What you may not realize is that it happened over fifteen months ago, in October 2020. Since then, I haven’t written anything other than a few blog posts, some poetry, and four articles for this column. As for my MS, I haven’t even cracked it open. But I have had a revelation or two in the time since.

Revelation: Making Something Known or Visible

When I dedicated myself to finally fulfilling my lifelong dream of becoming a published young adult author, I was ALL IN. Even after losing my son towards the end of drafting my MS, I was still committed to seeing this through—not only as a project or hobby but as a serious change of direction in my life. 

My goal was to spend 5-8 years building my writing career by creating a backlist of books and a healthy list of fans and followers via email and social media so that by the time I retire from teaching, I can enjoy a profitable second career as an authorpreneur. 

And in 2020, I made serious progress toward that goal in only 8 months: a complete novel drafted and (somewhat) revised, a website up and running, a blog, and an email list with a few dozen subscribers.

But then. I just. Stopped.

Maybe I just need a break, I told myself. Maybe I’m just burnt out from doing so much so fast. 

It took me several more months still to acknowledge the truth I’d known all along: I’m not the same person I was when I started all this.

Like many moms, I can imagine all kinds of terrible, awful things happening to me and my family. To my kids. As a writer, the way I imagine them is magnified exponentially. 

But of all the horrible thoughts and images a writing mama can conjure up, the only one she believes could never actually happen because it is so unspeakably awful is the end of her child’s life. 

It’s the one time the words The End don’t bring satisfaction, but instead bring anguish, suffering, despair, and loss of all hope.

One thing this writing mama has been so skilled at is writing a different ending; one that didn’t include those words and the finality of them.

Denial is the heart’s way of protecting what it has lost and the brain’s way of protecting what it cannot fully conceive.

I’m not in denial anymore: my son is gone and he isn’t coming back. 

But that isn’t the only thing I’ve been in denial about.

Revelation: An Enlightening Surprise

Have you ever heard the idea that the thing we feel the most resistance to is often the thing we should be doing?

Well, that’s a load of crap.

One lesson I’ve learned from loss and the grief it creates is that resistance is the soul’s way of nudging us away from things that no longer serve us and toward living in our truth.

I’ve been resisting my truth for the past fifteen months, but here it is: I no longer feel like writing, and I certainly don’t feel like writing about all the writing I don’t feel like doing.

This might be only a now thing, or it might be a forever thing. I don’t know. And that’s OK with me.

And this isn’t the grief talking. It’s not a giving up, or a giving in, or even a tired ol’ giving out; it’s a giving to. It’s a giving to myself. 

It’s giving myself permission to call it all off just as the guests are arriving.

It’s giving myself permission to let it go and knowing that because it’s my choice, I’m empowered and liberated to do something else and to do it guilt-free.

It’s giving myself permission to acknowledge that I was a certain person before my son died, and that person had different goals and desires than the person I am now.

The new direction I’m being pulled in is one I never expected for myself. It will definitely require some use of my writing skills, but in a way that feels exciting and energizing.

Revelation: The End

As a mom, I’ve been through HELL and back, and I’ve survived. Am I over it? Heck, no! I’m still IN it, but I’m functioning. 

In fact, my experience with grief and loss has made me more fully human. 

I’m still able to grieve AND go to work and take care of my family. 

I’m able to grieve AND laugh and enjoy things and do my hobbies. 

I want to help others know they also have the strength and resilience to get through anything, and that while there is no “getting over” grief, we can commit to making it our life’s work to go THROUGH it. I want to help people understand that our emotions cannot kill us, so we need not avoid them. We can run into the bullets and make it out alive.

Collectively, we have all suffered a tremendous amount of loss in the past two years, and many are in need of encouragement and support in managing their thoughts and emotions in response to grief.  

At this moment, I see a great need in our world to help others develop fortitude and resilience to withstand the heaviness that comes with grief and loss. 

However, I don’t want to help others by writing fiction, but by being of service in a different way. I’d like to coach anyone who has suffered a loss (not only death but ANY kind of loss) and is struggling with allowing and making space for the sometimes overwhelming thoughts and feelings of grief to be present in the midst of the busyness of daily life. 

