes. The before and after. 

Rachel: Yeah. 

Meli: Yeah. I definitely have found other writers receptive to reading about grief. I’ve never gotten the indication that it’s too heavy or too much from writers. I think that too-much-ness comes from inside me, although I’ve had other creative experiences where. You know, I, I was in a playwriting workshop and I announced I was going to write about grief and everyone kind of looked at the floor, you know. Certainly in the writing world , I’ve never had anyone say, Oh, this is too much, or this is too dark or couldn’t this be happier, but I guess I was thinking about and this I guess has to do with structure, which we’ve been thinking about a lot about and the conventions and expectations of a story structure. I think when we write about grief, [00:04:00] I don’t know, sometimes I get the sense that we’re not supposed to leave our narrator in a ditch when we’re supposed to show them coming out the other side. And I sometimes question if that’s necessary . Obviously processed stories are better than not, but I don’t want to make grief any lighter for readers because I think that would be false. And again, I don’t want that treatment when I’m reading, I want to be respected. And have the writer know that I can hold it.

Rachel: There’s something almost offensive really about reading work, where there is kind of like the false resolution maybe at the end, and then, you know, life got better in this way. And I definitely think on the editorial side, [00:05:00] like I’m particular, I’m thinking of short essays, like memoir essays, where often I hear from writers who hear from editors who tell them, well, you know, , you have to kind of win in the end. Or there has to be some kind of hopefulness or something extra at the end that tells, you know, gives that reader hope. I don’t know if I’m looking for hope, I’m just looking for understanding a lot when I’m reading memoir about loss in particular, or just that space to be able to actually acknowledge this is happening. Then these are the ways that one person might feel, and it might be similar to how I felt and then ways they might act, and it might be similar to how I acted. You know, even there’s something about the pandemic that I think has maybe shifted the way there I’m seeing signs anyway, that there’s a shift away from glossing over. And one thing that struck me was reading a [00:06:00] piece about Michael J. Fox talking about his memoir and how, you know, I guess he’s made written maybe multiple memoirs, but none of which I’ve I’ve read, but there, the, the angle of the article was like, you know, here’s this guy who was always optimistic seeing the sunny side of everything. And this year he was saying. Yeah, it’s not great like he moved away from the always putting things in a positive spin. I think he’s had to leave acting entirely and just, you know, saying that it’s a struggle, living with that condition in this world. And, and yeah, it was just a bit of a relief almost like, cause I feel like there’s sort of that perfectionism underlies that it’s like, well, I have to be a good griever. I have to grieve in these set ways. And the fact that I’m still grieving and it’s been so many years says something about me and my failures. 

Meli: Yes. Exactly.. 

Rachel: That laughter is not [00:07:00] true laughter but more kind of awkward discomfort with that idea, I guess. And also, yeah, I mean, part of me still maybe buys into that narrative because it’s such a big story in our culture, like it’s like resilience means getting over it and not thinking about it anymore and not, you know, having it be a part of your daily reality.

Meli: And then we know, if we’re grieving someone who’s, who’s gone, who’s died. There is a, I mean, maybe not in writing, but just in sort of secular life, let’s say there is not always ritual for creating a space for grieving like there is in the Jewish tradition for example so, you know, there’s the, the week. The seven days of Shivah and then there’s the year of mourning. That kind of grieving happened [00:08:00] around Ellen’s death which provided a container, but in secular life, it’s kind of like you get a window of grieving and then other people want to see you back. And I want to see the old Rachel and want to see the old Melanie. And as we’re talking about, these stories or about how grief changes you, the transformation that comes with that kind of loss and back to the connection, like when I read someone. Say like Michael J. Fox or someone with chronic pain or chronic illness say, yeah, it’s not great. That makes me feel seen. And that’s a kind of hope for me. It’s pretty well-worn but the idea that we’re not [00:09:00] alone and I guess in describing what you were saying earlier in describing what it feels like to grieve and what the loss was like, even inside our bodies, that amount of detail gives me as a grieving person and a reader, something to hang on to. And that is hopeful to me. 

