Writing Through Grief and Loss with Jill Christman

Welcome to Writing Your Resilience, the podcast for writers who want to write and live the story that sets them free. I’m your host, Lisa Cooper Ellison—a writer, transformational and trauma-informed coach, story alchemist, and fellow traveler on the winding road of healing and creativity. Each week, I’ll share tools, practices, and conversations that will help you let go of what no longer serves you as you create stories that change lives, especially your own. Together, we’ll explore how to trust your creative voice, support your mental health and resilience, work with your nervous system and unique design, and stay connected to your deepest calling as a writer, even when life gets messy.

It’s time, my friends, to write and live the story that sets you free. I’m honored to walk that journey alongside you, one story and one episode at a time.

Well, hello, Jill. Welcome to Writing Your Resilience. I am so happy to have you on the podcast today.

[2:17] Jill Christman: Thank you, Lisa Cooper Ellison. It’s a joy to be here, and I know I already told you off recording how much I loved your questions, but the time that you spent with my work means so much to me. So, thank you.

[2:28] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Well, I love to talk about books, and I love to talk about books that I love, and yours falls into that category. So, I’m going to hold up the book itself — if you’re on YouTube, you can see it. This is The Heart Folds Early, though it is not your first book. So, before we dive into the content and how you wrote it, what would you like us to know about you as a person who has written this book and is also a serial memoirist?

[2:58] Jill Christman: Yeah. So, I know that for young people especially this is hard to even fathom, but when I went to grad school at the University of Alabama in 1995, there were no nonfiction programs that I knew about. My dream to become a journalist and travel the world with my photographer boyfriend, writing long-form stories for National Geographic, had fallen flat, and I had decided that my only way forward as a writer was to be a fiction writer, because I did not know there were options. There were, in fact, two options at the time — the nonfiction program at Iowa, and one at Columbia. But again, this is the day when you wrote away for brochures that arrived at your house when you applied to grad school.

So, I went into a fiction program, and I was, of course, writing poorly disguised autobiographical fiction, because I had — as so many of us have — a book inside me that I needed to tell before any other book could be written. I was holding a story that was like a boulder at the entrance to the cave, and I couldn’t get out until I figured out how to push that out of the way.

So, my first book was actually written under the cover of short stories. I had very encouraging faculty at the University of Alabama, and they knew what I was doing. I wrote my first book, Dark Room: A Family Exposure, as my thesis, but I wasn’t talking about it in my workshops. I think this might be important to your listeners, because whenever I tried to — which I did a couple of times, and I talk about this in Dark Room — people would say, “Well, that’s therapy writing, that’s not real writing, that’s not what we do here. We’re serious literary writers, and what you’re trying to do is get therapy.” I took in that message at the time. I held it. So, I knew I had to do this work I had to do, but I did it alone.

Again, this comes to the serial memoir thing — I just had to be alone in a room. This was a completely solitary project. And this is kind of the fun publishing part: I didn’t care if it was ever published or not. I truly didn’t. I needed to write it, and then I never published anything until I sent this book to the AWP Prize. It won the first time I sent it out. It was my first publication, and it gave me false expectations about the way the publishing world works, let me tell you.

So then, after writing that, I thought I was writing that book to get it out of the way so that I could return to fiction, which I still believed was the “real” writing — because I had just taken that message in. But it turns out I had many memoirs in me. So, this gets to the serial memoir question, and I think in terms of asking questions — that’s what we get to do in memoir. So, in a way, The Heart Folds Early is the next book. This book just came out this year, 2026, but three books grew out of the same manuscript. My essay collection was me trying to figure out smaller versions of the story in essays, and my other book — which is only available as an eBook — called Borrowed Babies, is about borrowed babies in home economics programs, which was about how we learn to mother, what that thing is. I pulled that whole thread out and made it a separate book, because there just wasn’t room for it in this book. I believe in using the whole animal when we write, so I think I became a serial memoirist by way of writing down a lot of things and then trying to figure out where each piece of that story was going to go.