Along the way, if I feel like writing again, I may even write a bit about grief and loss.

And if I don’t, that’s ok.

Finally, to end this column and—if you’ll allow the pun—close this chapter, I’d like to thank Gabriela Pereira and her team at DIY MFA for their generosity in welcoming me into their community of writers. I learned so much from all of you, not only about writing but about myself during the most challenging time of my life.

Tell us in the comments: Have you ever had a revelation in your life as a writer?

Anita Ramirez is a grieving mama and writer on hiatus. For updates on her next adventure, you can check out her website, or follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

The post Life of a Writer—Episode 5: Revelation appeared first on DIY MFA.

I bought ‘American Sunrise’ on Audible first, by accident, but I am so glad I did. Usually, I prefer hard copies for poetry books so I can underline at my leisure, and to stop at a particular passage to think about what and how they’ve written something.

American Sunrise is narrated by Joy herself, and while I encourage people to buy the hard copy too, hearing her speak her own poems in her own voice is a delicious indulgence. I cannot overlay my white perspective on top of her melodious, sometimes haunting intonations. Her voice turns her words into birds that fly over me too high to reach.

The Trail of Tears

I had never heard of The Trail of Tears. Maybe it is because I’m Canadian by birth, or because I’m white, or because my privileged education did not have the courage to embrace all of our history both cruel and horrifying.

The first few poems immediately pull me into the mud and bafflement of being thrown out of my own home, on my own land. Of having my children taken from me and forced to learn about a strange god in a foreign language, their homemade clothes suddenly not good enough. The trail of tears and everything that went along with it is a grief-rupture that is carried along ancestral DNA from parent to child. It is difficult to sit through. And it is not theirs alone to endure. If 2020 has taught me nothing else it is that no community suffers in isolation. What affects one will spread to the other. We are all connected. Hurt never stays contained within the one holding it.

Standing Witness

The imagery gives me chills –  the line from “How to Write a Poem in a Time of War”, ‘The torn pocket of your daughters home made dress…’ makes me want to cry and I am not a crier. I am a mother though, and this line makes me want to fight, and cry, then fight-cry.

In the past I would have stopped reading. I would tell myself this is hard, and you’ve had enough hard in your own life, and there is nothing to be done about it now. But this is 2021 and I am still alive and so I don’t turn away, feeling like it is my duty. It is my personal responsibility to both our ancestors to stand witness to her pain. And there is pain. There is grief. There is also this strange and wild voice threaded throughout her poetry, startling me like birds taking flight abruptly. 

Startling because it feels familiar. And even though I do not have even a ghost of a similar experience to relate to, even though this is the first time I am hearing these stories from her grandmothers, I find an echo of my own pain in hers, a glimmer of shared human suffering. Her poetry calls for us to stand still for a moment and listen to what was lost.

Humor connects us quickly but it is a light touch. A lover’s graze. This deep mourning, this sharing of her grief through poetry is a mother’s birth travails. There is hurt you don’t think you’re going to survive, and there are tears. In the end there is a love that shatters you more completely than suffering ever could. 

Shovels of Grief

She doesn’t shy away from the heavy topics, the thoughts we try not to think. In her poem “Singing Everything”, she reminds us that ‘For death, those are the heaviest songs. They have to be pried from the earth by shovels of grief.’

When you think you’re just reading a Joy Harjo poem and then the words slant sideways and winnow down deep inside your being to a sacred, secret place you are surprised to find is there. 

And it blooms, awakens, shoots out like a fire-cracker lilly back into the poem that birthed it and you are connected as surely as to a telephone line. You are never the same. This is the wonder of poetry in general and the skill of Harjo in particular.

As usual, Rumi said it better than I ever could:

Cry Easily

Keep your intelligence white-hot

And your grief glistening,

So your life will stay fresh.

Cry easily like a little child.