Rachel: Yeah I wanted to respond to what you said about secularism, because one thing I credit with surviving, and we’re going to be talking about our specific grief stories, because they’re something we’re going to weave in and out of every episode, but we wanted to kind of give the, I guess the nutshell, the bullet as it were about each of our stories in this episode. But the thing that really helped me as a person who’s [00:10:00] fairly secular and, you know, in beliefs is the fact that my husband is Muslim. And so I actually just followed him. I would literally use often the metaphor and this is making me emotional just to remember it. That he was like walking through the canyon and I was just putting my foot in each of his footsteps as he went along because he had the rituals, he had the routines, there’s a 40 day mourning period. There’s like practices that you put in place. And, and I definitely felt at a disadvantage for not having religious traditions in my life. Other than, you know, even maybe more the hokey kind of the universe is giving you messages sort of more of the world that I had come from. And I mean, those kind of messages from the universe are devastating because it basically means, you know, you’re not meant to, to survive this world somehow. So, so yeah, there was definitely, and I say this to kind of put position myself too, [00:11:00] as like a white woman, settler Canadian, you know, who doesn’t really come from big traditions certainly came from, you know, it was Christian adjacent background, but that’s not certainly not something that anybody in my family practices anymore. So, you know, and then there’s the other side of people who are spiritual telling you, God has a plan for you and you just have to trust and believe, I’m going to get into it more, but you know, your baby is now an angel in heaven and will be there for you when you, when you die kind of thing, 

Meli: People trying to assert their coping onto you, you know, in terms of the Christian example, this, this has comforted them and so it’s meant to comfort you, but they’re not seeing you for the comfort that you may need. And I share that too. I did not grow up religious. I grew up in [00:12:00] so-called Canadian society. And I’m with a Jewish person and his mom was Jewish. And so , it was his mother and so I was in a support role, but I was grieving her too. And I really love that image about walking in his footsteps and really feeling lost without those, that framework of what to do next was helpful for me too. And I didn’t get that with my father at all. So when I got to grieve Ellen and had the space and time to grieve her and there was ritual around it and I was part of it. Once I saw that, that was a way that you could grieve. I realized what I didn’t have with my father’s death. I didn’t have any ritual at all. I wasn’t part of the grieving. I went to the funeral, but [00:13:00] that was, it seems like secular tradition is to have pictures of the person at the funeral. Maybe there’s amazing grace which there was, but there’s not much else to hang on to. Only when you get what you didn’t have before do you realize what you didn’t have, the sort of in my case that first death.

Rachel: Yeah, I feel like I need to say too, because as you repeated back to me about stepping in his footsteps, I’m almost like making him into a Christ like figure. So I want to make sure that it’s clear that I mean, for me, that was super helpful and there were sort of two sides to that actually. There’s a phrase that basically just means, thanks, thanks to God, which you say it’s Hamdullah, and you say that for everything for bad and good things. Cause it’s like, that’s what we get kind of thing. And I found that both super helpful and super [00:14:00] challenging at times, because on the one side it was like, just be grateful that you survived, because that was a question at one point. You know, and, and for sure, I mean, I am very grateful for my life. But then it also was kind of like, well then I can’t be sad or disappointed about the loss then there was, that was embedded in it. But then the positive side of that was very much that, you know, there was never, ever a question of blame. There was never like nobody in Mustafa, my husband himself, and then his family, nobody ever said, well, the choices you made led to this bad outcome. I said that to myself, I think members of my family felt that way for sure. But and you know, express that in the passive aggressive WASPY ways that waspy people do, but that was, that was to me was the biggest freedom. But I would just want to say, it’s not, it wasn’t simple. And you know, [00:15:00] just like a hero’s journey of me following this, you know, this gladiator through, through the mountains, but there was complexity to that too.

Meli: I hear what you’re saying in terms of your experience, and definitely want to return to the downplaying that the the WASPs like to do and, and the idea that it could be your fault, which is, I mean, sincerely not something that I would have, that I was thinking until you said it, but to talk about that image where you’re clarifying yes I understand that that image is particular to the Christian tradition but I also feel defensive for you. Like why can’t Rachel…I mean, when you said that image to me, it really. ..like I felt it in my body and writing wise, I feel defensive for you. Like you can’t use that beautiful image. If you took that image to workshop and [00:16:00] someone said, is your husband like Christ? I would feel defensive for you because that is that I think the image spoke to me so well, because we do rely on other people’s experience of grief to process our own grief. When we feel so lost there in this case, it was your partner who also lost in equal measure, I guess you could say as, as also the parent, but we do, I feel like we do look for people to help us and guide us. And it does feel like, Oh, there are, there are, there’s already a path to this. Like you said, I mean, that’s what I felt like you were emphasizing. So I just wanted to say that while I understand that 

