I was so worried that the book would be somehow disrespectful to people who deal with mental illness. I wanted it to, you know, be honest but also compassionate, to hold space for things being really difficult, but also hold space for the fact that we're human and it's beautiful that we can connect with each other and that we can heal through things, even after we feel like our our worlds have been torn apart. This is here After, and I'm your host, Megan Divine, author of the best selling book It's Okay that You're Not Okay. This week on Here After, Emily X R. Patton, author of one of my favorite books of all time, The Astonishing Color of After. We're going to talk about grief and fiction and how to write stories driven by grief without relying on simplistic, worn out tropes in today's episode. So if you have ever read a book that had a grieving character and you're like, that's not how it is, don't miss this episode. We'll be right back before we get started. One quick note. While we cover a lot of emotional relational territory in each and every episode, this show is not a substitute for skilled support with a licensed mental health provider or for professional supervision related to your work. Okay, friends, so, as most of you know, I do love conversations with interesting people about difficult things. I mean, I say it all the time in every single show. But what most people don't know and have no actual reason to know, is that I strongly dislike most fiction. I am impossible to please with fiction. I get about four pages in and I'm like, yeah, I'm not this is not worth my time. When I find a book that really shines, again only by my interpretation, and when I find a book that really shines for me, I want the whole world to know about it. If that book also deals with grief in a realistic and complex way, I kind of want to take out billboards to tell the world about it. I read Emily X R. Pant's book The Astonishing Color of After when it first came out a few years ago, and I immediately read it again, like, got to the last page, turned to the first page, and started over. For years. It was the only book I recommend it if you wanted to read a story driven by grief that felt realistic and true to the experience of being human. In fact, I have recommended this book so often. I don't know. If there were a prize for people recommending books, maybe I would get it. I don't know. Anyway. There are a few additional books that I would recommend now, but The Astonishing Color of After remains my single go to favorite. I am not the only one that feels this way. This book is so good that Time magazine nominated it as one of the hundred best young adult books of all time. Emily Xrpan is the New York Times and National Indie best selling author of The Astonishing Color of After and the recently released novel and Arrow to the Moon Now. Truly, the world deserves a consistent supply of her brilliance, So we talk about both books today, and as you can maybe tell from my intro here, this episode is kind of a fangirl moment for me. I get over it really quickly, but you know, you just gotta bear with me while I I gush for a little bit about this one. But if you're a writer of any kind and you're not sure how to include grief in your work, I want you to listen carefully to this conversation. The way Emily describes her process of finding the real story behind those sort of traditional and flat ways of writing grief driven characters is so helpful and so enlightening and so in couraging. If you're a writer, you're really going to learn a lot. But don't click away from this episode if you're not a writer. Not only is the conversation stellar my fan girl moments aside, we also explore the ways our parents and grandparents views of death and grief impact our own ability to feel and to be. As always, we get into Emily's ideas on functional realistic hope. So let's get right to it. We're going to dive right into it. And again, I'm sorry, but this episode opens with me fan girling. I promise it goes by quickly. Emily. I am so glad to have you. Welcome, Thanks so much. I'm very excited to be here. Yeah. I have been a fan girl of yours forever. So let's get my little fan girl my fan person moment out of the way. I think this is actually a really good and from star our conversation. So your first novel astonishing color of after New York Times bestseller all of those things. It is the one of the very only grief related books that I recommend to people because I'm super, super particular, but in fiction, Astonishing Color of After is the only grief related fiction book that I offer people, And when people um, you know, sometimes in comments on social media, people will say, like, does anybody have any recommendations for a grief book? A fiction book that's a really good story, but like doesn't make everything turn out okay in the end. I'm like, I have one for you. It's Astonishing Color of After. I promise not to gush through the entire thing, but what I mean, you can tell me how pretty I am then absolutely gorge Yes, I think it's really important to recognize when somebody is not only a brilliant and skilled writer, but a brilliant and skill writer when the storyline is grief. Now, Season two of Hereafter is really like conversations with interesting people about difficult things and not just related to grief and death and those those sort of things that we think of as grief e topics. But the Astonishing Color of After really centers grief, but it's not the worn out tropes of grief. So how do you write a book with a grief storyline that isn't the standard grief storyline tell me about that. I mean, I was really worried when I set out to write the story in in the final iteration, and I started out writing the story as