#HFGather: The Resilient Writer—Writing Through Trauma and Grief

How can we write honest, heartfelt stories for young readers without harming ourselves in the process? Author and mindfulness/writing coach Heather Demetrios joined us for a powerful #HFGather on nurturing both writer and reader through the work.

If you missed the live Gather, you can watch it here.
Please note: closed captions are being added to the video below. When they are finished, you can see them by hovering over the bottom of the video and choosing the “CC” icon.

Resources Shared During the #HF Gather:

• PDF of Heather’s Powerpoint presentation
• Rebecca Dykes Writers website
• Writing Through Trauma & Grief to Empower Readers: A Retreat for Storytellers at the Highlights Foundation Retreat Center
• Rebecca Dykes Writers Fund at the Highlights Foundation
• Rebecca Dykes Writers Scholarship at the Highlights Foundation
• Heather Demetrios website
• Dr. Kristin Neff: Self-Compassion
• Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet, by Joan Halifax
• Lena and The Dragon, by Bethany Walker

Listen to a Podcast Version of the Gather:

Full Transcript

George Brown:
Welcome to the Resilient Writer, Writing Through Trauma and Grief. This free webinar session is a part of our HF Gather series, which started in the early days of COVID as a way to bring together a community of storytellers to center around a specific topic. I’m proud that as we celebrate 40 years of the Highlights Foundation, we’re able to continue this free programming.

I’m George Brown, the Executive Director at the Highlights Foundation, and our mission is to positively impact children by amplifying the voices of storytellers who inform, educate, and inspire children to become their best selves. Tonight’s HF Gather is a representation of our mission. We want to support you, the creatives, as you write the books you are called to write.

In some cases, those books are filled with joy and humor, and in some cases, those books share the realities of trauma and grief.And in many cases, the books share all of the above, ’cause that is the reality of life, joy and grief, happiness, and some tragedy too.

We’re so grateful that Heather Demetrios is here with us tonight to lead you through some writing activities to help bring stories of trauma and grief to readers of any age. Writing is hard. Writing about trauma and grief is really hard. Go at your own pace and take care of yourself.

Heather is a part of our faculty for our upcoming retreat, Writing through Trauma and Grief to Empower Readers, which will be held at the Highlights Foundation Retreat Center, November th through 9th. I hope tonight’s session gives you a little sample of what that retreat might be like.

Before we get started, and a couple more items. First, whenever and wherever we gather the Highlights Foundation strives for a safe and inclusive environment. We ask that you join us tonight with no hate, no harm, and no harassment of any kind. Also, as a webinar-style Gather, we cannot see you and we cannot hear you during this session, so you’re safe from that. However, as the hosts and panelists, we can see the chat and the Q and A feature. We’ll get to as many questions as we can after Heather’s presentation.

So please use the chat feature for comments and insights, and use the Q and A function for questions for Heather. And also, as I mentioned earlier, be aware whether you’re, uh, messaging to hosts and panelists, or to all participants. A copy of tonight’s webinar will be–with closed captions–will be delivered to your inbox in approximately hours, so you will have a recording of this. Uh, you also on your end, can enable closed captions as we gather live tonight.

With me is our program assistant Emily Rosenthal. She will be taking care of our tech and monitoring the chat and Q and A for any questions. Emily and I will probably turn off our videos so that Heather can have the full screen.

So onto the show. I first met Heather as she attended a Personal Retreat and then hosted a writing retreat here at the Highlights Foundation Retreat Center. We are in northeast Pennsylvania on the traditional lands of the Lenni-Lenape. Heather, at the time, let me know about the work she was doing with an organization called Rebecca Dykes Writers. And this organization is committing to end, committed to ending gender-based violence one word at a time.

In 2022, we hosted our first retreat in partnership with the Rebecca Dykes Writers and their founder Jane Houng. Jane is the mother of Rebecca Dykes, who was taken from this world too soon by gender-based violence. This program has grown significantly since 2022, both at the Rebecca Dykes Writers and as a retreat at the Highlights Foundation. I hope you’ll learn more about these pieces that tie into tonight’s presentation.

Emily, if you have a chance, will you please share our links, uh, to Rebecca Dykes writers and to the retreat in the chat as you’re able.

So, Heather, thank you for the work you do.Will you please tell us a little bit about yourself as a creative and then begin your presentation, which you’ve titled The Resilient Writer.

Heather Demetrios:
Hello, everybody. So first of all, thank you so much for spending some time with us tonight. I am thrilled to be able to share our work with you. The lecture that you’re gonna hear tonight is a taste of a lecture that I gave at our last retreat, and the work that we do is really centered around you.

Uh, one of the things that I’ve noticed as somebody who is a writing professor in an MFA program, who received an MFA myself, so many of you I think have a connection to Vermont College of Fine Arts, which is where I went. Um, as an author, as a writing coach, as somebody who has been in many writing spaces and groups, is that many spaces do not have a sense of what it means to be trauma-informed for writers.

So there are classes and books and teachers and editors, agents that are asking writers to mine their trauma, mine their stories, mine their pain, and they’re not providing any kind of a safe container to do that. And so writers are going off on their own and they’re digging deep, and they have nothing to keep them tethered to anything that feels at all safe or grounded.

And so what’s happening is that they’re dredging up all of this stuff, and they’re ex re-experiencing it. They’re having nightmares. They’re having PTSD, they’re having flashback, they’re having all of these things happening, and it’s affecting their personal lives.