Rachel: In later episodes, I may talk about how that’s, that’s like a concern for me in writing memoir, because I’m writing about a place and a culture that’s not my own and that it’s not grief related, but it’s definitely related to my specific grief [00:17:00] experience or my big grief experience that I want to, that it is central to my memoir. But thank you. I appreciate, I appreciate that because also, I didn’t know that about, about you and the kind of faith adjacent-ness that you had as well, that helped you with loss too. 

Meli: Yeah, Ellen had M.S. For 29 years and she chose to have a medically assisted death right after there was new legislation in the province of BC that allowed that. Yeah, I don’t want to misspeak about the tradition because on the one hand it really helped me. It gave me a chance to grieve. It gave me a way of, you know, this is what we’re doing and I was supporting my partner. And so that was helpful because it gave me a job to do. 

Rachel: Do you want to go into the story here that, that you’re writing about when it comes to Ellen’s death and the full scope of your memoir? 

Meli: Sure. I’m writing about two significant deaths in my life. One was my father and then 10 years later was my [00:18:00] mother-in-law my partner’s mother. We’re not married, but there is, I don’t know what else to call her my partner’s mother. And so they died 10 years apart and they both chose to die. My dad chose to die by suicide after a lifetime of depression or many years of depression. And Ellen died 10 years later after living with Ms for 29 years. She chose to have a medically assisted death, which the province of BC had changed, had introduced new legislature and allowed for that to be a legal thing. And in the story, I talk about how she, one of the things I have written and was in the emerge anthology was about the day Ellen told me she was going die and that she was choosing to die. [00:19:00] And she asked me, she knew about my dad. She was always interested in his story. His affair, how my parents’ marriage ended, his abandonment of me and how I interpreted it. She was interested in me in that way, and I felt grateful for that. So when she called me over, she was in bed, it was like 6:30. She always had to go to bed really early. And she called me over to ask me, or to tell me about how she was choosing to die. But what she wanted to ask me was, “When your dad died by suicide, did you blame him?” And she wanted to know because she was concerned that her grandchildren would think she didn’t try, would be disappointed in her. When she asked me that I never, at that point, I had never, I had not been comparing them. The two deaths, [00:20:00] my father and my aunt Ellen, my mother-in-law couldn’t have been more different in terms of their approach to life. You know, he was an avoider and definitely of the white male power structure and dominated, and his death was violent and he left behind a lot of wreckage between the women and children. I was estranged from him for 10 years. And so when she asked me that question, I was really shocked because it had not occurred to me to compare that. It didn’t even seem comparable to death by suicide, from depression to be compared to medically assisted death or medical assistance in dying after years of chronic pain. [00:21:00] And so I’m interested in comparing those two deaths and how they affected me. I want to, I want to convey somehow…how much Ellen’s death gave me. Cause it showed me what a good death is and my dad’s death I was quite removed from. And so less than a compare and contrast way. Cause it’s not that simple to say, Oh, death by suicide from depression is one thing. And medical assistance in dying is another thing. Yes, they both chose to die. And as someone with depression, inherited trauma and depression, myself, you know, there’s always a fear that I’ll go that [00:22:00] way. I want to, I want to talk about the process of grieving and how they can be so different and that’s the gist of it. Yeah. 

Rachel: Thank you. I’m in awe of, I know your story already, so, that my awe at this moment, isn’t about the story itself, but just how you’re able to encapsulate it. I see it as a memoir already, and I’m looking forward to digging into it with you, as we dig into each other around like the choices that we’re gonna make as we build that we are making, as we build in our memoirs.

Meli: Thank you. It’s, you know, I tried to be clear, but it’s always [00:23:00] a bit murky when you go into that description. I mean, even there was some too-much-ness you know, low grade, undercurrent of too-muchness, as I was explaining that to you. And then of course your reaction tells me that that was not the case. So thank you. 