And so, I think I will cry. And then maybe dance a little, just like in her poem “Seven Generations.” I’ll dance and cry, and hold space for the relief of grief. 

Angela Yeh hails from Atlantic Canada but lives and works in Texas – after her liberal arts degree she wandered into Corporate America but managed to escape. She is a staunch advocate for writers and literacy/learning with her online writing community at DIYMFA.com. She also teaches a love of creative gardening to pre-k kids in her physical community. She lives with her husband, two lovely human children, and two cranky fur babies. You can check her out on Insta – @thatpluckygirl or at her website, www.thepluckycanadian.com

The post A Dance of Joy and Tears appeared first on DIY MFA.

A personal loss can mean the death of a loved one, pet, or close friend. It can also be a divorce, losing a job, a financial blow, moving away, or even the loss of a dream, among others. In my case, I lost my 25 year-old son to a brain aneurysm in April. Because of the pandemic, we couldn’t have a funeral, so two weeks after his death, I received his ashes in the mail.

 Throughout it all, there were moments I thought I would quit writing altogether, but I discovered some ways that helped me preserve my writer identity. So, whether you’ve also experienced a personal loss or feel like you’ve been in a relentless standstill due to everything else, what I’ve learned while trying to write during my own crisis may help you, too.

Give yourself permission to take a break from writing.

Some of us have such a strong work ethic that the mere thought of taking a break from writing causes anxiety. When my son passed, my first instinct was to keep writing because — despite my grief — I was afraid if I stopped, I’d never finish my WIP. However, after a day or two of sitting at my laptop and struggling to write, I decided it was healthier for me to take a break. I meditated, prayed, and talked to the people I’m closest to; I let myself be still and feel. And if I felt an inkling of guilt over not writing my novel during this time, I promptly squashed it.

Use your writing skills in a different way.

We have a unique skill set that lets us drill down to the core emotion underlying a set of circumstances. We can render truth out of conjecture, and we can make meaning where there seemingly is none. So in the midst of a crisis, we can hold on to our writer identity by doing things differently. One way is by focusing on writing smaller pieces like blog posts, personal essays, and poetry. Another way is to use journaling prompts to process emotions. If you google journaling prompts, you will find dozens of lists you can use. However, if journaling is too intense, you could also do a brain dump, which is simply a list of thoughts and feelings you pull out of your mind and put on paper. After my son died, it was difficult for me to journal, so I did a brain dump instead. While I had few epiphanies, I felt a little lighter each time I wrote a list.

Set a date to re-evaluate and return to your WIP.

When my son passed, I was halfway through a writing master class, and while I was determined to finish my manuscript, I knew I needed a break. However, I also knew I didn’t want to put my WIP on hold indefinitely, so I set a date to check in with myself and take my writing temperature. If I wasn’t yet ready, I set a new date to re-evaluate. In my case, these dates weren’t far apart; after the first week of shock, I checked in every 3-5 days until I decided it was time to get back in the chair. At that point, I set a new date, which was the day I went back to writing.

Of course, some people may prefer to have their check-in dates spaced further apart, but in my case, I wanted to get back to my WIP more quickly because I knew my son wouldn’t have wanted his death to stop me from  fulfilling a lifelong dream. Everytime we talked on the phone, he asked me about my novel and how close I was to finishing it. He was invested in it almost as much as I was, and in the end, I used that to help motivate me to start writing again.

Adjust your expectations.

When we start doing an activity again after some time off, we need to transition back into it; we know we can’t resume the activity at the same level before we quit. Thus, when I started writing again, I adjusted my expectations. I didn’t expect to immediately produce the same average word count or daily writing time pre-crisis, so I cut those numbers in half. For example, prior to April, I was averaging 1,500-1,800 words in about 90 minutes of writing per day. When I got back to writing, I lowered my goal to around 750-1,000 words a day, however long that took me. In the beginning, I only managed around 500 words some days, and I wasn’t able to concentrate for more than an hour or so. In addition, I went from writing 6 days per week pre-crisis to only 4 or 5 days per week. In my case, I was back to my normal speed and frequency within three weeks, but everyone’s pace will be different.

