by Writing Workshops Staff
3 days ago
In a bright cottage on Peaks Island, Maine—where the Atlantic's winter swells crash against rocky shores with metronome-like persistence—Mira Ptacin has built a literary life from the fragments of profound loss. The award-winning author of Poor Your Soul and The In-Betweens speaks about grief with a startling clarity that feels both intimate and universal, like overhearing a confession meant precisely for you.
"You don't get over grief," Ptacin tells me during our conversation about her upcoming workshop, Paper, Memory, and Light: Writing Through Grief in Flash Nonfiction. "You get under it, carry it differently." This philosophy—grief as companion rather than adversary—forms the bedrock of her four-week course, which promises not resolution but revelation: a chance to meet sorrow on the page and transform it into something bearable, perhaps even beautiful.
Ptacin's approach to grief writing rejects sanitized narratives and tidy conclusions. Instead, she invites participants to embrace what she calls grief's "blobfish" quality—its tendency to be messy, unpredictable, and resistant to conventional storytelling. Through flash nonfiction—brief, intense pieces that mirror grief's sudden visitations—students will explore their losses alongside readings from masters of the form like Jo Ann Beard, David Sedaris, and Ocean Vuong.
The course emerged from Ptacin's own journey through unimaginable loss—first her brother when she was a teenager, and later, her daughter. "Grief isolates," she explains with characteristic directness. "Writing about it cracks a window. It doesn't solve anything, but it does let a little air in." It's this promise of air—of breath, of space to exist alongside one's pain—that makes her workshop not merely instructive but potentially transformative.
For those who find themselves carrying the weight of absence, Ptacin offers neither platitudes nor promises of closure. Instead, she extends something rarer: permission to honor grief's complexity, and tools to give it shape. "My hope," she says, "is that students see grief not as a detour, but as part of the map."
Writing Workshops: You’ve written about grief and loss in your work. What life experiences first propelled you toward exploring such emotionally charged themes, and how did that shape your approach to creating this workshop?
Mira Ptacin: My deep dive into grief began with the loss of my daughter, which unearthed a much older sorrow, which was the death of my brother a decade earlier. Losing a child shattered whatever illusions I still had about control or closure. When my brother died, I was a teenager, already unmoored, already flailing. Teenage grief is its own kind of chaos. As an adult, I thought I had agency, systems, and coping mechanisms. Turns out, not so much. You’re left with a choice: go numb or go in. I chose the latter, partly because it’s cheaper than therapy and marginally more acceptable than yelling into traffic. This workshop is built around that impulse: grief as nonlinear, strange, at times absurd, and absolutely worthy of being explored on the page.
WW: In Poor Your Soul, you transform a profoundly personal tragedy into a narrative that resonates with a wide audience. Can you share a moment when, amid your own grief, you realized storytelling could be a pathway—not to “getting over it”—but to growth and meaning?
MP: You don’t get over grief. You get under it, carry it differently. I remember reading from Poor Your Soul and someone came up afterward and whispered, “I thought I was the only one…” That’s when I knew the story had moved beyond me. Grief isolates. Writing about it cracks a window. It doesn’t solve anything, but it does let a little air in. Sometimes, that’s more than enough.
WW: Your workshop encourages participants to write flash nonfiction pieces about their losses. Why do you find brief forms so powerful for capturing something as expansive and elusive as sorrow?
MP: Because grief doesn’t announce itself politely. It shows up while you’re folding laundry or rinsing shampoo out of your hair. Flash nonfiction mirrors that suddenness. It doesn't offer space for grand narratives or neat resolutions. It drops you into a moment, hands you a flashlight, and asks, “What do you see?” That compression and rawness, that’s how grief feels. Quick, breathless, devastating.
WW: The course outline suggests exploring grief as a personal and collective experience. How do you guide participants in balancing the privacy of their pain with the desire to connect and empathize with others’ stories?
MP: We begin with consent and autonomy. You can write as if your life depends on it, and still keep the pages to yourself. Grief strips away control; writing gives some of it back. You decide what gets shared and what stays locked in the drawer. I believe that the tension between solitude and solidarity is where the most resonant writing comes from.
WW: You include readings that range from David Sedaris’s reflective humor to Ocean Vuong’s poignant prose. What do you hope participants learn from examining such diverse approaches to writing about absence, memory, and healing?
MP: That there’s no template for writing sorrow. Sedaris reminds us that humor can be sacred, and that laughter and grief are not mutually exclusive. Vuong writes like each word is a held breath; his intimacy cuts and heals. I want participants to see that sorrow can take any shape: lyrical, jagged, funny, fractured, unpublishable. I like exploring opposite ends of the spectrum (and also what’s in-between)…
WW: Grief can be messy and unpredictable: a “giant blobfish,” as you put it. How do you help writers navigate the chaotic emotional terrain without feeling pressured to impose neat resolutions or “tidy up” their pain on the page?
MP: This workshop doesn’t ask grief to make sense. We don’t force it into moral arcs or clean conclusions. If your piece ends in silence, or rage, or an unanswered question, then that’s legitimate! That’s life! Grief doesn’t tie bows; it leaves things frayed. Our job is to tell the truth of that.
WW: Your writing seamlessly blends personal memoir with cultural history and ethnography. How do you see that combination of the personal and the collective shaping the way we process—and write about—grief in this workshop?
MP: Grief isn’t sterile or self contained, but rather is tangled in culture, lineage, body, history. It. Underlies everything! Who gets to grieve publicly? Who’s granted sympathy? Which losses are deemed worthy of attention? These are not just personal questions, they’re political. In the workshop, we hold space for that reckoning. Writing becomes a way to resist erasure. To insist: this mattered.
WW: “Writing toward healing” can mean different things for different people. What do you hope students walk away with at the end of these four weeks, especially in terms of how they relate to their own grief stories going forward?
MP: I hope they leave with less shame and more language. Maybe a sentence they didn’t know they needed. Maybe a draft, or just the knowledge that they’re not the only one sobbing next to a bar of soap. Healing doesn’t mean tying things up, but rather living with the ghost in the room, maybe even bringing it a cup of coffee My hope is that students see grief not as a detour, but as part of the map. My hope is that students see that writing is a way through.
Learn more and sign up for Mira's upcoming class, Paper, Memory, and Light: Writing Through Grief in Flash Nonfiction.
Mira Ptacin is the author of the award-winning memoir Poor Your Soul (Soho Press, 2016), which was named a best book of the year by Kirkus Books, where it received a rare “starred” review. She’s also the author of the genre-blending book of feminist history, memoir, and ethnography, The In-Betweens: The Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna (Liveright-W.W. Norton, 2019), which the New York Times lauded as the best book to read during a pandemic. Mira’s writing frequently appears in the New York Times, New York Times Book Review, Vogue, Poets and Writers, Harper’s, Tin House, LitHub, and more. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she was editor-at-large of their literary magazine, LUMINA. Mira lives on Peaks Island, Maine, and is currently working on her next book.
