Letting Grief Speak - by Diane Zinna (Hardcover)

About the Book

Letting Grief Speak is a creative writing craft book on the art of telling our hardest stories.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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

About the Author

Diane Zinna is the author of The All-Night Sun (2020), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize. Her work has appeared in Brevity, the Bellevue Literary Review, and CutBank. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has taught creative writing for more than twenty years.