Be prepared for “aftershocks” and the possibility of another break.

Sometimes when we get over the initial shock of a crisis and we think we’ve put it behind us, it can sneak back up on us. I call these aftershocks, and sometimes they come in smaller waves or they hit us hard and pack a wallop. The latter is exactly what happened to me. My son died in April, and I was back to writing at my normal pace within a few weeks. I spent the summer revising my manuscript and working on my author platform, which kept me busy. I thought I was doing quite well, but then, at the end of September, an overwhelming wave of grief knocked me down. Hard. I’m still struggling to get back to my WIP, but I’ve been employing the steps above and this past week I’ve decided I’ll resume writing within the next two weeks. I’ve set a date and I’ll write something, even if it isn’t a lot. I’ve committed to accepting whatever comes and being grateful for it.

While I never would have imagined that anything could make me go several months without writing, I’m giving myself some grace while working the steps that were helpful for me in the first go around, knowing that in the future, I may have to work them again.

And again.

Anita Ramirez is a writer and teacher who transforms bilingual, dispassionate teens into lovers of books, one reader at a time. When she’s not teaching Hispanic/Latinx literature and composition to her high school students or linguistics at the college level, she’s revising her first bilingual YA novel and attempting to win NaNoWriMo while writing her second. Anita is a California native who’s been living in New York for the past 25 years. She loves the poetry of Pablo Neruda, teen movies from the 1980s and café con leche. You can find her at www.anitawritesbooks.com and connect with her on Twitter and Instagram.

The post #5onFri: Five Ways to Keep Writing Through a Crisis appeared first on DIY MFA.

Then I wrote Five Ways to Fit Writing into Your Busy Schedule and Honoring Your Writer Identity. 

In this post, I hope to address some of the seemingly insurmountable things on my list that don’t feel like excuses but literal roadblocks. 

I hope that you will be encouraged to no longer see these things as immovable as you try to inch them little by little and get your motivation back.

Loss/Grief

This one is tough, so why not address it first and get it over with?

One of the most difficult setbacks in life is the loss of something valuable. While the death of a loved one is so hard, we can experience similar feelings to varying degrees after the loss of a job we loved or the ending of a relationship. As writers, it’s important we “Honor our reality” and give ourselves space and self-care. 

Yes, we need to take care of ourselves but also remember that our writing can take care of us too. Our writing is an abstract thing that is part of us, and it will always be there waiting for us when we return to it.

For the sake of helping you out, I will put myself out there and say I suffered a loss-setback myself a few years ago. It was one of those really bad ones. But as I was going through my grief, I realized that writing was the only thing keeping me going. 

So I started up again and it was working. But one thing was missing. I felt I needed to interact regularly with other writers. I wanted to go back to school, but then I found DIYMFA, which was a much more manageable route to getting back on track.

By signing up for DIYMFA and embracing my writing life, I was coping much better with my loss. It pulled me out of that grief cycle and gave me something to work on and through which to channel my creativity. It also helped me meet lots of great new people who gave me a reason to get out of bed in the morning. 

My advice: go through your stages of grief, but don’t give up. Free-write/journal about your experiences until it all comes out. Then shift gears and focus on something new.  Cry and rage, but always come back to the page.

Illness

Another rough thing to experience and address is illness, which can also happen in varying degrees. Whether it’s the shock from an unexpected diagnosis, the coping with symptoms, or even a chronic illness you’ve had for years (been there), it might be tempting to put your “writing hobby” on the back burner. 

Don’t do that. Of course, if you are suffering so much you can’t function, your writing will take a backseat, but like with grief, you can have good days and bad. On those good days, let yourself experience the joy of writing. Say “No” to things that don’t bring you joy and focus on writing. It’s obviously not a cure-all, but like laughter, writing can be great medicine. 

My advice: use a calendar to track the days you feel like writing and the days you don’t. Give yourself a sticker/smiley face/treat or something more fitting to your personality on those days as positive reinforcement for trying. The more you do this the more you will associate your good days with writing and associate the writing itself with positive experiences.