something very different. It began as an ode to my grandmother. The entire time that I was writing it and through publication, my grandmother was still alive and got to be a part of that process, which was really cool. And I was writing an ode to her because she had this really wild life experience. So the grandmother in the story is basically my grandmother, like her life story copied and pasted into the book. So there are some really bananas things that she lived through. And I was thinking to myself, Okay, so how do I have an excuse? Because I very quickly realized that it was overwhelming me to try to write from her perspective starting in Taiwan, in this tiny little mountain village that was felt impossible to research. So I reframed it to be from the perspective of her granddaughter who's learning her stories for the first time. So that was how it began, and in the beginning, the death of the mother kind of was just in service as an excuse of her getting to hear these stories for the first time, her being a strange from her grandmother, and after a number of years of kind of playing with it, feeling like it wasn't right. It was kind of hollow. Something about the story was kind of hollow. I said it aside. I wrote other novels, and then I ended up losing my aunt to suicide, and suddenly my entire world was just rocked with grief. I don't it sounds almost gloved to say that, but it was obviously a very difficult time. It was difficult for so many reasons, including that we saw it coming, which makes the guilt so much worse. My family is very Buddhist, and there are a lot of things like they kept saying, like, oh, we can't weep loudly because the equivalent of her soul, her spirit, will hear us weeping, and that will make it so much harder for her to journey on to you know, we want her to head towards the Buddhist equivalent of the heavens rather than hell. And being told that you're not allowed to weep, you're not allowed to physically embody that experience, I think is in a lot of ways kind of harmful. So for me, it became this process of writing in order to work through it, and suddenly my story felt extremely different what had felt hollow before because I was writing it just in service of some plot, and it wasn't written with any feeling, you know. I was trying to like artificially inject feeling into it. But suddenly it was an experience that I was inhabiting myself. And when I sat down to rewrite it, that was also when I introduced the bird. The bird had not existed in previous drafts, and something about dealing with that grief and having the story as a way of wrestling with my own feelings about our family history, about secrets that are kept that I think allowed me to be able to write it in a more genuine way. But even even so, I was very nervous the whole time dealing with the topic of sue aside and depression, dealing with a book about grief. I didn't want to romanticize any of it. I didn't want any of it to feel like it was there for the drama. I didn't want any of it to feel like it was in service of something beyond my emotions and my experiences that I was processing. So it suddenly turned from this thing that was so plot oriented and so focused on I'm creating a book to something that was me almost in a cave, just needing to process things on my own. And I think that made me approach it with so much care. I was terrified that I would somehow be perpetuating some sort of harmful trope related to suicide or depression. I was so worried that the book would be somehow disrespectful to people who deal with mental illness, and I wanted it to, you know, be honest but also compassionate, you know, to hold space for things being really difficult and at times horrible to think about, but also hold space for the fact that we're human and it's beautiful that we have such such intense emotions and that we can connect with each other, and that we can heal through things even after we feel like our our worlds have been torn apart. So I don't know that I had like a specific game plan for how to go about writing a grief book that didn't feel you know, like dramatized. It just became really important to me that grief never really goes away, and it comes back at weird times, and it takes very different forms for different people, Like the experiences are so varied and unique. And I wanted to make sure that the book didn't end with this feeling of wiping a slate clean and there's no grief ever. Again, I wanted to make sure that the book was holding space for that grief and allowing it to live on, while also allowing the characters to celebrate the things that they loved about this woman who had died. Yeah, there's so much in everything you said. I kept like almost putting my hand over my mouth because I was like, yes, this is what we're talking about from white where you said at the beginning, you know, in the in the Buddhist tradition, not weeping so that you don't impede spiritual progress or progress after death. And that's that's such a common thing in so many different traditions, Like your tears have that much power that you can actually hold somebody back from their own path. And I think that that silences so many people. I know a lot of the times when I do interviews, somebody will say, you know, I think I think it's just the West. The West has such a skewed view of death and grief and we should really be looking at other cultures. And I'm like, okay, one cultural appropriation moment, and two, I think we do have this romanticized idea that somehow, quote unquote other cultures have this mythically healthy way of dealing with death and loss and suffering. And I just I don't think that's accurate. Yeah, I don't think so at all. I think I love a lot of Buddhist philosophies and