While loss and change potentially initiate painful grieving, artists and writers across time have used writing to remember and contextualize life and experience to bring forward the goodness that preceded a loss and/or that which is to come. Western culture has historically encouraged a forgetting or rewriting of the past, but as ancestral and community-focused wisdom shares, looking at the past provides writers and their audiences the opportunity to celebrate life and grow in a more balanced relationship with the environment.

This talk will discuss the transcendence writers and artists create when they allow themselves to sink into mourning and share that space of memory—and often celebration—with readers. From the example of elegies, obituaries, and eulogies, we are given permission to share one of humanity’s multifaceted truths.