View the archive of my two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about reconciling the anxiety and loss that accompanies grief – and about the writing process that can bring hope, transformation, and healing when we lose someone we love.

Hi. I’m Claire Bidwell Smith.

I am a licensed therapist, a grief expert, and the author of three books about grief and healing: The Rules of Inheritance; After This: When Life is Over Where Do We Go?; and Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief.

For more than twenty years, I have worked in support of all kinds of people experiencing all kinds of grief. In doing so, I have discovered the great degree to which writing can be a powerful tool to help people process their own responses to loss. Giving private voice to experiences and emotions often also serves as a gateway from which people can better understand and reconcile what it means to lose a person they love.

I have worked in hospice and in private practice, and – like the people I want to help – I am also someone who has experienced my own deep, personal loss. It is the unavoidable, fundamental things I’ve come to understand from these encounters and experiences that I wish to share with you in my live, two-hour class class, Five Things I’ve Learned about Living and Writing After Loss.

I’ve learned that most of the time, when we lose someone we love, it feels like grief is just happening to us. We feel out of control, and overwhelmed. Most importantly, I’ve learned that there are all forms of loss, that loss is something that inevitably happens to all of us, and that how we choose to acknowledge loss and grieve is a choice available to us all.

Time and again, I have also found that writing about loss can be a cathartic and beautiful way to reflect upon your journey of grief. In this class I’ll share with you the experience-tested writing exercises that I’ve found most helpful. I’ll get you started with techniques for tapping into memory, negotiating with trauma, eliciting emotion, and even for navigating shared experiences of grief. I’ll share with you how I’ve been able to write my way own into moments that felt elusive, my approaches for writing about people in my life, and also my sense of the most practical writing tools I’ve used to create a meaningful writing life for myself. 

If you’re someone processing your own grief and loss, I think this time together will be very beneficial. You will have the chance to connect with others who are grieving, explore your loss in new ways, and better understand how to lean into grief as a way of healing.

My hope is that when this class concludes, you will be better able to integrate the complex layers of loss and grief into your life in a way that feels hopeful and meaningful.

– Claire Bidwell Smith