Rachel: Not at all. 

Meli: While we’re talking about these two deaths that I am obsessed with or focused on, or I’m trying to explore, I don’t think anyone has directly said it, but sometimes when I describe what I’m trying to do, I get the sense that like a memoir should just be about one death. Like, isn’t it too much to try to get two deaths in one story. But I can’t think of one without the other now, even though, like I [00:24:00] said, at the time that Ellen asked me that question, “did you blame him?” I was stunned because they could not have been more different in my mind . So there is a a question sometimes of, just deal with the one, do Melanie’s memoir up to age 24, 25 when he died and then do the next part. And that can be another book. I don’t know where I’m getting that from maybe because I haven’t seen it done, which is exactly why I should do it. And, and maybe there are, of course there probably are memoirs about two deaths or and I say that specifically, because I think there are stories about layers of grief, like a divorce, a death, or, a loss of a friendship, a loss of a job. I think there are memoirs, of course, that deal with different types of grief in the same story. That is the idea that we stack these difficulties, you know, in fiction, we make it very difficult for the character to get [00:25:00] through. There are all these obstacles that get in their way of, you know, but in terms of memoir, I’m not sure I’ve seen two deaths in one story. And because they’re both, so-called suicides too, it’s a heavy topic and, and if anything, people will say, “Oh, wow, that’s…” there’s a kind of, “Ooh, that’s ambitious or, “Oh, okay. Well, that’s a lot to take on.” a lot of times I’ll receive it with gratitude and go, yep. That’s someone acknowledging what I’m trying to do, but there also have been writers where. Their eyes glaze over their eyes glaze over. Or perhaps they’re just thinking about someone else who died. Maybe they’re thinking about someone who died by suicide and I’m just causing that to come up for them. And what I’m seeing in their eyes is their own grief. It’s so hard to know, because often when we talk about writing, we’re not supposed to be having a therapy [00:26:00] session and we’re not supposed to be saying, “Oh, that happened to me too”. We’re supposed to say, “Well, when I read this story as a reader, I come from it from this experience…” and you’re supposed to give just a quick little one-liner, don’t make it about you. Find a way to make that useful to the writer. And I agree with all that. I’m not saying that that’s inherently wrong, but I think that maybe that’s where some of it is coming from. And then in terms of life, you know, people around me outside from the writing, I mean, my, my mother. I mentioned to her shortly after my dad died, that I was talking to someone more of an acquaintance and it had come up that he had died. And I think they asked how, you know, people ask that sometimes. And I said, he died by suicide, or maybe I just offered that up. He died by suicide. And my mom said, ” Oh, no, people don’t want to hear that. Oh, that’s Oh, Melanie that’s too much”. When my dad died, I was 24. I didn’t have a [00:27:00] lot of peers around me who were experiencing parent deaths and suicide seems very common. And yet it’s hard to find people who are survivors or are left behind. I hesitate to use survivors of suicide. There’s something about it that bothers me. So, yeah, I know you have your own experiences of being told your grief is too much. 

Rachel: Well, I want to pick up maybe on what you said too, about it being so common because it’s certainly very common to miscarry and to lose a child that way. And I definitely wonder about some of the responses I’ve had one that’s really odd actually is people who I’ve told and I felt like, “Oh, this is a big disclosure”. I have, I mean, I lost my child in childbirth, so it was a stillbirth. It’s a bit different than miscarriage and very traumatic. It was a very medicalized [00:28:00] experience. And I want to fill in that I have two alive children right now, too. So there’s a setting, but so then my setting became where I would maybe talk about this cause we were living in Egypt and then we moved to Montreal. So picture a Montreal playground. My kids are playing someone else’s kids are playing and then, you know, questions that kind of led me to disclose, even though by then, I already kind of knew that this wasn’t something that people really wanted to hear. But anyway, more than once I would have told someone and then they just seem to completely forget. They would never mention it again. It just feels like as if I had said nothing, it was really strange. And I guess I sometimes like, is what happens too in those, you know, I guess white women, mother communities that’s the experience that I’m speaking from, we were living in a very white neighborhood and people want to talk about, Oh, well, Caesarean’s a [00:29:00] bad choice for this reason. It’s unhealthy kind of thing. And well my, my subsequent children were born by C-section because I didn’t want them to die. Right. But but so then for me then to interject, well, actually this is the reason why I had a C-section sometimes felt like, okay, that’s not the time to say that. Or, you know, it just changes the whole dynamic of the room. And then also there’s a protectiveness it’s like, I don’t know you well enough. You don’t deserve my story yet. In my mind sometimes I would think, “Oh, well, you can read my memoir if you want to know more about this particular choice” 