And so I started noticing this. I have an undergrad in theater. So this started way back. I mean, this even started in high school being like, you know, we’re being asked to do this, this method acting, and then we’re being asked to write these solo performance pieces.We’re being pushed by our teachers to, um, to use our memories to make our performances or make our writing better. And we’re just expected to deal with it, to deal with how it’s, it’s affecting us. And it’s supposed to be used for entertainment for other people or for healing for other people, but no one’s taking care of us, right?

And so, um, when Jane and I, we met at Vermont College of Fine Arts. And so when Becky was murdered, um, one of the main things that, uh, Jane wanted to do was to use story as a space for healing first, as a space for healing for other women who had experienced gender-based violence. And then to use story as a place of change, right? Change in the world because we believe that stories could change the world.

And that’s what Highlights believes. And so that’s where that partnership began.

And so this is where kind of our work begins in holding writers with tenderness and care and dignity. And so, if you have been harmed in your writing journey, um, I, I want you to know that we come from a trauma-informed space. We have a licensed clinical social worker on our staff who, um, meets with our writers on our retreats.

I actually am in the process of becoming a clinical social worker because of this program, because of Rebecca Dykes Writers, um, and because they believe in this work so much. So when I’m in school, people say, what’s a social worker for writers? And I have to explain my whole thing about this, right? Um, we have an md, a doctor on our staff who is in the process of becoming a somatic healer through the somatic experiencing. I think a lot of you probably have somatic therapists. That’s what she’s becoming.

Uh, so this is really important to us, not just to bring wellness into the space, but to actually bring clinical support as well as mindfulness. I’m a trained mindfulness facilitator, um, through UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. So we, we bring it, we really, really want to support you, um, with evidence-based support.

And so with that, I want you to know that in these next 30 minutes, you are, um, meant to be held in care. And so with that, from a trauma-informed space, I will not be talking about anything disturbing.

So we’re really kind of having a bird’s eye view discussion here. And I’m gonna be giving you a lot of, um, information in the slides, but I won’t be going over all of that information.
So in the chat, I’ll be sharing the PDF for tonight. You can also take screenshots if you’re tech savvy, um, of the p of the, um, what’s this called? PowerPoint. Um, but I wanted you to have the information, and this was a 0 minute lecture, and this is what my husband told me to say. He said, okay, this is what, he’s a high school teacher. He said, you gave a 0 minute lecture,but you only have 30 minutes,which means everybody gets an hour of homework. Spoken like a true teacher.

So, um, within these slides are opportunities for reflection. So, um, considering the books that you’re reading, considering the books that you’re writing, um, and yourself, where do you see these themes? Where do you see opportunities for reflection and journaling?

So with that, I’m gonna do some sharing of my screen and let’s see if I can do this.

Well, hopefully this looks good. Perfect. Okay. Looks great. Okay. So we are writing through trauma and grief, and here’s this quote, which I love from Rumi: “The wound is the place where the light enters you.”

And, you know, many of you have been through so much, and I just want you to know that the wound is that place, um, where we believe at Rebecca Dykes Writers, that we can find that light. And that’s not to say like, oh, there’s a silver lining for all these bad things, and isn’t it, you know, actually it’s kind of good that the bad things happened. That’s not what we’re saying. But we are saying that you have an opportunity to take these things and to, um, to provide healing for yourself through your work and also for your young readers.

So I’ve come up with four tenets for writing trauma and grief. So tenets being kind of like the kind of guidelines, guideposts, and this comes from my work that I’ve done over many, many years. Um, working with my own trauma and my own experiences, working with so many different writers from all different backgrounds who are, have been working from picture book through middle grade, YA and adult.

Um, and at our retreats actually, we have women who come, who have a story in mind that they’re working with, and they’re working with something personal. Sometimes they’re working with something that’s secondary trauma. So they have a family member who experienced something, and then they have that secondary trauma from that. And they’re writing through that. Sometimes they don’t know what they wanna write, but they’ve experienced something and they wanna write about it. Um, and sometimes they’re actually writing in a more memoir space about something that happened to them when they were younger.

So first we write from the wound, we write from the wounded place, but we do that with a container, a container of care. We’ll talk more about that later.

We edit from the scar; so we don’t edit, we don’t revise from the wounded place. That’s, that’s not, um, useful at all, the wounded places where we just, you know, we let it all out. We just put it on the page. No censoring, right? Inner critics not allowed. There. We edit from the scar.

So we, we we’re editing now from the healed place, the medicine has gone to work, and now we’re able to take that step back. And from our wisdom mind, we’re able to begin to revise, right? We offer our book to the world as medicine only after it has healed us.

So this is key because it gets into the fourth tenet. We do no harm to ourselves or to the reader. If you put your book, or your tweet, or your blog post or whatever you want out there to soon, you can do harm to both yourself and to the people that you’re, um, speaking to. Because if you’re putting work out there from the wounded place, that not-healed place, then, then you’re putting things out there not from your wisdom mind.

So you might be saying things that you don’t actually mean or intend to say about your trauma or, um, or other people’s trauma, or your grief or other people’s grief. And it could, um, increase and amplify the hurt in other people, right? And so, um, we talk about this in the work that we do, and we give you tools and we work through this, and we talk about how you can take care of yourself and how do you know if you’re writing from the wound or the scar, right?

How do you calibrate that inner our compass? Okay? And remember, I’m gonna give you the PDF, but you can take a screenshot if you want. Those are my four tenets. Okay?

Um, uh, oh, I’m trying to move to the next, uh, okay. It’s not letting me move. My arrow was working. Oh, there you go. Yay. Okay. All right.