teachings, and I think that there's a lot of value in in studying like the Buddhist stutrals and whatnot. But things like that where it's prescriptive in a way that feels like it's so contradictory to the human experience really bother me. You know. I I work with a mindfulness coach who's always reminding me to pay attention to what I'm feeling in the moment and paying attention to where in my body I'm holding a feeling and allowing myself to fully experience it. And I think that's really crucial. And I think weeping, grieving is it's a part of our are are we of regulating our mental health. I think that there's like catharsis and letting all the tears out and letting the like full body, you know, racking sobs to come out, and then being able to sit in the silence that follows and think about all of the all of the memories, all of the feelings that just washed over, all of the experiences that you're kind of being reminded of. I think that it is a why do we have that response? It must be built into us for survival reasons. It must be important physically, otherwise our bodies would not be built that way. That's a really interesting way of looking at it. That from an evolutionary standpoint, that capacity to feel so deeply, to have those racking sobs, to have dreams and all like that must be of benefit to the human organism in some ways. So when we silence that, like we're actually literally erasing the human nous at the core of fens and like pretending towards being robots. Like is this what we think of for the afterlife? That you're just supposed to be a robot, right, just detached completely from the visceral nature of being human. Yeah, I absolutely believe that, And I think it doesn't matter what you know, what culture, what religion, what background. So many people have such an unhealthy way of viewing death. I'm really interested in in the work that you know, the people who started the Order of the Good Death. I'm very interested in the work they do. This idea of death positivity, you know, not saying that death is something to where we're not allowed to have negative feelings, like, that's not what it's talking about. It's that we can think about preparing for death and knowing that it's coming and celebrating that it marks the end of a full life. You know, a life is still a full life, regardless of how long or short it is, and there are things to be celebrated in it. And being able to look head on at the idea of death and grief, and I think that's so much healthier, this idea that yes, my loved ones are going to pass at some point, but we are prepared for it, and we can have conversations about it, and we can do things in advance to safeguard our well being to help us get through that loss. Becoming friendly with death is not meant to erase the pain of loss. It's really meant to be able to feel like you are making those connections in the totality of what it means to be human, which the totality of what it means to be human means losing what you love in some way shape before I'm at some time, right, So I think this is I mean, this is why your your books resonate so much for me as somebody who's really picky about death and grief storylines. And also why why Astonishing Color of After landed on the New York Times bestseller list. Right there's this idea, I think in publishing and I can only speak from the nonfiction publishing end of things right now, but this idea that like no nobody wants to talk about grief, Nobody wants to talk about this stuff. And you know, my my perspective has always been you're right that nobody wants to talk about it. If you're talking about it in this prescriptive, do these five things to get over it, move on with your life, remember the happy times, and get back to it. Basically, be a good production machine. Nobody wants to talk about it if we talk about it that way, but if if we speak about it in really human, visceral ways, it turns out not only does everybody want to talk about it, but everybody wants to read about it. There's so much permission giving in your work, and I love that. I mean, the best writing opens portals for people anyway, right into the worlds that we create. I think that's also true in nonfiction, but it's certainly true in fiction, and both of your books, Astonishing Color of After and Arrow to the Moon, there's a permission to feel more than this, more than these four walls and these hard structures and these rules about what it means to be human, both of your books, I feel like it's more than the normal fiction opens a portal to a made up world. It's more your work opens portals to the fullness of being human. Yeah, thank you for saying that. It's really important to me that my books offer a safe space for people to experience emotions that they might not necessarily be ready to experience or confront in real life, because for me, I remember being very young when my paternal grandfather passed away, and again going back to my my family's unhealthy relationship with death, my parents didn't tell me he had passed away because my birthday was approaching, and so they waited until over a month later to tell me, and I remember thinking it was so bizarre, like my dad hid all his grieving from me. So I never saw my dad we've I never saw him be sad. He just you know, put on a smile and faked his way through it for the sake of protecting me, I suppose. But it it taught me that maybe I wasn't really allowed to grieve, maybe I wasn't allowed to have feelings or or I should be hiding them. And then it was not long after that that I read Where the Red Fern Grows, which you know, has these two dogs who die, and animal death is very difficult, but that book I remember weeping like full body leaping. It was probably the first thing I'd ever read where