Meli: Well, the thing about what you said about people never mentioning it again. I relate to that because it was all I could think about during those two deaths, especially with my father, he wasn’t really in my life. And so my life didn’t really change. So no one really would’ve [00:30:00] noticed. And so it’s like people think, “Oh, I won’t bring that up again because I don’t want to upset them”. Which is ridiculous. Cause it’s more upsetting to be silenced and to be invisible. And to act like nothing has happened, which is a very I would say a very white in the colonial tradition of, “Don’t look at that, look away, don’t connect those two things. 

Rachel: Yeah, and I think the context is yeah, they’re parents, and so just the idea of losing a child, I get it. I mean, it’s a horrifying thing to think about. It’s one that I’ve experienced. And so then I kind of live with knowing that can happen more readily maybe. And I feel like, I don’t know about you, but that’s sort of, part of being in the grief club is, we just kind of are closer to that veil of death. You know, like we know that life can change in the instant. That’s good. I’m quoting loosely Joan Didion there, you know, like [00:31:00] things can just sort of switch in a moment and everything in your world can change. 

Meli: I get what you’re saying about people with children who don’t want to consider how fragile life is. I’m not a parent, but I observe that parents, you know, it’s having this heart walking around, outside your body idea, but what is it like contagious? Like it’s not catching to, ,you can’t catch suicide, you can’t catch infant death. So it, it doesn’t make any sense intellectually, but of course that’s not what we’re talking about.

Rachel: Yeah. And it doesn’t create the world, which I think, you know, I guess kind of ultimately is the goal of our project is like this world-changing thing. Like to be able to talk about that openly on that [00:32:00] playground would create a world where, you know, you would have kind of more safety and comfort available to you when you were having a hard time when you had lost a child-like there’s so, I mean, there’s just so many weird things around pregnancy and loss. Like just also, you know, the idea of not talking about being pregnant in the first three months, because the fetus is so vulnerable then, and then, but then being really devastated when you lose the pregnancy, because again, of expectations, changing, you expected, one thing, and then something else. And yeah, I really, I don’t, I am not a fan. I mean, I’m certainly a fan of us having our own private lines, but I’m not a fan of there being these taboo topics that you feel like you’re the Grim Reaper who’s shown up at the party sometimes I think I say that, that I think you can probably [00:33:00] relate too it’s like, “Don’t forget that we’re all mortals and we shall toss off this mortal coil at one point. I think there’s a readership, like we’re talking about writers who appreciate this, but I think, you know, there are people who are reading those books who are not writers. But it’s almost like it has to be compartmentalized in this one space. “Okay. Put it in a book. But don’t talk about it over coffee”, or… 

Meli: I mean, even what you said about “you can read my memoir”. It’s your right to decide who you disclose to, how you disclose when you disclose. But if in disclosing ,that there’s going to be this vacuum of sadness that’s suddenly created around it and that, you know, on that playground, which I think is such a great scene it, it really helps me visualize what that’s like to be watching your alive children play, her watching her alive children play. And then you bring this death into the situation, through natural questioning

Rachel: Not [00:34:00] unprovoked, I will add it wasn’t just “oh by the way”

Meli: Why do we always have to explain that I did that with mine. I was trying to go, well, somehow it came up. I don’t know. I, I was just answering questions. I mean, , those are essential experiences. Like I am not who I am without those two deaths. I’m not my trauma. I know that, but it has shaped my life. And so yeah, bringing the death into the room, it’s just such a… it’s frustrating. And I do think that people do want to read these stories, but you were starting to tell yours. 