These are the three tenets, um, of Zen peacekeepers. So I have a background in Zen Buddhism. Zen Peacekeepers is an awesome social justice organization.nAnd, um, I don’t have time to go into all of the work that they do, but this is a lens through which you might look at the world, um, that might be very helpful as you’re writing, when we’re writing about trauma and grief, and we’ve got that trauma grief lens, it can be like, um, like kind of like that bottle glass where we’re just like, we can’t see clearly.

And sometimes we can engage in what cognitive behavioral theory might call, or therapy might call, black and white thinking, you know, like, either this is bad or this is good, right? And often it’s shades of gray, right? It’s very, very complex. And trauma can be very confusing. Um, sometimes we love the people that hurt us the most, and we might need to hold some space for that in our work, and that might make us feel shame. And that’s confusing and right?

And so I love these three tenets because it allows us to hold that complexity. And I put the zen peacekeepers.org, um, website up there for you to check out. And, um, just to put some clarity, Zen is, um, yes, it’s a religion on the one hand, but it, it’s also a philosophy. So it can be secular. So you can be, you know, Zen and Muslim, for example. So just to, you know, if anybody feels squeamish about that.

So the first is not knowing. So just kind of approaching the topic, your characters with a sense of not knowing. What if, um, a character has an experience and you’re in a scene that’s very confusing and you approach it with, um, without an agenda. Just like, I don’t know, I don’t know, uh, what justice looks like in this situation. I don’t know what resolution looks like. Let’s explore it, right? Instead of coming into the scene with, well, this punishment needs to happen to the perpetrator, right? That’s what not knowing looks like. That’s what holding space for the complexity looks like. Bearing witness, bearing witness is what we do as writers, right?

So I love, I love foreign correspondents. I’m obsessed with them; in another life. I definitely was a foreign correspondent. And they bear witness, they go out into the field and they bear witness to what’s happening. We are the foreign correspondents of the child experience. That’s what we are. We go into the field of childhood and we report back, right? That’s what we do. So we bear witness to childhood trauma. And so then our child readers can see, oh yeah, this is what it feels like for me. Or the adult readers who are reading for their inner child, they’re reading, like, I read picture books for my inner child to heal my trauma. So I’m reading that. I’m like, yeah, that is what it felt like to not be heard, right? Like, um, what is it? The Rabbit Listened, right? Like that, that picture book is like, yes, they listened, right?

Taking action, that’s the next part. What does it mean to take action from a place of not knowing and then bearing witness and then taking action. So not taking action from a place of anger, taking action after the not knowing and the bearing witness. Okay? All right, now we’re gonna go to the next slide. So I’m gonna give you an example of each not knowing.

My example here is Ida, Always. Love this picture book, great picture book about grief. Um, it’s by Caron Levis. And the illustrator is, uh, Charles Santoso, an example of not knowing, uh, spoiler alert, one of the polar bears dies, Ida. And, um, the way that Gus is able to kind of process this is that, um, Ida says to Gus about the city, they’re in Central Park and they’re surrounded by New York City. And he gus longs to be out in the city. And Ida says, you don’t have to see it to feel it, ’cause they can hear the car honking and they can feel the energy of the city. You don’t have to see it to feel it.

So after she’s gone, there’s this beautiful moment where Gus, his eyes are closed, he almost looks like he’s meditating, and we see pictures of Ida in the clouds. And it has this moment where he says, you don’t have to see it to feel it. And we know that he’s feeling her presence, he’s maintaining that connection with his dead friend.

We don’t need an answer. We don’t know where Ida went when she died. We don’t need those answers. We live in that liminal place of not knowing, right? So that’s an example of not knowing, bearing witness.

Long Way Down, Jason Reynolds, If you haven’t read this book, you are in for a treat. Go read it as soon as possible. He bears witness to the experience of young black kids who are caught in systemic oppression and the cycle of that, right? So here’s an example:

The rules, number one, crying. Don’t. No matter what: don’t.
Number two, snitching. Don’t. No matter what: don’t.
Number three, revenge. If someone you love gets killed, find the person who killed them and kill them.
Another thing about the rules,
They weren’t meant to be broken.
They were meant for the broken to follow.

That’s bearing witness on the page. That’s being a foreign correspondent for children in the landscape, in the battlefield of childhood. Right there, taking action.

Speak, right? Laurie Halse Anderson. All right, so I’ve got this thing in the way. I can’t read it. Okay, here we go. Oh, man. Talk about Rebecca Dykes Writers and, um, ending gender-based violence one word at a time.

Shards of glass slipped down the wall
and into the sink, it pulls away from me, puzzled.
I reach in and wrap my fingers around a triangle of glass.
I hold it to Andy Evans’s neck. He freezes.
I push just hard enough to raise one drop of blood.
He raises his arms over his head, my hand quivers.
I want to insert the glass all the way through his throat.
I want to hear him scream.
I look up, I see the stubble on his chin, a fleck
of white in the corner of his mouth.
His lips are paralyzed.
He cannot speak. That’s good enough.
You’ve been through a lot, haven’t you?
The tears dissolve the last block of ice in my throat.
I feel the frozen stillness melt down through the inside
of me, dripping shards of ice that vanish in a puddle
of sunlight on the stained floor.
Words float up me, let me tell you about it.

That’s taking action. Okay?

So you see, these are examples of not knowing, bearing witness and taking action. And they’re all coming from these places that are, that are all playing. There’s an interplay with each other. So as a writer, you’re thinking, right, with your work right now, how might you use this concept of not knowing? Where are you kind of stuck with this? I, I have to have it this way, right?