[6:26] Lisa Cooper Ellison: What I love is that you’re talking about the fact that you ask questions. What I often tell writers is that a memoir — or really any piece of writing that we do — the book or the project is the answer to a question. So, if you are a curious person and you have a lot of questions, you can write a lot of books, because you can look at the same experiences from different angles. And that’s one of the things I think you do so well in The Heart Folds Early — there’s a specific question you have around how do we make a decision, or what is it like to truly make a decision and own it?

[7:05] Jill Christman: Yeah, and that’s how I think Dark Room, the first book, and The Heart Folds Early, the most recent book, are really connected. Because if this had a question, it was: in a world where lovers die suddenly on highways, where puppies are abandoned in paper bags, where little girls are assaulted in garages — in that world, knowing what I know and living in the body I live in, can I really have a baby?

This book is actually about having a baby. Most people wouldn’t know that reading it — maybe they would. And this book is deep into that journey of motherhood, trying to figure out what it means to make a choice with my husband — who, by the way, this is the romantic part of the story, is a poet I met reading Middlemarch in a class at the University of Alabama. And it’s about our decision to terminate a pregnancy when we learned, at a routine ultrasound after we were told everything was totally fine with the baby — we went truly to make a video and basically have a baby party — and that’s when we learned that he had only half a heart. So, this book is about our decision to end that pregnancy, and everything that went into that choice, and the choices that came after, largely, as you mentioned.

[8:20] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Yeah, and this was really written in response to the Dobbs decision, but if you read the whole book and you get to the acknowledgments, it took you decades to write this. So, what was that process like?

[8:34] Jill Christman: Yeah, this would be maybe a moment I could read just a tiny bit.

[8:39] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Absolutely.

[8:40] Jill Christman: The book does have a prologue. I had written a draft of the book years earlier — before June of 2022, when Roe was overturned by the Supreme Court via the Dobbs decision — and I had put the book out into the world with my then-agent to the Big Five. I heard very strange and discouraging things back, like, “The marketing people don’t know how to position a book with a baby dying. Nobody wants to hear about babies dying. We don’t think we could sell this to the baby shower market.” This was fully not my intention.

[9:24] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Oh my gosh, Jill.

[9:25] Jill Christman: This was not what I thought should happen with this book. So, at that time, around 2018, I was like, “You know what — I really got what I needed out of writing this book, and I’m good. I’ve got other things to write. I’ve got living children to raise. I’ve got a pandemic coming for us.” My life was full, and I thought, “I’m just going to put this one to bed permanently.”

And then it is not hyperbole to say that on the day I heard the news — I think we all remember — I knew that I would return to this book and finish it. And I knew I would boldly and clearly make it about choice, in a way that I think I was tiptoeing around before, because I was worried about upsetting people. And I knew it was not only something I could do, but it was fully my responsibility to do it. I had the skills to do it. I had the story to tell. It was a collision of things I couldn’t look past — it just felt like it was my job. So, I’ll read you a little bit about that moment, if it’s okay.

[10:35] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Yeah.

[10:36] Jill Christman: “What are the moments you remember with terrifying clarity? On June 14, 2022, I was in a second-floor Airbnb in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, up before my family, coffee in hand, feet up on the couch, looking through a plate-glass window over the construction site of a hot springs development, the Colorado River, the train tracks, and beyond all of that, a glorious mountain — looking as if she hadn’t a single fuck left to give, rising up and making everything else, the bulldozers, the passenger train, the strip of condos, and even the mighty Colorado River, look small, glowing red in the morning sun. She wore a shawl of green against the early morning chill, looking for all the world like the mother of us all.

And then I picked up my phone, and I saw the notification. I knew this was coming. We all knew this was coming. But as with those other great American disasters — JFK’s assassination, the Challenger explosion, the second plane hitting the second tower — this was a jolt to the nerve center, and I will always remember where I was and what I was doing when I read the news. The Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade. Our right to an abortion in the United States, our right to access medical care for our own bodies, was no longer protected.

