I am pleased to post an excerpt from my new book, Sorrow’s Words: Writing Exercises to Heal Grief, now available on iTunes and Kindle. A year ago, when Beth Bacon of Zoyo Branding, asked if she could publish a digital book for me, I knew immediately I wanted to create a book from teaching material I developed for those writing about loss. The excerpt I’ve chosen includes a sample of Ekphrastic exercises using photographs by Port Townsend photographer Sheila Lauder. I am grateful to Sheila for the use of her photographs and to Beth for this publishing opportunity and for her superb formatting and editorial skills.

When my son was five, I wrote a poem about being in a rowboat with him on Lake Union in Seattle. In the poem, I record his wish that he could “wear his head on backwards for awhile.” Rowing on the lake listening to my son brought back my own young school days and childhood fears. But looking at the boat’s wake from the point where it began at the stern, brought me back to the present with my son, to knowing I would have to row away from those fears fanning out behind us so I could be the mother I wanted to be.

Twenty years later, a colleague told me she was reading my poems for images about my son. I began doing that as well. I saw that writing from my grief, I had to leave the boat and dive into the wake. I had to cry as I wrote. I had to allow myself to feel the void left where the words had been stored inside of me before I wrote them. I had to become used to the room I would make inside myself for new feelings. I would now write from other snapshot moments that helped me recall my son.

Writing in response to visual art (or to a viewed or remembered scene) produces what is called Ekphrastic writing, a word and a poetic form given to us by the Greeks. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the term means “a literary description” or “commentary on a visual piece of art.” The Greek root of the word means “to point out.”

You can begin your own Ekphrastic writing by describing exactly what you see in the photographs by Sheila Lauder offered here. Allow your experience with loss to influence how you enter the scene depicted by the photograph. The story you tell may include details that you as a viewer can not actually see but believe are there. You can include events that you imagine came before the photograph’s moment or will come later.

Armchair by Sheila Lauder

Here I am
Sitting on a chair,
thinking
About you. Thinking
About how it was
To talk to you.

—Mary Jo Bang “You Were You Are Elegy”

In the months after my son died, I took great solace from the sun. From my window, I watched it rise each day, and I went outside to watch it set. Between sunrise and sunset, I read emails with stories about times others had shared with my son. I roamed the condo I lived in. I stood by the television cabinet Seth had climbed atop to fasten a heavy piece of wooden folk art to the wall. I smoothed my hands over the butcher block he sanded. I stared at the pot rack he had fastened to the kitchen ceiling for us. I could see his fingerprints on the chrome. Every piece of furniture, every piece of art work, even the cats seemed to hold his touch, his care.

Try This 
Imagine sitting in the pictured armchair. Write about the way the lamp, the chair, the table and other objects as well as the lighting wait for the person to come back. Write about the memories they hold of the person you miss. Your passages will reveal what reading the words and looking at the photographs makes you think, makes you remember, compels you to say, pulls out from hiding.

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After my son died, I sought out books by parents who had lost children and by children who had lost parents. These authors telling their stories were the company I wanted to keep. I could experience my feelings thoroughly by experiencing theirs.

 Bird In The Rain by Sheila Lauder

Without a listener, the healing process is aborted. Human beings like plants that bend toward the sunlight, bend toward others in an innate healing tropism. There are times when being listened to is more critical than being fed.

—Miriam Greenspan, Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair

Try This
If the bird had come to the fence in the rain to think about grief, if this bird were you, what images from the pier would inform thoughts about loss?

What might this bird be thinking, as she carries on normally, though on the inside, she is consumed with feelings of loss and sadness?

You might write as if this is you sitting on the pier in the rain. Or, you might write from the vantage point of the person behind the rain speckled car windshield seeing the bird survive in the elements.