it just felt like someone had completely gutted me, and it was a horrible feeling. But then I also couldn't get enough of it because I had permission to cry and mourn these fictional characters, because there were no real world ramifications. It was just this little bubble in which I was allowed to fully experience something. And so I think about that a lot, and when I'm writing fiction, I want people to have that space, to be able to process feelings. I think that when I was grieving for those fictional dogs, I was also in part allowing myself to grieve for my grandfather. And I remember years later writing poetry about my grandfather and hiding it for my parents because it felt strange to put fewlings down so solidly on paper and have them exist about something real. So, you know, I strive to make my fiction be able to offer a kind of that oasis, that experience, and then I also strive, as as you were saying, to encompass as much humanity as I can. I I want every character to always have something redeemable about them, always have something empathetic, something where even if they're making horrible choices and you hate their choices, you could still see where they're coming from. And I think that I explore that a lot in an Error to the Moon, because I wanted so much for Hunter and Luna, who are my leading characters that are kind of the Romeo and Juliette characters of the novel. You know, both of them feel that their families are crumbling, they're falling apart in very different ways, and both of them have a lot of resentment for that, and I wanted the reader to be able to fully be on board without resentment, and at the same time be able to witness from the parents perspectives how things can be so complicated, so messy and sad at times, and how there's that divide that's kind of heartbreaking where the parents and their kids don't totally see eye to eye. And if only they could understand things the way the reader could understand things, how different would those family experiences be. Yeah. I don't want to give away any spoilers for for Arrow to the Moon, because there are some really important plot points that I could bring up right now that I'm not going to because I want you to read the book everybody. But the thing that really strikes me about that will two things. First, I love that in the pacing of the book, the reader me is fully on board with resenting certain sets of parents or certain characters, and it's not until that resent and has fully taken root that you learn that their actions are really based in a ferocious love that they have for one of the other members of the story. I mean, that's real life, right, Like I love that that shows up in Arrow to the Moon, this sort of my god, let's look so terrible. This looks like such a terrible thing to do to a kid and a family, And then you understand where that actually came from, and I just think, you know again, this is that skill that you have with really bringing what it's like to be human onto the page in a really cool way. Hey, it's me jumping in here before we head back into this episode. If you a therapist, social worker, or other provider and you have been waiting for me to open up a professional training program for you, that time has officially come. Enrollment is open for my four months online training program four months with me. With so much grief in the world, it is a pretty good bet that you are encountering it in your patients or your clients. As we learn on this show, and as I've been telling y'all forever, grief is everywhere, even if it's not the identified problem that somebody brings into the room. I developed this online training so that you can bring human centered grief care into your practice. All of the information is at Megan Divine dot c O. I'm going to link to the training registration page in the show notes. But if you've been waiting to have some real skills and some real conversation about doing the work of supporting grieving people in your practice. Don't miss this link in the show notes and Megan Divine dot Co. Okay, back to the show. The other thing that I really like about Arrow to the Moon actually both of your books, and you you alluded to this when we first started talking. Neither of your books has a happy ending, not in the classic Hollywood rainbows and puppy dogs. Since so tell me about that. Tell me about your no happy endings without giving away the endings, because we want everybody to read both of these books. I always want a story to end with hope, with some bit of optimism, or I guess maybe optimism is I know I would say I want I want my stories to end with a bit of optimism, but I'm resistant to the bow tie everything is hunky dory type of ending because I don't know, it just doesn't feel true to life. I want a story to have an an ending that to me can feel bitter sweet, so I can hold onto that feeling of hopefulness, of of understanding that there's something more, there's something beyond, but then also give the story space for the reader to feel like it continues off the page, and when there's this like bow tie happy ending where everything's just wonderful at the end, it almost feels too precious to allow the story to continue because things might go wrong again. It's sort of where where could we possibly go from here? If everything is so perfect, like nobody can move otherwise it's going to disrupt the perfection, right, And it just doesn't feel true to life, Like maybe there's a little bit of a endorphin rush that that lasts very temporarily when I experienced an ending like that in a piece of fiction or something I'm watching, but it doesn't stick with me because my brain kind of puts up the caution tape, like okay, well that's that. That stays over there. And so I