We all knew this day was coming. I had seen this day coming. And yet when it did, I felt the news — so small, the size of a phone screen — like a kick to the stomach, like a cramp, my uterus contracting like a fist. The coffee in my mouth turned bitter. I flipped my phone face down on the couch, as if I could hit pause, mute, reject call. Was the mountain trembling? Did I see her shake? If she had been a volcano, she would have blown. We both would have blown.”

So, yeah — this book is about choice, about choices. In that moment, I knew. And if people tell you, “Oh, that book wrote itself” — I don’t know, either they’re extremely lucky or they’re lying. I really can’t tell you. But I can say that from that nexus, it felt like power. It felt volcanic, situated in the center of my body. I knew that I would write the book, and I wrote it from that place, and it felt unstoppable. I did it really quickly, and I’m not a fast writer, but that gave me the clarity of vision. I knew — you were talking about questions — I knew exactly what the center of this book was and what story I needed to tell, and then I did.

[13:22] Lisa Cooper Ellison: And I’m so glad you did. I love that you said that once you knew the center — and it was really the confluence of what was happening out in the world and the content you had already written, the experiences you’d had — that led to this propulsive, volcanic need to write this book. I’ve seen this happen with other writers. I think sometimes — and I love how you said this too — you wrote the first draft, or drafts, I’ll say —

[13:55] Jill Christman: Oh, so many, so many drafts.

[13:59] Lisa Cooper Ellison: — and I don’t want to make young writers nervous, but —

[13:59] Jill Christman: It’s just how it goes.

[14:00] Lisa Cooper Ellison: So, you wrote that, but you allowed it to be for yourself — so you got everything you needed, and then you set it aside until the timing was right. And part of that timing wasn’t just the things happening out in the world, it was your reaction to it. So that’s an important part of the process, listeners, that I really want you to hear: sometimes there’s this patient waiting that needs to be done so that everything can catch up to the story you have to tell.

[14:30] Jill Christman: Yeah, yeah. And then another really interesting thing that happened in the final revision of this was — instead of sending everybody out of the room, which I did fully throughout the whole writing of Dark Room — when I went to revisit this, I threw the doors open wide and invited everyone in. That’s those moments where, if you ever felt like I was breaking down the fourth wall, like I was talking directly to you, it’s because I was. But I’m also talking to my mother. I’m also talking to my husband. I’m talking to my grown children, who have not read this book, but they might read this book long after I’m dead.

I was kind of aware of that passing of time, and when these words might meet up with different people. I was talking really carefully to parents who had met with similarly devastating diagnoses during pregnancy and made a different choice. I think that’s one of the things that really held me back from writing this book, or from finishing it — that idea that somehow my personal story would cast judgment that would be hurtful to someone who had already been so hurt, who was spending her nights checking oxygen saturations and praying that we’d make it to morning. So, it was really important to me that I considered everybody, and that was a different writing experience for me. It was crowded in that office — who am I kidding, mostly I write in bed.

[16:04] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Bed is the best place to write.

[16:06] Jill Christman: I think so — it feels very safe. So, yeah, I think that was also totally different, and it was something that felt really conscious to me.

[16:15] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Yeah, and I definitely felt like there were a lot of people on my shoulder as I was reading it — sometimes you were addressing me, and sometimes you were addressing other people. A moment that sticks out for me is when you address your kids and say, “Warning: you may now be reading about your conception — decide if you want to keep reading or skip this part.”

[16:38] Jill Christman: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying about those future children. I was like, “You know what — if this were my parents, this would ick me out, and I really wouldn’t want to know.” So, I just gave a small content warning, specifically for my children. The rest of you, just keep going — it’s a sexy bit, you might enjoy it — but kids, you might not.