Or with bearing witness. Where, where might you step back a little bit and just bear witness to the experience, not be so heavy handed. Let those characters tell their story, right? I often say the book is the boss. Let those characters tell their story, right? Especially if it’s your story. How can you kind of take, take a step back a little bit, right? And then taking action. How can you have these empowered characters with agency who have earned those actions, right? And so that, that you can hold that up as a mirror so that your young reader can have an example of what it means to have a voice, right? To take action for themselves. And again, that’s how we do that.

But we need the resilience as writers in the writer’s seat to write these tough scenes. We can’t get to these scenes if we’re a puddle in the writer’s seat, right? Because these are tough things to get out there. And we need support to be able to do that. All right, come on, let’s get to the next slide. There we go.

Okay, so the three tenets. So we go from practice to the page. Y’all, I can’t tell you how many times I try to do this, but it’s, it’s interesting. So we go from not noticing or not knowing to curiosity. And that why I’ve tried to get it so many times to line up and it wouldn’t. So I decided to be curious about it. I don’t know that why is just hanging out there. But not knowing is really just embodying curiosity, right?

So if you as a writer are in the writer’s seat and you’re just, you’re having a hard time, one of the things we encourage people is to just get really curious. And that’s bringing in mindfulness. So usually when I have the time, I start my sessions with some mindfulness exercise. And so when you do a retreat with us, or if we are working one-on-one together or doing a class, you always are gonna have mindfulness tools and different ones to choose from.

We teach you about the window of tolerance, which I don’t have time to teach you about right now. And you are able to determine if you are in hyper-arousal or hypo-arousal. Um, and if somebody who could type into the chat “window of tolerance,” look that up. If you’re not familiar with that.

And so you’ll have tools to know, oh, I’m in hyper-arousal. These are the tools I need right now to get back into a place of stability. Or I’m in hypo-arousal. These are the tools I need to get back into stability. So you take a step back from the writing, you get back into your window of tolerance, assess whether or not you can keep writing. And then if you can, you go back so you get curious. Hmm, am I out my window of tolerance? I am. Okay, what do I need? Yeah, bearing witness is openness. Just really open to the experience. Oh, this is gonna hurt. I’m resourced. I can do this. Let’s go, let’s be open.

And taking action requires courage. It’s really courageous of you to even come to this lecture, of you to be willing to do this work. Yeah. And to write things that, you know, I’ve had people say that book’s never gonna sell. Nobody wants to read about fill in the blank. But you know what, you know, who does? Kids, kids who’ve had that happen to them. Kids who are scared about fill in the blank, kids who are having that happen at home, kids whose friends are having that happen at home.

So it’s really about that gut check, getting market out of the head and thinking about the kids and thinking about you. The kid who had that happen to them, right? So that’s what it’s about. Always taking that gut check. And we always do those gut checks together ’cause it’s hard, it’s really hard, how to write in these times.

Okay? This is from Totoro, if you haven’t seen that. Okay? So this is the part of our time together where I don’t have a lot of time to go super deep into it, but this is so mind-blowing to me that I had to include it in the slides because I think it’s so helpful to have language around this.

So there’s this great book called Standing at the Edge by Joan Halifax Um, finding freedom from fear and or Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet. I think we’re in a time where fear and courage are meeting a lot. And when you’re writing about trauma and grief, fear and courage often meet. And so the first thing we need to do is to really understand our suffering.

We are suffering, and I mean that word very seriously. And so when we are experiencing that, we need to understand what is exactly happening here and what’s happening in us, what’s happening in our book? What kind of suffering do we wanna show in our book? And what is the transformation arc? What kind of suffering is our character experiencing at the beginning of the book?

And I think I’m here talking more middle grade, and YA, this will be in some picture books too, but, and then how is that suffering gonna be transforming? So it’s different at the end. Okay?

You’re gonna see my cat Thirsty who has feelings about being picked up right now.

Okay? So please either take a screenshot or keep an eye out for the PDF.

So these, there’s two kinds of categories of suffering that I just wanna touch on, but I’m gonna focus on the latter category first. We have suffering that just hurts. There’s different kinds. And then we have what I call generative suffering, which is the juicy stuff for us where what I call my holy fury, it’s suffering. That is, um, it makes me write. It, it’s the suffering that’s like, this really hurts and it makes me wanna change the world. That’s good suffering. That’s the bearing witness suffering. This is the suffering that like we gotta watch out for.

So we have moral suffering. This is the harm we experience in relation to actions that transgress our tenets, our ethics, let’s say, of basic human goodness. So if we had more time, and we don’t right now, I would be giving you lots of examples. Um, so what that hour of homework that my husband is assigning you, um, what I would love is if you could take some time with your journal and really dig into moral suffering. Are you experiencing moral suffering? Is there a moral suffering in your book that you’re working on? What are some examples of moral suffering that you are seeing either in your life or maybe in your community or in the wider world?

Okay, um, for example, I work with trans teens. Um, I’m a social worker with trans teens. Um, and they are experiencing a lot of actions that transgress their, um, tenets of basic human goodness, right? Right now, okay, moral distress arises when we are aware of a moral problem and determine a remedy. We’re like, oh, I, I, I know what we can do about this, but we’re unable to act on it because of internal or external constraints. Like there are laws against it, or we don’t have the money, we don’t have the power. Again, do a little bit of journaling around that.

Moral injury is a psychological wound resulting from witnessing or participating in a morally transgressive act. It’s a toxic festering mix of dread, guilt, and shame. Alienation is the hallmark of this. My dad is a combat veteran with PTSD, he has experienced moral injury. So, um, have you experienced, do you have anybody in your life who’s experienced that? Is there collective moral injuries that you can think of? Right? Um, yeah, I wanna give examples, but I don’t have time.