want my fiction to always encapsulate the complicatedness of being human and having human experiences and also just being unafraid to have sadness in it, because I think, you know, I'm very annoyed by the positive vibes only feel that some people have because I think it's it's in a way toxic at times to refuse to acknowledge that something can be really heartrending, something can really shake your world and turn things upside down, and there is value in being able to recognize that and feel that. Again, going back to what my mindfulness coach and I work on, allowing ourselves to fully inhabit those feelings in our bodies and fully experienced them and not just try to shut them out. So in my writing, I want to have that. I want to make it so that any feelings are allowed to exist on the page, any feelings will be hopefully dealt with as as respectfully as possible. And yeah, I kind of joke sometimes to my readers that my brand is sad and weird, but that's really an over simplification because ultimately I think that, you know, I'm trying to capture very human, very typical experiences through perhaps slightly bizarre circumstances, perhaps a little bit of absurdism, and I'm pinning down a lot of sadness in my stories. But at the end of the day, it's really, to your point, just about being human. I mean, my issue with the with the perfect ending, you know, with the transformational storyline where everything turns out okay in the end, no matter how bleakue it got, It's not real. Yeah, it's not real, And I like I think that's my my parallel to what you're talking about with like if it ends too perfectly, there's that caution tape, Like those characters can't grow in, evolve, sequel bad idea because there's nothing else that can happen that would not upset that perfect stasis. Basically, and there's nothing about being human that is a perfect stasis. All of those media tropes about hard things only happen to get you to the good stuff. And you needed to learn these things so that you could become more of who you are, like all of those good vibes. Only everything happens for a reason. Things like they're not real, it's not true, there's no life in those And I really, you know, I've been I've been in this work for long enough to see things start to evolve where the messiness of being human is first allowed and then celebrated. And you know, I feel like I can point to when I'm when I'm having a everything is bleak, everything is terrible day. I can look at the success of your work and wait, but things are changing because there's a not only a tolerance, but a hunger for stories we can see ourselves reflected in. And you know, added benefit for me that it's beautiful storytelling and like richly evocative and just really good everybody read them. But I feel like, you know that that literature is a reflection of where we are and where we're growing to and what we want for ourselves now and in the days and years to come, and especially during such a bleak, bleak world. I'm gonna draw that parallel here that the things that we're living through now, they don't have any easy answers or solutions. Everything is not okay, good vibes not so much. And how are we going to get through any of this? And it's through telling the truth, it's through listening to the feelings, it's through telling different stories. And there has to be there has to be some sort of functional hope in that. And it can't be tacked on at the end as sort of a nice tidy bow at the end of a difficult story to say everything worked out. Everything doesn't work out in the end. It also sets up really unrealistic expectations for what we should be aiming for. You know, the idea that happy ending never involves death, right, or maybe it would be the death of a villain. Yeah, if there is death. But going back to what we were talking about with death positivity, the idea that happy like the ending of a story should not result in a main character or a beloved character dying contributes to painting some kind of taboo and negativity to the fact that we are all going to approach death at some point. And the fact that the love story always ends with the people who are in love falling in love, happily celebrating it, perhaps with a marriage or something, you know, sets up this expectation that the only successful relationship is one that ends in marriage and and doesn't allow space for you know, the idea that, for example, a relationship might transform and maybe people change as humans and they're able to acknowledge that, and then they get a divorce, and how beautiful to be able to honor that they as humans are changing and their relationship has fundamentally changed and they want to you know, alter the dynamic. Like, I think that's a really beautiful and mature thing. But then in love stories, if we perpetuate that, oh, well, the ultimate happy ending, the ultimate goal is a happy marriage, then we're continuing to perpetuate these ideas that can be so harmful. Yeah, to get married, stay married, and of all things. Yeah, I mean, this is a really interesting parallel to draw between the stories we tell about death and grief and the stories we tell about love. Now, for me, love stories are grief stories. Love stories are death stories, and vice versa. But this idea that there is only one correct way to do love and for a lot of the population, a lot of the mindset that is a white cis hetero normative marriage only until death do you part sort of thing, and that's just not the only successful relationship there is. Like success in a love relationship is not about one person and one person only for the rest of all eternity. Like, can we expand our ideas around what does true love look like? And as you said, sometimes that means transforming and