Rejection/Bad Critique

This one is more writer-oriented, and “isn’t as serious” but tell that to any writer who just experienced it. The best way around this one is the mindset shift of realizing that it happens to ALL WRITERS.

Yes, it does. And, once you embrace that getting bad critique or receiving rejection from an agent and so forth is all part of the process of writing, it makes it easier to swallow it and persevere. It also makes you a better writer. Remember, even the best quality writers still aren’t perfect. 

Lots of famous authors have different stories of how they dealt with rejection. No one is an overnight success. Debunk myths around writing and educate yourself with the process. The more knowledgeable you are about this industry and what it takes to be successful, the more resilience you will have as a result. 

My advice: give yourself a reason other than publication to submit something. Sure, that’s your goal, but if you don’t get that, what else do you receive? Free writing advice from a knowledgeable source? A better understanding of your genre and who your readers are? A push to do better and know better and write better next time? Keep asking yourself those difficult questions and hold yourself accountable. 

So those were “the big 3” reasons why writers stop writing. And they happen to everyone.

The moral here: life can really suck, but don’t give up on the one thing that makes it better.

Amy Ayres is the Tech Fairy at DIYMFA. When she is not in her office writing about terraformed planets, multiple personalities, and Irish folklore, she is hanging with her awesome tech-hubby, stepson, and RubyCat. Visit amymarieayres.com where you can find out more about her private writer’s group Fill the Blank Page. You can sign up for her Newsletter where she sends out motivational tips for new writers and her special brand of humor. You can also find her on Twitter and Instagram.

The post Against All Odds: Writing Despite Setbacks appeared first on DIY MFA.

It seems ridiculous to say with any kind of certainty what’s best to do in these shifting, traumatic and disruptive times that very few of us have any equivalent experience to fall back on.

But we share the grief as human beings. We respond to loss in ways that unite us through our humanity, through our capacity for empathy, even when isolated by physical distance.

Two books released this year offer glimpses into the place where grief resides, reading both together gave me a sense of hope and lightened my heart with their humor and loveliness.

Review of Dancing at the Pity Party by Tyler Feder

Dancing at the Pity Party: a dead mom graphic memoir by Tyler Feder, invites the reader into her life when she was in her first year away at college and learned her mom had stage-four ovarian cancer. Feder offers an intimate and honest view of her family as they navigated through chemotherapy, hospital stays, her mom’s death in 2009, and the decade that followed as Feder began to turn her life experience into this beautiful book. Every page is a delight and many made me laugh out loud, not in that laughing-at-a-funeral-feeling-inappropriate way, more the laughter that comes from the surprise of human candor or the delight of being shown another human being’s true self.

Dancing at the Pity Party not only tells the story of one young woman coping with loss and grief, but also gives good instruction on the do’s and don’ts for dealing with a grieving person. In fact, there’s a list on page 110 that addresses precisely this concern. Do, for example, “ask them questions about their loved one.”  But don’t “compare their loss to yours unless the situations are EXTREMELY similar.”

This is Tyler Feder’s first sole-authored book in comics art form, but she has illustrated books for other authors, including Unladylike: a field guide to smashing the patriarchy and claiming your space, a 2018 book written by Cristen Conger and Caroline Ervin that is now on my how-am-I-just-now-learning-about-this-book? shelf.  

Reading Dancing at the Pity Party is like being hugged by a child, a favorite aunt or a best friend, the kind of hug that immediately makes you feel like you’re okay even when life hurts.

An Interview with Laraine Herring, author of The Grief Forest

The Grief Forest by Laraine Herring follows a bunny’s journey to meet the many forms of grief and grief responses. It pairs a brief narrative with her drawings to create a very approachable story about “what we don’t talk about.” Herring and I both hail from Arizona and had met at writing events and workshops, but it wasn’t until this summer, when I took her online writing workshop, “Grieving into Life: writing raw in the time of the pandemic,” that I came to appreciate the depth of her expertise as a grief counselor. For this post, I interviewed her about The Grief Forest.