But please, this is part of your homework. And if you’re reading a book right now, um, maybe see like, are you seeing examples of this, right? And this is great to talk about, you know, with people, if you have a writer’s group or something, dig into this together, we’re still on the sufferings that are not generative.

Moral apathy occurs when we simply don’t care to know or when we are in denial about situations that cause harm. Like, you know, see no evil, hear no evil, right?

I love this quote by James Baldwin: “I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, Which is happening in my country.” Um, certain ICE raids, people that we care about, right?

Mental gentrification, letting our common sense and decency be colonized by privilege. This is the big one. Really big, really, really big moral remainder. The painful emotional ooh, ugh, kills me, spelling error, residue that lingers following actions of violence. One sense of integrity where you’re just like, oh God, I saw that and I’m right. I live in the Twin Cities, so George Floyd, right? Okay, so please think about those and those all come, all these definitions come from Joan Halifax’s book, but now we’re into the generative suffering.

And I’ve got like four minutes left. So I’m just gonna be quick about this. And I, um, my husband was like, you’re gonna give them too much information. Yes, I am, but that’s okay. That’s what I do.

Moral outrage. This is what I call holy fury. This is our stuff, you guys, this is what we do. This is how we end gender-based violence one word at a time. Moral outrage is an externalized expression of indignation toward others who have violated social norms. It’s a reaction. And involving both anger and disgusted moral outrage at unethical actions can drive us to take action and demand justice and accountability.

This is kidlit at its best, right? This is our colleagues who are engaged in Authors Against Book Bans. This is our friends who are writing books that are considered transgressive because they dare to speak about topics that are relevant to the young people in our country, that are challenging social norms that are trying to protect black bodies, right?

So this is where moral outrage meets creativity, meets love of young people and love of ourselves, love of our young selves, right? And of our planet. That’s where it all comes together.

There is a shadow side of moral outrage. So please be aware, righteous indignation, it can lead to ego satisfaction. It might relieve guilt surrounding our own culpability, morally superior, morally corrupt. That’s that virtue signaling. So just be aware of that and recreational bitterness. So when we’re angry and emotionally over, over-aroused, we can lose our balance. So that’s stuff we work with in our work, um, with Rebecca Dykes Writers and stuff that I work with, with my writers.

Um, I’m gonna be teaching a class on my own, um, called, um, the Sound and the Fury this summer using sound and, um, writing to explore Holy Fury. And just looking at like how do we, how do we keep the, the good parts of the Holy fury and the moral outrage, but not let it turn into these other things that, that are not healthy and not creatively generative, right? So just be aware of that, right? And the tools that we are, we talk about are helpful to that.

And then the last one, moral resilience. Moral resilience is something that empowers usand we’re able to cultivate it through various means. Meditation practices, grounding insight in high intensity situations. So when you do get dysregulated in the writer’s seat, you know, having that presence of mind to say, Ooh, I’m out of my window of tolerance. What do I gotta do here? Remember, do no harm to yourself or your reader. Being aware of your personal values and ethics, right? Noticing when you’re not in alignment. All of that kind of stuff. Really tending, tending to it, tending to yourself. Okay?

So ending up with this. I know this is like, woo, the whirlwind. Um, so being a resource writer first, um, and if we’d had time, I would’ve, I would’ve walked us through this, but part of your homework is to do some mindful self-compassion.

So if you look up Dr. Kristin Neff and mindful self-compassion, I know some of you are familiar with this, um, the mindful self-compassion break,
if somebody can write that in the chat: Mindful self-compassion break.

It’s just three steps, three very, very simple steps, and it’s super, super helpful. One of the biggest things we do at Rebecca Dykes Writers is to find a way, the way I phrase it is positive self regard. I know for some people saying self-love is like, oh God, stop, gross. Um, and so finding, you know,’cause shame is such a big part of trauma, can I befriend myself? Can I befriend my mind? Let’s start there. Right? Positive self regard. So the mindful self-compassion break, that’s the first thing.

RAIN practice. So these are both two “in your back pocket” practices that you can do right in the writer’s seat. And it’s so important. And if you don’t like these, we’ll find you something else on the Rebecca Dykes Writers website. We’ve got lots of tools for you, and if you come to our retreat in November, you’ll get lots more. Um, but having like quick “in your back pocket” practices are so important. hen you’re doing this tough work, you probably don’t have time or bandwidth or anything to be like, oh, let me go do 20 minutes of meditation. I want you to have something where you’re, you’re writing a really tough scene and you’re like, whoa, that was really, I can’t to just push back and say, okay, whew, I’m gonna do a mindful self-compassion break, or I’m gonna do the RAIN practice, two, three minutes, let’s check in. Can we keep going? Yes, no, let’s do another break, right?

That’s what we try to do. Trauma-informed writing support. So obviously Rebecca Dykes Writers, but also Highlights. I mean, Highlights is such a trauma-informed space. It’s such, they worked so hard. So any of the classes that you do there, they are going to take care of you. And they’re, you know, and my big thing is, if you’re gonna sign up for anything, anywhere, ask ’em if they’re trauma-informed. If they don’t know what you’re talking about and you wanna work in trauma and grief with your writing, do not work with them because the harm could occur. Uh, it might not, but it could.

If you’re gonna work with a writing coach or work at a writing program, an MFA program, whatever, just make sure that they have those tools for you, because if they don’t, I’ve seen a lot of harm done.