transforming away from the form or the format that held it for some time, and that that is also a good outcome, right, that the dissolution of a lovership is also a good outcome. And that's not some of the weird backwards way of saying like, oh, you needed to break up to become your real person. No, no, no, no, no, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about Sometimes there can be that it needs to be okay, that the end of a relationship is not seen as a failure of love exactly. Yeah, And I and I like to think of relationships as never failing, but just changing, because we have a relationship with everything, right. We might have slightly more negative relationships or relationships that fade into you know, more distant relationships, but still anything that we're connected to is a relationship. And so I think the idea of divorce being a failure, and that idea of you know, a marriage being no longer a marriage is some kind of failure really contributes to people finding it such a difficult transition. Like maybe it doesn't have to be such a toxic experience for so many people. Maybe if we think about it as okay, we're going back to being friends, which is how we started, and it's just a recontextualizing of the relationship, re contextualizing, not a failure, especially from the outside in right, Like we've we've sort of all absorbed that toxic, narrow soup of marriage is the only valid relationship if you're if you're really serious, right, you get married and you stay married. And we do see divorce as failure, And I think a lot of people have internalized that divorce is failure or breaking up as failure, and I love that, Like what if, what if we could just lift that out and remove that that the value judgment on the end of any relationship. And I love that you said we're in relationship with everything, right, Like that's the everything. Everything is alive, right, Like, we are in relationship with everything, and we're always growing and always changing and maybe leaving things that no longer fit with you. We don't need to see as failures to adhere to a standard we inherited. I think there's a great questioning in there of do those standards serve me? Are they mine? Or are they something that I inherited? And And that we've through so much of your work and so many of the teaching that you do, right, I love that you're out there teaching people these truths about writing and curiosity and human nous at the center of all things. You know, a lot of folks who come to listen to this podcast are interested in difficult conversations, whether they're as that's as a writer or a creator, or as a human being living these things. And I think a lot of people want to write about loss right, whatever loss means to them, whether that's chronic illness or injury, or the state of the world or personal losses and deaths. Like as we've talked about earlier, right like when when we're allowed to talk about it in a really human way, we always want to be having that conversation, right, Like everybody wants in on that. And I think one of the things that gets really tricky when you're writing about loss, when loss is a character in what you're creating. You actually mentioned this a little bit that you felt like it was a one of the first iterations of astonishing color of after that it was a trope a vehicle, right instead of something embodied. So one last question for you, both for our listeners and honestly for me as somebody who who writes from grief a lot here, like, what do you wish other writers would know about writing from grief or writing into grief, or even if it doesn't show up in the finished product, allowing that full, messy humanity to inform an impact the stories we're telling. It's a really big question, but what do you wish other people would know about engaging with the intensity of being human? From what you've learned by engaging with the intensity of being human. Well, for writers specifically, I think there's oftentimes the temptation to be like, I'm writing about grief, and so I need to make the reader feel how sad this character is, and so I'm going to just write pages and pages of this character weeping in, this character falling over and unable to do anything, and and just really focus on all the tears. And grief is not just trying. Grief is a way of changing how we view everything in the world around us. It's like tinting a lens. You know, once you have that grief that your lens is going to be tinted for most of the time. And so I think when people are writing about grief and and thinking about it, because really, when you're writing about something, you're kind of actively choosing to interrogate that experience. I think that if you're writing about grief, it's important to think about what is the change to the daily circumstances, the regular life, the way that a character thinks about things. What are the the little unpleasant surprises that maybe come up, like having to cancel someone's manicure appointment, which feels like such a tiny thing, but then can be such a an intensely felt reminder. Right, it feels like such a throwaway, little trivial incident, but for the character who has to do it for something that they're grieving, it can feel devastating. I think that's where grief feels the truest, and not so much the big funeral scene and not so much the collapsing on your knees and and crying and right, right, like cinematic moments is not They're not the thing, yeah, right, And not saying that they don't belong in stories, but just that that is not the way to connect with your reader. Those are the symptoms of the experience, and you want to write about the experience itself. You want to write about how is this character engaging with the world, and how are they