Open Submissions for Creative Grief Zine

The seed of this project came with the beginning of my companionship with loss and grief at age eight. After 25 years of journeying with grief through my relationship with nature and spirituality, therapy, my midwifery career, and now my career as a psychotherapist - I have clairified my passion as gifting back to the world all the wisdom I have gathered throughout my life. In that journey, I have discovered that isolation is rampant in western culture under capitalism. I have also realized that making art is an intuitive and natural way of transforming the emotional experience of grief. It holds a space of ritual, when held with intention. This zine project is a container that holds the salve to the collective wound of isolation with loss, aversion to grief, and denial of our mortality. By calling in community to express their grief as a way of ritualizing and tending to our grief hearts, I believe we begin to create new ways of sitting with and honoring the loss we inevitably all experience. My first round of this zine (originally "Together in Grief") came from a project in my undergrad program at California Institute of Integral Studies. After a few years of collecting submissions and publishing this zine, I decided I wanted to expand it into something bigger. Together in Grief is now "Together in Sacred Grief," offering the ongoing annual zine, workshops, a "grief notes" newsletter, instagram, and grief coaching offerings. As much as expansion can be scary, I deeply believe in the importance of creating more accessibility to grief care in our world, especially as we face so many new waves of collective grief in climate crisis, political upheaval, and global violence. This is my form of resistance. And in the wise words of Zenju Earthlyn Manuel in The Way of Tenderness: "Confrontation with the impermanance of all things is perhaps the widest gate to liberation from suffering." Thank you for being a part of this project, even if it is just reading these words. Sending care to your grief heart, from mine.