Okay? And then the last thing is therapy. We all need it. We all need it. And I know kind of being resourced for therapy isn’t always available, but, um, I just, I, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s so important. If you’re writing and trauma, you need to have somebody that you’re checking in with. Um, it brings up so much. And unfortunately, in our writing culture, we’ve, in our, in the arts culture, whether it dance, you know, filmmaking, whatever it is, there is not an infrastructure of care for artists. So we are just expected to use our trauma as though it’s like, we went to Blick and bought paint and go for it.

But I cannot tell you how many writers I work with one-on-one who are like, I’m having nightmares. I’m having panic attacks. My marriage is having trouble because I’m working on this book, this I, this, that, and the other. You know, like, this is real, this is real. So please, please know that if that’s happening to you, you’re not crazy. This is really serious stuff.

Um, the other thing is spiritual technology. L love this term. Um, it’s, uh, Krista, what’s her name, Krista whatever from the On Being podcast. Um, she uses this term and I really like it because I think there a lot of people have had spiritual harm experiences. So, um, I like kind of mixing these two words together, but having some kind of practice, whether it’s mindfulness or tapping, something that connects you to your highest self, the universe, um, whatever language you wanna use, but that, that’s that other expansiveness, right?

I think of the conductor, um, in Norman Jester’s book, the Phantom Toll Booth. I don’t know if any of you remember that scene. I love that scene so much. Um, but just that sense of, of, of, um, that oneness, right? So whatever makes you feel that sense of like, you know, when you see a sunset, whatever that is for you, if you can find something that helps you tap into that,that is not writing, okay? Because we need to fill our wells in other ways. Something that you can engage in regularly that will resource you. It could be playing music, whatever it is, having that as well.

So these, these things here, this is being a resource writer. Um, and for many of you, exercise is also part of that. Okay. All right. Last slide. I see Alison’s coming on. So this little QR code, you can scan it, it’ll take you to our website. Um, also has a link to our retreat, which I know Alison’s gonna be talking about. Um, also our resources. So, um, I’ll put the PDF on there as well. But, um, I’ll put it in our chat.

And yeah, I just thank you all for being here with me tonight. And, um, I just wish you, I just wish you nourishment and, um, words thaI wish you, books that you write that heal you and that heal your readers. Okay?

Alison Green Myers:
Hi Heather.

Heather:
Hi.

Alison:
There’s so much love in the chat right now, and thanks in the chat. Just so nice to see. Oh, I would love for you to take a deep breath because I feel like the clock was just, it was a hard one for you in this one.

Heather:
Um, I had my little timer.

Alison:
Yeah, trying to get so much. There is so much to say and I know how much, um, you want to give and hold the stories that people tell in this space, so I love that. Um, I hope, you know, people will be getting the recording of this as well, so if you didn’t have an opportunity to take a screenshot or write something down, but there was that one idea, you know,that you wanna go back to, know that you’ll be getting the recording.

Um, one of the things that you were just saying,

Heather:
I put the PDF in the chat too.

Alison:
Perfect. And we’ll, we’ll attach that in the, um, blog post too, so we’ll make sure people have that too.

Um, we’re, I, we’re in the thick of a, a rain spell here, and when you were talking about the, the sense of oneness, I think about that a lot. I, I remember you had brought that upand I love the idea of like, sharing of, of,of what that might be for people.And, and it is a good character exercise too.I think that is something I often share with my character.Like, I think about nature a lot.For me, we’re like in total rain all the time right now,but you can’t miss the color of the leavesthat are coming out right now.And you can’t miss the way that the ferns are coming backand they’re kind of like waving at you and things like that.And it’s like, we have the rainand we have all of this vibrancy, um,to look at in nature and,and, um, you know, that it, it, it, you,you made me think back tothat time when you were talking about those things.

So I hope everybody’s writing down, um,those moments for themselves.And especially if they can capture it with a sense,it’s something that they hear, something that they see,something that they touch or smell, um,and that they can go back to.

Really, um, one student, I, I was kind of going through, we’re gonna get to some questions. I had someone send me questions, Heather, who could not be here tonight, but they were just so hopeful that we would talk a little bit about some things.

And then I see that there’s some questions in the Q and A and, um, we’ll wait and see if any others populate in there.

Um, but one of the students last year after your retreat, um, had left a message that said, “I came back from the retreat feeling fortified with emotional strength to pursue my work in progress, which draws on generational trauma. I felt heard.”

I loved that they used the term “fortified” because, you know, we’re thinking about the food that we’re we’re having there and the space that we’re taking up and things like that. I love, um, that they were, they were talking from a place where they had returned home. It wasn’t just that we held the space while we were together, the retreat, they wrote this comment when they had returned home. So I love that they took something with them. Um, and I love that they used the word “heard,” like they, they felt heard, you know, I, it, they kept repeating that kind of throughout. It’s a much longer, um, note that they had sent.And I, I think it, it really is a testament to kind of that space that you all create and the things that you do.

Um, for those of you who haven’t had a chance to see, Heather will be joined this year by Winsome Bingham, um, who’s an author and an editor. And, um, Bethany Walker, who is an author and a clinical social worker. And I was reading more, so Bethany, um, also did a, a read aloud for us last year. I don’t know if you, do you remember that? It was like such a sweet moment. We sat and had picture book time together, which was so sweet. But then she mentioned off the cuff like a,after we had, we start, we were looking at this picture book and said, you know, she’s pursuing her doctorate in Traumatology.

And it was like, oh wow. You know, it was this whole other, um, level of things.

So, um, and Azra and Yvonne will also be there, you know, supporting us and, and helping us too. So I think, like for me, part of the retreat is this, um, beautiful experience, but that you’re all drawing on different things that have worked for you. And the hope is that people will take some of that home with them so that they can find things that work for them.