viewing the world, and why is it different, and what are the ways in which this character is now maybe reconsidering certain histories, are reconsidering certain relationships. That's what's so human about grief. That's what's so powerful and and changing about grief when it happens to us, is that we are permanently altered in some way because forevermore we will have this perspective that is a different facet by the fact that we have that loss as contract asked to what we had before. And so I think that contrast is where, you know, when we're when we're writing, when we're really interrogating these things on the page and examining what makes us human. I think it's focusing on that contrast that is really going to bring out the feelings and make it feel true. And that's what we want for our readers, right like we want them to see themselves and feel themselves reflected in the words. And it really is the daily, intimate minutia of life that conveys those emotions. It's not the funeral, it's not the landing on the knees, right it's the those big cinematic moments. That's not where it lives. It really is in that minutia. And I love that, and I think that's true for storytelling of all kinds. So I really love that you brought that for us. And that was going to be my last question, but you know, as I was listening to you and remembering, remembering some of the territory we covered together, I think I think I want to close us on hope and I'm not really sure how I want to close us on hope, but I'm going to toss you a question and you interpret it however you would like. Okay, So we we spent some time talking about hope and what does hope look like and wanting to leave people with hope. But I think hope. You know, people who have listened to me for a long time, No, I have a really big issue with hope because it's usually hope for a specific way that things turn out, and that's a hope that gets disappointed a lot because things don't work out. So if I ask you to talk to me about what would a functional hope look like for you in any context, in writing, in life, and relationship, in love, what would functional hope in this moment look like for you? I think I would call it something different. I think I would call it openness, This willingness to see what comes your way and to embrace it. And again not trying to go with the positive vibes only or like everything that happens is meant to happen and you're on the right path, not to go with any of those sort of overly positive, overly shined up and almost dismissive, sweeping statements, but just to say that I think the saddest thing that can happen to us as humans is to allow an experience to close us down so that we are no longer willing to engage and learn new relationships and and allow things to change. I think that's that's something that can happen a lot in grief. Is this resistance towards change because the change that has been experienced has been so huge and earth shattering that the idea of more change is almost unbearable, right, And I think the beautiful thing about openness rather than hope is learning to allow for things to alter and grow and become different things, allowing for ourselves to become different people. So I don't know if that really answers your question, but I think it's, you know, this question of not like what lessons being learned, because I don't like when things feel prescriptive or or like they belong on a poster in an elementary school guidance counselor's office, you know. But more that, I think it's really beautiful when we can change our perspectives and when we continue to allow those perspectives to shift. When we continue to allow more and more of the world in That's what I mean by openness, to end a story with this willingness to see what comes next rather than closing everything down. Yeah, it's that middle ground. Like you're not saying I didn't get what I wanted, This didn't work out the way that I wanted, but hey, I didn't need that anyway. Let's make that go away and pretend everything is a party. But it's also not the flip side of that binary, which is to say things did not work out the way that I wanted to and there is nothing else. It's that scorched earth policy right in our own lives. And I love openness there and that openness and that curiosity for given what is what next? Yeah, exactly, Yeah, I love that. I think that's a really beautiful note to end on for us, given what is what is next? I think that that applies to so many things, so many things in the world, personal and political, so so many things. Okay, so we're gonna put lots of information in the show notes, Emily, but let people know where they can find you, what teaching stuff you have coming, and where they can get more and more and more and more and more. Yeah, so I am on social media on every platform. I used the same handle. It's always e x R P A N. I'm working on a new book. I'm under contract for a new book, so hopefully that I'll come out sooner than later. And yeah, I'm mostly teaching for institutions right now for m f A programs, but whenever I have any one off workshops or things that you can sign up for that are open to the general public, I will definitely share them on social media. So follow me on social media. You can sign up for my newsletter on my website and I'll keep you posted on all of the things excellent and again, the two books are astonishing, Color of After and An Arrow to the Moon. You can also find lots of Emily's writing out there on the web. Thank you for holding up your books. Lots of great writing and wisdom out there from Emily. Just do your Google's everybody and you'll find her all right. Coming up after the break, your questions to carry with you, and an announcement about an upcoming training for