From Writing to Doing: Strategies for approaching loss, dying and grief in auto/biographical writing

Drawing on the auto/biographical work experiences of four women working in the academic field of death studies as well as on a range of creative, professional and academic sources about loss and the process of writing, in this article we explore creativity, innovation and impact, and the strategies on offer in auto/biographical writing about dying, death and grief. We ask and explore the questions: When is writing doing? What is writing doing? and provide insights into the productive potential of writing as a way to continue bonds, live with loss and engage with grief. Centrally concerned with how first-person writing can function as a powerful practice for responding to experiences of dying and grief, we take a creative approach to the article that seeks to do what it advocates – to write in the first person, to reflect, and to explore the limits and potential of language to produce meanings from loss. The article intersperses the personal narratives of three writers (G, T and K) working in the field of death studies woven together by B (also a death scholar) with epigraphs from other writers whose work is connected to that offered here in terms of its themes. This practice of collaborative writing, and of citing the work of others from a wide range of backgrounds, suggests and produces connections, emphasising the theme of this special issue – public dying and public grieving – and signals the complicated, inevitably partial, and powerful ways in which writing can function to make grief a shared and public experience.