RFE: How did you decide on the scope of grief that the book addresses?

LH: Bunny’s particular grief is the loss of a parent, but her journey through The Grief Forest puts her in contact with a multitude of different aspects of grief—sudden loss, anticipatory grief, deflected and denied grief, intergenerational trauma, etc. In the company of her mentor, Death, she’s being given windows into lots of different ways people respond to grief. For example, when Robin’s egg doesn’t hatch and she says, “I did everything right!,” this could connect to someone’s miscarriage, or a long-term illness where the treatments ultimately did not work, or it could apply to the loss of a dream or a plan (enter COVID!) I wanted the book to address a variety of types of grief and a variety of stages along the grief process so that it could be used in a therapeutic sense as well as for a personal journey. 

In my own graphic memoir, By the Forces of Gravity, I grappled with the grief I had carried for years from the murder of a childhood best friend when I was fifteen. Creating the book made me look at grief more deeply and I came to understand it as more complicated than the so-called five stages of grief that leads one to think of grief as a thing that ends. If I had met Laraine Herring sooner, I might not have taken forty years to get that I was still grieving. I asked her about the differing ways of experiencing grief.

LH: Grief has many aspects. There’s an acute phase (the surging ocean), and then there’s the ways it lives with us for the rest of our lives (the lake). No one experiences grief in the same way, and grief ebbs and flows throughout a person’s life. There is no end-point. If we loved a person and they die, we will always have moments where we miss them and wish things were different. Even for me, 33 years after my dad’s death, there are still some moments of that acute phase. It doesn’t last as long as it did back then, but sometimes just the right song or the right scent will rip the skin back again. Many of the animals Bunny meets are in various stages of “stuck”. Bunny is also stuck. Bunny’s complicated mourning is manifesting through intense attachment to the deceased and an inability to adjust to the reality of a world without her dad. Animals like Whale and Spider Monkey are “stuffers”. They’ve absorbed all their losses and tucked them neatly away. Of course, that’s only sustainable for so long. The Startled Kittens at the beginning of her journey represent the shock of the news—how we can get swept away by emotion and be untethered. As Bunny moves through the Forest (which magically becomes an ocean in Act 2!), the animals transition from grievers to guides, each one offering an insight on how to approach living with grief (which is decidedly different from the “get over it” messaging). This is not to say that we will be devastated, sad, and angry our whole lives. If we move into our grief and learn how to address it, ask it questions, and listen to its wisdom, grief also moves from being a weight to being a guide, as evidenced by Bunny’s ability to work with grievers and her own grief story by the end.

RFE: Picturing grief as a tethered balloon and also as the colored air within it was really illuminating. How did you arrive at this image?

LH: Before becoming aware of the environmental damage of balloons, releasing balloons in grief groups was very common. The balloon represented the griever’s loss and then it was released to the sky. I didn’t consciously think about this, but I have done so many grief groups that I think it was a natural image waiting in my subconscious. I wanted something playful and colorful to represent what is often so heavy, and I wanted an image that could change—the balloons lose their strings in Act 3, although if you notice, every single animal, even Grandmother Bunny, has their own griefs nearby. I wanted to visually represent that grief isn’t “gone.” It informs who we become, and we have the choice as to how to use this energy when we meet it.

RFE: How do you imagine people might use your book in processing grief or helping others process their grief?

LH: I’m working on a companion book: The Map to the Grief Forest: a guide for grievers and groups. I wanted the images to be the primary springboard into conversations about grief and the sharing of grief stories. If you think about using the illustrations through the lens of an art therapist, we can discuss what we notice. Where are the grief balloons? What colors are used? Is it light or dark? What is the proximity of animal to grief? People can draw their own images of their grief story (and I want to put together a workshop that does this). I think the text helps anchor readers in the particular parts of the grief process, but each person is going to have a different way of relating. I hope to see this book in clinical settings, hospices, educational centers, hospitals, and with individuals. I put illustrations on every page because I wanted the book to feel joyful, even though the subject matter is serious. I wanted there to be that sense of play and wonder, and I hoped that because the illustrations are so imperfect, they will not intimidate other people. I wanted the “soul” of each animal to come through, and I hoped that the animals’ souls would connect to the grievers’ souls and create space to breathe.

