Grief and loss are a deeply layered, pebbled path to walk. The stories we tell ourselves about our grief evolve as we seek understanding and acceptance. Feelings and insights come in stages, we grapple with our emotions, trying to find the words to express how the grief moves and lives inside of us.

Wild Writing is a healing practice. It’s a deep and brave space where you are invited to express your grief freely and unselfconsciously, allowing whatever you need to say surface within a small community of kindreds who are doing the same thing.

By lifting the words out of ourselves, we can explore them, finding clarity and peace.

Our class will touch on grief stages including reckoning, remembering, healing rituals, and moving toward recovery and redemption. Each week, we will have the opportunity to create one poem or short prose piece from our wild writes and share it with classmates and Susan for feedback.

Slightly different from the regular Wild Writing classes, this class will use the 90-minutes of weekly class time to Wild Write, as well as offer a weekly writing prompt where students have a chance to explore a theme, writing a poem or a 300-400 word prose piece that they are welcome to share in a private group. Susan will offer feedback on all posted pieces.

After many years running a Montessori school, I earned my MFA in poetry and nonfiction. In 2018, I discovered Laurie and the Wild Writing method and thought, eureka! This is what I’ve been looking for. I so believe in the power of this practice. After finishing the Wild Writing Teacher Training in 2019, I began to lead virtual writing circle workshops based on Wild Writing for writers.com. I love watching people bloom as they let their words flow unedited into their journals.

I continue to write my own essays and poems, most of which emerge in rough form via the Wild Writing technique. My work has been published in Rattle, Nailed Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, and others. I have three poetry books, Blame It on the Serpent (Finishing Line Press, Jan. 2022), Cactus as Bad Boy (Kelsay Books, Aug. 2022), and One of Them Was Mine (Kelsay Books, July 2023).

I live in Phoenix, Arizona with three mostly mellow rescue dogs: Frida, Sasha, and LuLu.

*Wild Writing is a timed writing process that we use to tell our stories to uncover the themes we want to write about. Using poetry to move us into our writing, we write three times in one session, writing as fast as we can, pen never leaving the page. By writing quickly we are able to push past our inner critic and our ego and all the ways we stay trapped in looking good. This gives us a chance to move into a less self-conscious, loose groove where, if we’re lucky we may stumble into the fertile imagination that lingers within us, conjuring up stories and memories that are waiting to be written.