Rachel: I agree. I think people want to read these stories, like certainly when I workshop parts of my writing, which I have done in some memoir courses and people saying, ” I so relate to this. I’ve never heard someone say it [00:35:00] this way before. And even, I guess you and I finding each other too and going, “Oh yeah, both of us have this experience.” So yeah, like you, I’m kind of pairing a couple of ideas in the memoir I’m working on and it’s funny cause I’ve actually felt the pressure, not like a good pressure to do that when I was working with mentors on parts of my writing and just that, that the story of stillbirth alone, isn’t really the full story, because I think for me, a lot of it’s about the significance that I placed on that at that time. I came from like in my background, I have an alive mother, but also there’s real motherless-ness about me that has led me in a lot of ways to kind of question my own loveability to seek out mother figures, my mother-in-law included someone who is a [00:36:00] character in my memoir and, you know, related to that, kind of the, the experience of the culture surrounding loss because we lost the baby where I was living with my, with my partner and near his family in Egypt. So the thing I guess that I really want in the memoir, if you think of, I’m trying to turn myself into the character, right. So character me wants to feel love to be different from my family of origin, to love my family, without condition, to have that really positive maternal experience. And then the thing that’s stopping me is like the meaning I assigned to the death of my first baby that I’m unlovable and this sort of hypnotic hold of the narrative that my own parents have for me, that I’m selfish, inept, and unlovable, that’s a big part of it. And there’s grief in that too. And in fact, that’s something, another kind of topic that’s like part of my bouquet of taboo topics is [00:37:00] like not being able to bring up, well yeah, sometimes your parents don’t love you in the way that maybe other, you know, that other people experience or, or the feeling, or they do love you, but there’s sort of this difficulty I guess, in the relationship. So the scope of the memoir right now does kind of, I mean, we kind of start or the way I have it right now is we start in this moment where I’m on the precipice between being a mother and not a mother and my baby is frozen in what medically is called transverse arrest, unable to move from the first to the second part of delivery, and then experiencing that loss kind of the aftermath. And that’s like the, the crisis moment, I guess, that I start in, but then I take you back to falling in love with Mustafa feeling like I’m kind of worthy of that kind of love and able to be part of this really loving family, which is his [00:38:00] family and his mother at the head of that family. And yeah, and then kind of moving into moving around. So moving from Egypt to Canada, having some big cultural change problems, I guess, in Canada and facing some things about Canadian society. And to qualify that we moved in 20 13 to Canada. So just to give an idea of kind of the cultural climate, I think, and things that were changing in terms of anti-Islamic sentiment, and now having children who are, you know, identifiably, Muslim, Arab children was part of… it fits into the theme in the sense of kind of like even the country, the motherland in some ways is like rejecting and turning away. You know, in a space where I still can’t find that kind of family the family that I, that I’m looking for in terms of love and acceptance. And then, [00:39:00] we’re going to talk about this in future episodes, but it’s the decision of where to end something like that, like, you know, you see people writing multiple memoirs because it doesn’t expand the scope of their entire life. And so what’s the container for this particular story? I’ve written a lot of stuff that may turn into separate pieces, essays. So I’m still kind of honing in on the overall, I guess, meaning. And being able to talk about that story and finding the right, the right frame for it and connecting, I guess, with other people who’ve experienced loss in terms of my readers.

Meli: There’s so much to mothering the mother, the theme of the mother. Vanessa Martir talks about “the mother wound”. Yeah, it seems very clear to me. I [00:40:00] had the same thing where I was like, Oh, this is what a family is” and I was starting to really see that and so by the time Ellen was dying, I was like, “Oh, this is what a family does when someone dies”. I got these specific experiences of what a mother could be like, what a parent could be like, and it really affected me. And it sounds like that happened for you too. And thinking about your mother-in-law. It seems clear to me that it’s about mothering.

Rachel: Thank you. And yeah, I think the idea when we’re writing these memoirs too, is that we’re not writing to the person who’s had the exact same experience, but who can relate to some of the, you know, see some of the things that [00:41:00] they’ve experienced be spoken aloud because you know, as much as, I guess we’re saying. It’s hard to have these stories on our backs, kind of in that we can’t like put them down anywhere because people back away. So memoir has the space to do that. And then that’s kind of the whole reason that this kind of memoir genre exists probably I guess, is because people need to find that place to, to be able to read and, and share, have that kind of, you know, I was like that expression from one solitude to another, make that connection from the writer to the reader.

