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Letting Grief Speak
Writing Portals for Life After Loss
Society doesn’t always make it easy to tell stories about loss. Grief can make us feel that we have crossed over to another side, where people can’t reach us and we can’t reach others. We’re encouraged to move quickly through the often-misunderstood “stages of grief”; we fear that we are burdening others with our pain. But pain can feel more manageable when we find ways to describe it—and writing about grief can help us connect with others who have felt pain of their own.
Letting Grief Speak is a creative writing craft book on the art of telling our hardest stories. Based on a class called Grief Writing Sundays that Diane Zinna has led for several years, it provides ninety writing prompts with accompanying craft techniques to help people find language for their grief. By turns gentle, unexpected, rebellious, and wonderfully strange, these prompts open portals: entryways into spaces where difficult emotions can become meaningful narratives. Warm, sensitive, and honest, Letting Grief Speak is a memoir of the craft, interwoven with stories from the author’s own life. It also includes pieces from acclaimed writers and more than forty of her Grief Writing students, inviting readers to find their own ways to tell vulnerable stories. A tool for writers and a companion for grievers, this book meets writers of all levels where they are, no matter what kind of grief they hold.
Praise
“As the title Letting Grief Speak suggests, feelings of loss will never be silent or at rest until given voice. Like grief itself, this important book is simultaneously expansive and intimate. Zinna has written a meditative guidebook to assist writers turn the unease of life’s sorrows into compelling narratives.” —Sue William Silverman, author of Selected Misdemeanors: Essays at the Mercy of the Reader
“Diane Zinna’s book, Letting Grief Speak, is a gentle, careful, solid guide for anyone approaching the work of writing loss. She collects stories, her own and others, and provides writing portals to help people communicate their grief. She pushes back against the idea that we are isolated in our sorrow, teaching us how to make our stories both personal and universal.” —Eiren Caffall, author of The Mourner’s Bestiary
“Diane Zinna’s Letting Grief Speak offers readers a warm, sustaining community on every page, so that we can discover what she describes as “portals and paths—ways into grief writing, ways to sustain, and ways out again.” Full of accessible lessons, useful literary role models, and generative prompts, this book will appeal to writers of all levels of experience and across genres. It’s a book for any reader who fears that loss is untranslatable and who yearns to find an authentic voice for grief.” —Jehanne Dubrow, author of The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma
“Zinna’s Let Grief Speak is the rarest of things—a craft book imbued with a multitude of personal stories from her Grief Writing Sundays group. This gifted teacher offers a series of inventive portals to transport writers to “the memory of their own feelings”—uncovering rich seams of material previously unexplored. An essential resource for writers who feel blocked.” —Margaret Juhae Lee, author of Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History