“Writing the Dead”: A Creative Reckoning with America’s Last Taboo

Black Beauty rosebud currently blooming

This morning, I read "The modern taboo that Americans just can’t seem to break," Sara Youngblood Gregory’s timely piece in Vox on the persistent silence around death in American culture. It’s a moving exploration of how, despite our thoughts often turning to mortality, we struggle to give voice to our grief, our fears, and our hopes about what comes after. From families that sidestep the subject altogether to a culture shaped by euphemism and for-profit deathcare, the result is clear: we are left ill-equipped to process loss or live fully in its shadow.

That’s why I’m offering a new six-week course this fall through the Transformative Language Arts Network: “Writing the Dead.” This course is not about resolving the mysteries of mortality. It’s about embracing them openly and together.

Black Beauty rose from my garden

Like Gregory’s article, this course begins with the premise that our reluctance to speak of death carries real emotional, psychological, and even societal costs. And yet, there is a powerful antidote in the act of making meaning. When we write and create in the wake of loss, or in conversation with it, we don’t just face death, we build a relationship with it. We connect to memory, to community, and to what it means to be alive.

Over six weeks, we’ll gather to explore death, grief, and remembrance through creative writing, visual art, and dialogue. We’ll read short texts, examine art, and create our own responses to profound questions. Writing letters to the dead, crafting rituals of remembrance, and sharing our stories will become tools for deep inquiry, healing, and transformation.

As the Vox article makes clear, most Americans think about death regularly, but only a third ever talk about it. This course offers a space to break that silence. Not in isolation, but in community.

Together, we will:

• Explore cultural and personal narratives around death and dying.

• Use writing to process grief and affirm connection.

• Learn from traditions that treat death as an integral part of life—not a forbidden subject.

• Approach our creative practice not as escape, but as a meaningful confrontation.

If you’re curious, if you’re grieving, if you’ve ever whispered to a loved one who’s no longer here, or wished you could, this course is for you. Let’s step into the conversation that matters most, and discover how writing can become a living dialogue between what’s lost and what remains.

“Writing the Dead” begins this fall through TLAN. Join us—and let’s talk about what no one talks about.