Meli: Yeah. I remember you saying something about someone’s being relieved you didn’t post something or just kind of what you’re saying about nowhere to put it down and other messages. 

Rachel: Yeah, so you were talking about being 24 and like no one would know that you lost someone who you were estranged from well I had been [00:42:00] pregnant and kind of publicly pregnant person too, in spite of, you know, I had moved from Vancouver. So I had lived in one community, moved to another, but was like talking about how I’m expecting a kid. And so there were people, you know, for years, and then it was the weird experience of also then being in this other place, not having the child and to people, you know, there wasn’t, they organically kind of finding out. And actually I found it was interesting that, you know, a lot of cases, like certainly when I ran away with Mustafa and we basically eloped kind of thing, you know, you tell one person and everybody knew that story because that was, I guess, an exciting, positive story that was shared amongst my peer group and beyond I think too. I mean, actually I was publishing my book of poetry at the time, and my publisher was talking about that in an office with someone else who knew me. I think I know her, like, you know, the story that was going around [00:43:00] this poet, who’s running away to Egypt to be with you know, for love. And, but then losing the baby, nobody shared that story. So it was like, I had to keep kind of telling that to people over and over again, because no one wants, like, it’s a story no one wants to on their lips, I guess too. But yeah, then I had to tell people this was a client who I told, because I had planned to be off of work for a while, and then realized I wanted to go back to work sooner. People of course polite, ask you about the baby. And I had to say, “Well, no, I lost the baby. The baby was stillborn”. And a client said, “Well, good. You know, good thing you’re not publishing that on Facebook. I didn’t want to see that on my Facebook feed” or something just horrific. I mean, people will say things to you like, “Oh, I feel like you’ve punched me in the stomach” when I’m telling them what’s happened. It’s just, we’re not equipped. And people don’t really know that, that grief chart of like giving support inward and getting support outward, like looking at what’s the center of the grief and that’s [00:44:00] all language I’ve learned, I guess, since then, around what went wrong in terms of support for me. I t was silencing, it was very silencing. I think that’s the point. That’s why it was in our notes for this episode is like, cause it made me then just sort of disappear from the internet because if I couldn’t talk about what was happening and how I was feeling. And that’s changed actually, that was 2011, and so. I’ve seen more people publicly grieving on the internet in a way that people don’t seem to shame them about it. But, but I felt very, like, I wasn’t allowed to. 

Meli: Even that story about the eloping and you know, that’s your business, same as the death of your child, it’s your business. But, people don’t want that sad story on their lips, as you say. And, and, Oh yeah. Wow. That’s such a great comparison in terms of people’s reactions. 

Rachel: And we’re going to [00:45:00] explore more topics related to, you know, particular craft challenges when it comes to writing this memoir, each of our memoirs and then obviously content is going to be a big part of our discussion as well, too. So content and then community around grief and, and the conversation around grief. That’s what we’re going to be talking about. Right. Anything else that I missed?

Meli: Yeah, that sounds great. 

Rachel: When we explore the craft in the future episodes, we’re going to also give ourselves tasks and kind of report back in around how we’re addressing a problem in our writing 

Meli: If I had to invite you to write about something, the playground scene, I would wonder just as an example about the playground scene and if you’d written that. 

Rachel: I hadn’t, and I hadn’t even thought of it as being part of the memoir, but you’re making me think it is. So I’m happy to [00:46:00] be like, let’s do tasks for this first episode then. So I’m happy to be, to be tasked with that. 

Meli: Yeah. I mean, just to like free write. 

Rachel: Well, I would think maybe we’d try to go for similar tasks. So writing about people’s reactions. So is there a moment where, I mean, have you written about your mother’s reaction to talking about… 

Meli: No. 

Rachel: …telling other people about that? Yeah.

Meli: I’ll write about that. 

Rachel: That’s a tough one though. I mean, I’m giving you a mother writing assignment. 

Meli: That’s a good assignment. 

Rachel: All right and we’ll give we’re going to give like a small assignment to our listeners, too. 

Meli: I think it would be great to have people think about the ways they’ve been silenced.

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Writing Grief is a podcast for writers who want to transform loss into art. In each episode, co-hosts Rachel Thompson and Meli Walker discuss their own grief memoirs through the lens of craft and care for other grief writers.