therapists and other professional helpers. Don't miss that part, friends, We'll be right back before we get into this week's questions to carry with you. I want to let you know that registration just open for an intensive training for professionals with me that begins this December two two in case you're listening later. All of the information about this training is on the website Megan Divine dot c O, but a very short summary if you're a therapist, social worker, nurse or other provider. During this training, you'll meet with me every other week for just over four months, for whole months in live sessions covering everything from the current state of grief support and how the new diagnosis codes affect our work to how you actually deal with grieving clients or patients in more human centered ways. Now, this training is limited to only fifty people this time, so that we have a human way of connecting with each other. So check out Megan Divine dot c O to find the registration link, and I will also put the direct sign up page in the show notes. Now, as you know, every week I leave you with some reflection questions to carry with you until we meet again, and this week is no different. You know what really struck me in my conversation with Emily, aside from how happy it bade me to talk with her was how much getting grief right matters. A lot of my guests the season have talked about representation, about what it was like to never see their own stories reflected in books or TV or news or other media, and what that taught them about their own worth. I knew that I loved Emily's books, and I knew why, But this conversation really helped me understand the power of nuanced storylines. It helped me understand the way real stories of real love, which includes real grief, help us lean into our own feelings and experiences. I mean, I may be biased as a writer and a believer in the power of stories, but I left this conversation feeling really hopeful and excited to see the kinds of stories people are writing today and the kinds of stories that I'm going to get to read in the future. Real life is way more powerful and more poignant than any tired old tragedy to triumph story arc with worn out ideas about grief. Real life is way bigger than that. What's stuck with you today? What parts of this conversation with Emily made you look at your own story differently? Everybody's going to take something different from today's show, But I do hope you found something to hold onto. Hope really is a crowdsourced thing. I'm curious how you're going to open conversations about the portrayal of grief in novels and movies with your own circle of friends. It's a really cool topic. I think whatever you take from today's show, we definitely want to hear from you in all this. Check out Refuge in Grief on Instagram or here after Pod on TikTok to see video clips from the show and leave your thoughts in the comments on those posts. I want to know your thoughts on grief driven storylines, and I also want to get tagged if you start having those conversations with people on your own social media, so be sure to tag me tag us in your conversation starting posts. Use the hashtag here after pod on all the platforms so that we can find you. The whole team loves to see where this show takes you. If you want to tell us how today's show felt for you, or you have a request or a question for upcoming explorations of difficult things, give us a call at three to three six four three three seven six eight and leave a voicemail. If you missed it, you can find the number in the show notes or visit Megan Divine dot c O. If you'd rather send an email, you can do that too. Write on the website Megan Divine dot c O. We want to hear from you. I want to hear from you. This show, this world needs your voice. Together, we can make things better even when they can't be made right. You know how most people are going to scan through their podcast app looking for a new thing to listen to. They're going to see the show description for Hereafter and think, I don't want to listen to difficult things, even if cool people are talking about them. Well, that's where you come in your reviews. Let people know it really isn't all that bad. In here. We talk about heavy stuff, yes, but it's in the service of making things better for everyone. So everyone needs to sin. Spread the word in your workplace, in your social world on social media and click through to leave a review. Subscribe to the show, download episodes, and keep on listening. Want more Hereafter. Grief education doesn't just belong to end of life issues. As my dad says, daily life is full of everyday grief that we don't call grief. Learning how to talk about all that without cliches or platitudes or simplistic dismissive statements is an important skill for everyone, especially if you're in any of the helping professions. If you're a therapist, social worker, or other provider. Remember my exciting news. I've got a big training coming up this December two, twenty two, and registration is open right now. It is the place to learn how to deal with grief without cliches or platitudes or dismissive pathology based statements. Spots are super limited for this training, so head over to Megan Divine dot c O for all the d hales. You'll also find professional resources, including my best selling book, It's Okay that You're Not Okay and the Guided Journal for Grief at Megan Divine dot c O. Hereafter with Megan Divine is written and produced by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced by Elizabeth Fossio, with logistical and social media support from Micah. Edited by Houston Tilly, music provided by Wave Crush and background Noise Today provided by Occasional helicopters. Because I live in Los Angeles,