So I love that. I love it. I love it so much. Um, thank you for, um, your, your care tonight and, um, for being with us. And, and let’s turn to some of the questions that people have. ’cause now I’m just rambling excitedly about, you know, um,being together and talking about things.

So one of the, um, conversations that I see, it came up in the Q and A and in, um, what, you know, someone had sent in earlier, it draws on one of the slides that you’ve actually prepared. And, and maybe because it’s the Q and S, you could go just a, a layer deeper. Um, and talk to us a little bit about this, but there’s, I love the way Katie put this question in the Q and A and the last line of it says: how do you navigate the tension between protecting access to stories and being mindful of the psychological impact those storiesmight have on readers?

And similarly, Stephanie who had sent in a question, um, which said, said, you know, like, how do we do our best to, to keep our readers safe, but recognize that stories don’t need to be safe?

You know, it’s a big question, but it is one. I mean, if we’re entering the space where we’re writing stories that are coming from these experiences and we’re in the world that we’re in right now, what does that tension look like? What does that space look like? What do you think?

Heather:
Yeah, I actually think, speaking of Bethany,so Bethany wrote this amazing picture book called Lena and the Dragon. Um, and I buy it for everybody that has a child because it’s about something that happens to a child, but it’s never named. We don’t know what it is. The book starts off and it says the bad thing happened, we don’t know what it is. And the child’s trauma is represented by this dragon. And the dragon gets bigger and bigger and bigger and unwieldy and causes all these problems. And Lena gets in trouble ’cause the dragon’s causing trouble. And then eventually Lena tells her parents about the bad thing. And then, you know, they figure out how to control the dragon; not control, but to manage the dragon. The dragon never goes away. The dragon gets smaller and is able… uh, Bethany Walker is her name…I saw that in the chat.

Um, and what I love about that book is a way that first of all, um, you know, Bethany is a, a, uh, specializes in childhood trauma and works with children with trauma. Um, we don’t know exactly what this trauma is, right? So this is a way of protecting both the author, right? We don’t know exactly the trauma that Bethany herself is working with. We don’t know the trauma the child experienced. It could be anything. And yet, and nd any child reading it is not gonna be traumatized by the book, right? The bad thing could be anything, right? But for the child, the very specific individual child reading it, they know what the bad thing is, right?

So I think that’s how we manage it in terms of not traumatizing our readers. So that to me is such a brilliant example of writing trauma for children, for child readers.
And it is such a careful balance because you have to be able to reach that child and you have to be able to speak to their trauma. But there’s gonna be a lot of kids that read that book that that didn’t happen to them, right? And you don’t wanna like traumatize them. And so, and also for the author themselves, right? How can they work with their experience?

And I was telling you Alison, I took the Highlights picture book class, so I’m a YA author and I was like, oh God, I’m so scared. I’m gonna take a picture book class. And I wanted to work with, as I mentioned, my dad’s a combat veteran and I wanted to work with being in a volatile home. And, and those of you that have been on the retreat with me, I told my story a little bit and um, and I was like, how do I talk about this in a picture book? And so I had to find, you know, my own way of doing that. And for me as a writer, talking about something that was really hard for me, it was also really helpful, helpful to find that metaphor. It was less traumatizing for me. So we kind of work with that. Does that, does that answer, does that help?

Alison:
Yeah, I think, I mean, I, I appreciate that you came…metaphor I think does end up helping. And I don’t know, um, one of the things, you know, that we talk an awful lot about is the, um, idea of, you know, telling the story several times before it becomes a book. Like, it can be a story for a very long time, and it doesn’t have to be that finished product yet for your reader. And I think having community and having people that you can share the work with, who get it, who are, who are also writing within this space, um, can kind of help with what that might be.

But you’ll naturally see people turning toward essay or poetry when they are kind of taking a break from trying to write this book. They, they’re kind of going in that way because I think you’re seeking, um, either the, when the essay piece you’re either seeking kind of, I, I gotta get the facts down again, I gotta, I I need to write this out. Or you’re seeing it as the poetry that, that poetic turn. What am I, what am I really trying to find? And what am I really trying to bring in here?

So I like, you know, that you included that piece in there. Um, I think one of the other pieces that was in that question, and was also in one of the questions that was sent was, you know, talking a little bit about access to stories as in book banning and what book banning might have, um, yeah. To do with you know, writing these stories that can be about trauma
or grief, and, you know, are certainly needed, um, but are seeing some resistance, um, from different places.

Heather:
Yeah. And I, you know, it’s really interesting because, um, you know, we’ve, we, we’re working on a project right now, um, Rebecca Dykes Writers is, and we’ve had some people in the industry, you know, who’ve been like, oh, this is too dark. And then other people who’ve been like, this is awesome and so needed. So I think, you know, like with anything in this industry, you have to find your reader and you, and, and it’s, and it’s hard ’cause you will definitely find those people who are like, you know, the world, the world is a dark place. We want things that are uplifting or escapism or whatever. And then you have other people who very firmly believe, like people need to feel seen.

They need to have, they need bearing witness, right? Um, and so I think that the age old wisdom, I think still holds true. Like, you need to write the book inside you. And like that book is not gonna leave you alone. I mean, you, I mean, you can try, you can try to ignore it, but I mean, I don’t know about you, Alison, but have you ever successfully like ignored a book that wants to be written?

‘Cause like I have not. I have tried.

Alison:
They just keep coming back.

Heather:
They’re, yeah, they do. They do.