RFE: Humanity is grieving right now from all the loss of lives and disruption of life due to COVID-19. Can you reflect on what people can do with the many grief balloons they’re tangled in because of the pandemic?

LH: The book exists because of COVID-19. I couldn’t really put two sentences together, so I started to teach myself Procreate on the iPad and behold, a Bunny arrived. I felt so strongly the amount of different kinds of griefs emerging as both primary and secondary losses of COVID. I wanted to make something that created a space for grief that was open-ended and bright. I certainly am in the middle of the waves of grief these days too—so much time alone, teaching only through screens, missing my mother, missing trips we’d planned, seeing the economic and climate devastations—and hidden in all of those from time to time pops up my dad again. I think it’s important for folks to recognize that a grief response to times of chaos, upheaval, and change is absolutely normal. It is not a pathological response. Grief is a stress response—and we’re certainly in the middle of a whole lot of stressors. Grief requires adjustment and adaptation skills, and even those of us who are practiced in that are struggling right now. The grief response often involves things like: brain fog, forgetting things, fatigue, and (insert your avoidance-coping-mechanism-of-choice) (Mine is Doritos…). Add the unbelievable amount of screen time we all are engaged in, and it’s easy for our systems to hit overwhelm. 

1. Recognize that these times are not “normal” and having a response to them IS normal.

2. Practice compassion and patience for yourself and other people.

3. Practice discernment around what actually MUST happen versus what we’re conditioned to do in a particular day.

4. When a strong emotion arises, allow yourself to feel it (safely). It will pass if it is allowed to move. Too often, we clamp down on it because it scares us, and so it starts swimming around the body taking other shapes.

5. Don’t be embarrassed or ashamed to seek outside help. One of the surprising components of grief is that because it is a stress response, it releases oxytocin, which is popularly known as the “cuddle hormone.” Oxytocin helps us reach out for social support. It’s pretty amazing that our stress response has a built-in mechanism to help us find the thing that is most valuable. I know that with COVID, our social networks and activities have been dramatically curtailed, and that has further complicated people’s lives. I’ve started writing handwritten letters again, and that has helped me. I call people on the phone more instead of text (but not Zoom – GAH!!!!) 

RFE: Final thoughts?

LH: I’m thinking these days about how, though it seems the world is in many ways contracting, we might find expansion in the specificity of our single, beautiful lives.

Yes to that.

Rebecca Fish Ewan, a poet/cartoonist/writer and founder of Plankton Press, teaches landscape architecture at Arizona State University. She grew up in Berkeley, California, and now lives in Tempe with her family. Her cartoon/free verse memoir, By the Forces of Gravity, is her grief response to a childhood trauma. Her new book, Doodling for Writers, just released through Books by Hippocampus. You can connect with her at rebeccafishewan.com or on IG @doodlescriptorium

The post Picturing Grief appeared first on DIY MFA.

Ruh-roh. Becca’s taking a turn for the serious this week.

Just a month ago, I lost my best furry buddy. Couple that with several seriously ill family members and the recent firestorm that swept through southern California, and you might say that it’s been difficult to find time, let alone inspiration, to write. Fear and Grief are the sort of house guests who eat all your food, wreck all your sh!t, and stay indefinitely on your couch. And then blame you for making them dependents.

But this blog isn’t about how to force yourself to keep working on your novel when everything’s going to hell. I had a peer in a creative writing class a few years back who wasn’t a writer, and never claimed to be. She said that she was taking the class to help herself work through some trauma. That’s what we’re going to do today with Fear and Grief.

1. Fear

Don’t try to hide, I see all you anxiety-riddled people. That’s right, those who suffer from imposter syndrome, those who think every word they put down, every published piece will be examined before God and everybody—and then emblazoned with a big scarlet A (for Amazon… Okay, that wasn’t the best extended metaphor ever).

If you weren’t worrying about that before, you sure are now.

Fear is a parasitic little house guest. The more you keep feeding it, the more hair it leaves in the shower. Try these simple exercises:

• Write it down! Seriously, you read all the way through this article for this common-sense advice? Write down your list of what’s scaring you right now. Acknowledging your fears is the first step in conquering them—and turning a light on is a great way to see exactly what sort of hairy visitor you’re dealing with.
• Come back to your goals. In a recent Writer Fuel that Gabriela sent out (if you haven’t signed up yet, you should! It’s that minty green box there on the right), she talked about the top 3 goals for her annual “holy grail”—three goals that trump everything else. You should have a goal that is so strong you would pursue it, even through your fears. According to The Guardian, public speaking is among our top five fears, and yet many writers will have to face this. If one of the items on your bucket list is to do a reading of your book, you’re going to need to conquer that fear pretty quick. Book reading as a famous author trumps being afraid to talk to people (self, listen up!).
• Do what scares you. Afraid of what your family will say when you put out your memoir? All the more reason to do it (as Anne Lamott would say, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”). Traumatized by firestorms (like me)? Write a story about an arsonist. Terrified of jumping off a cliff? What the heck, do it! (No, no. DIY MFA holds no liability for following any of the directions herein.) Writing about what scares you will help you conquer the beast with the almighty pen!

2. Grief

This one is a little tougher. Grief is different for everyone. I myself have struggled with bottling emotions inside until they become physically painful. Grief is more of a lurker who may even convince you that he isn’t still staying at your house, but in the morning you’ll find all your bacon confiscated (Nooo! Not the bacon!).

Even for those who have trouble expressing their sorrow, there are still ways to write through it.

• Let it hurt. Writing about what makes you sad, like I did with my cuddle buddy, is going to hurt worse even than all those rejection letters you get as a writer. I know, impossible, right? Good. Write about how much it hurts, too; write about how it feels to crumble. And while you’re at it, try to balance the sadness with the brightness: From good times you spent with a person, or the hours of work your hard drive allowed you to accomplish before it crashed.
• Try poetry. Poetry doesn’t have to make sense. Poetry doesn’t have to mean anything except to you. Poetry can include all images that express how it feels to grieve (for ideas, check out this article on the image from Danielle Mitchell). When my 18-year-old neighbor, my brother’s best friend, passed away in a car accident four years ago, I cried every day for weeks. I still grieve, but I began to move forward the day I wrote a poem:

Last Words

for Michael

Trembling low and

confidential to a voice I

didn’t care to hear,

They said

he blew a

Kiss

to his girlfriend

through transparent

car windows

reflecting

too much

I thought,

I wouldn’t be disappointed if

that was my last word.

• Get help. A lot of time we blame our profession instead of seeking to see if there’s something deeper going on. Oh, those depressed artists! It’s okay to be sad, but it can really help to reach out to both friends and professionals who know the tricks to avoiding chronic sadness.

It’s hard to move forward, whether from tragedy or fear of failure, from painful memories or from something as seemingly “simple” as avoiding writing for weeks on end. Fear compounds fear, and grief gets worse the longer you hold onto it, but you are a writer. You can write through it. Write and weep every day if you have to. Only you know which methods help you. I hope that, whoever is hurting out there, you take comfort that you are not the only one and that you can and will write through this.

Got a question? Tweet me @beccaquibbles with the hashtag #askbecca, email me at becca [at] DIYMFA [dot] com, or just leave a comment below! You could see your question answered right here at Ask Becca!

Rebecca Ann Jordan is a speculative fiction author and artist in San Diego. She recently won Reader’s Choice Best of 2013 for her short story “Promised Land” at Fiction Vortex and has published poetry and fiction in Flapperhouse, Yemassee Magazine, Bravura Literary Journal and more. Becca regularly columns for DIYMFA.com. See more from her at rebeccaannjordan.com.

The post Ask Becca: Writing through Loss and Fear appeared first on DIY MFA.