And I also think, especially like from a writing trauma and grief perspective, is that there’s also that other element that I talked about where our, our books are also medicine for us. And I think that, you know, there’s an element of the, like,we need to write those books too. Like, something in us needs to be healed. And it might be that we need to heal that thing in us in order to even write those other books that are maybe more marketable or escapist or whatever, because that thing needs to be healed. Whatever happens with that book, which is not always what people wanna hear, but it’s also true. Yeah. You know, I, I mean,

Alison:
I, I absolutely think that that’s true. Um, how about one last question and then maybe a quick reflection before yeah, we wrap things up. But, um, one of the last questions was about the writing process itself. And I kind of touched on this a little bit. You know, the difference between a story and a book or, you know, between it being with you and being with your reader. But can you talk a little bit about, you know, fundamentally what has taken shape for you when it comes to writing a story that does have trauma and grief, um, in it, and what does the writing process look like or something like that?

Heather:
Yeah, it’s really non-linear for me. And, um, like, it’s very strange too, I find myself like laying on the ground a lot and like writing on the ground, like sitting, like not at my desk as much. Um, I find myself needing to do really tactile exploration. Um, I definitely need a lot more somatic work, like stretching and like, just really being in my body, which is, as you know, with Rebecca Dykes Writers, like at this retreat, um, we’re doing sound healing. Uh, Azra is Sufi and we do this really cool, last year we did it, we’re doing it again this year, like Sufi like whirling breathing, like experience. Um, and yeah, I’ve, it’s very, very different.

Um, and it’s really, it’s just really powerful. Um, and it brings up a lot and it requires a lot more spaciousness. Um, and I think that there are just times in my life I know I need to write it, but I, I can’t write it right now. Like, I have a book like that where I’m like, I have a board above my desk. I’m looking at it right now. And there’s, and actually I have a Highlights card and stuff, but, um, I have a picture of a deer and it’s for, um, it’s actually for a memoir, adult actually memoir. And I’m like, I see you. We’re gonna get there. And I write fragments as they come, but I’m gonna have to do like a residency or something to write that I just don’t have, that’s a lot.

And that’s okay. You know, so when I speak about like, a book is gonna tap you on the shoulder, it’s also okay to be like, I got you. But like, we’re gonna need to find a good time because as I mentioned before, like some of these books, like they can really derail you. And so like there are times in your life where you’re like, I can’t do that right now. You know? And that’s okay. Yeah.

Alison:
Yeah. I see that. I love that you have the deer up there. I have a, I don’t know if you can see it back there.vI have an alligator postcard.vOh yeah, That’s my, my,vI’ve been waiting for you alligator. Let’s come together one day.

Heather:
See you later, Alligator.

Alison:
But I do, yeah, yeah, yeah. We, you know, I think you do surround yourself with that story. And thematically I think they come back and I think one of the things that, that, you know, it within this question about what does the process looks like, I think it looks like a lot of space to think. I think it looks like a lot of space to exploreand the word “play” might not quite be right, but, but seeing how this is going to come about and the first thing that you write down might not be the first thing that stays with you for a very long time.

We know that about all novels, but you have to start somewhere, um, with the story and then, you know, you can keep exploring with it.

And I love that you said giving yourself time. And then on the other side, when it comes to the revision piece and when it comes to working with your editor or you know, a writing group or a partner, I think trust is the other piece there too.

Trusting yourself and trusting the, the people that you’re surrounding yourself with in order to really help shape, um, that book again and again.

So, um, you know, I’m sure that you’ve been in this a situation too where editorially people might, um, want you to shift certain things that are in the, the book
and you’re open to hearing feedback. But there are some things when it comes to grief or trauma that do remain. And you do know I do need to keep this specific word in, or I do need to keep this, you know, part of the plot in because it’s going to really speak to those readers.

So I love that you were talking about time and I would add trust to that for sure.

Heather:
Yeah. I had in my second novel, Meet You There; Um, there’s a character who’s a, a young marinewho loses his leg in Afghanistan. And there are these like interpolations where it’s just stream of consciousness where you’re just dropping into the PTSD mind of a Marine. And of course it’s like a writer, a writer’s group. He was a small character and I had no idea, I was writing about my dad,and then my writer’s group was like, who’s that guy? And I’m like, he’s just a guy. And they’re like, mm, no, you know, writers groups–plug for writers groups.And um, and I had a beloved mentor who was like, I don’t think we need those. And I was like, no, I really think we need those. And that’s the part that I get letters from veteranss or their spouses or you know, who are like, oh my gosh, thank you so much. And I’m like, I knew it. I knew I had to keep it.

So it’s like, it is, it is that calibration that they always say, “kill your darlings.” And it’s like, yes. But you know, that calibration of like, Hmm, yeah, I need to keep that Yeah.

Yeah. Thirsty just like wants to hang out with us.

Alison:
I guess. I know. Well, Heather, it’s always nice to be together with you. Thank you for sharing. Yeah. Um, You know, some, some pieces there. I think a big piece of advice we hear an awful lot at the Highlights Foundation is “do the work.” And I do think that that’s true. I think we have to write, um, we have to, you know, do that. But, um, I think that what you bring is that the work is also the self, it’s also the storyteller. And I love how much you center that and you really, um, say, let’s think about being resilient and let’s think about what we need to take care of ourselves so that we can take good care of our, our readers too.

So thank you. And, um, to those of you who came tonight, I wish that for all of you, please do take care of yourself so you can take care of your readers. Um, we’ll be better for it all around for sure. If we can do that. George, thanks so much for being here tonight and kicking things off and, um, please take good care. Do good work. We’ll see you next time.

Heather:
Thanks everyone.