[16:58] Lisa Cooper Ellison: And I’m sure when they come to read this, they will thank you for it, because then they can make the choice that’s right for them.

[17:05] Jill Christman: I hope so. I think we’ll get to this question later, but if we think about the big things I write about, I think at the center of everything I’m always just trying to write my way back toward love — and make a space where we can give love and receive love. Maybe that’s deep in my hippie upbringing, but it’s in me, and it’s what I hope for — for my children, for you, for our world.

[17:36] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Yeah. As I was thinking about the choice you had to make, and the way you allow us to love baby brother by making him real — for us, this is a real character on the page that we get to love, and so we get to feel that devastating loss alongside you, and you do that with all of your characters. What was really interesting is how you put different stories in your life together to create this. One person who I felt on my shoulder a lot was Colin, your first fiancé, who died very tragically.

I teach writing, I’m a writer myself, and I’m always thinking about why people put these two things together in these ways. I have my guesses — I mean, based on a person who also lost someone when I was around the same age. I lost my brother, and so I could connect with that sense of devastating grief you experienced at that age, because what a lot of people don’t realize about losing someone when you’re that young is that you don’t yet have the experience to know there is another side. I was 22 — I couldn’t see another side where I could live with this pain and still have this vibrant life. That was inconceivable to me. Whereas if I lost someone now, of course I’d be devastated, and I’d probably feel a similar range of emotions, but I also know I survived my brother’s death.

[19:11] Jill Christman: Yeah.

[19:12] Lisa Cooper Ellison: I’m just curious — because Colin comes up so much in the book — what were you thinking about in terms of choices that can be made versus choices that are taken away, and how you wanted us to engage in that conversation?

[19:26] Jill Christman: You and I have a lot in common, Lisa, in that we ask very intricate questions.

[19:35] Lisa Cooper Ellison: I know — here’s part one, part two… oh, and then there’s part nine that I didn’t even tell you was going to happen. I know I do that sometimes.

[19:41] Jill Christman: My students laugh at me — I’ll see their faces, their eyes getting wider and wider, and I’m still asking the question. I’m on part 27, and I’ll just stop and say, “I’m so sorry, that was a really Crispin question, wasn’t it?” So, I see I’m not alone.

I’ve made some notes, so I might miss part of this, but — from the very beginning, I’d like to say, on a really personal note, it touches my heart in a meaningful way when a reader like you says baby brother’s name out loud. I’ll cry saying it, but I think that’s an important part of this process — that we made a choice to end the pregnancy and end his life. He had a name in utero. Our whole family loved him. We grieve him, and still, that doesn’t mean we regret the choice. That was part of what I was navigating. So, as a mom, when I hear you say his name, that makes me happy that I made a place for him in the world, and that I’m able to share him.

I still miss him — I’ll always miss him. This May 19th marked 20 years since his death, so we just marked that passage in our family. In other interesting ways, his death also made it possible for his little brother, who is now 18, to be born. So, life has a way of moving on.

Like you said, after your brother died so young, in your early 20s — that’s what this book was about, trying to write myself out of that darkness. I just could not see the other side. The way you said it was perfect — I had no concept that there could be another side. It just didn’t seem possible.

And now I have an essay called “Spinning,” which is in this book — it’s kind of a ghost story. Colin shows up in my cycling class, and I’m faced with the question: what if Colin were to come back now? I’ve got Mark, I’ve got the kids — what would that be? There was a time when all I prayed for, every second of every day, was that he would come back again. Magical thinking, I get that — but these are interesting questions to consider.

So: the naming-baby-brother thing, losing someone young — grief doesn’t get easier with practice. This is something I think about a lot, and we still carry with us everyone we’ve grieved, and that brings us to the next grief. I think that’s a vital thing, something I discovered in the writing of this book. So, I’m going to read a snippet from the very beginning of chapter one, because you were talking about putting Colin and baby brother next to each other —

[22:40] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Yeah.

[22:41] Jill Christman: And as writers who write these big things of our lives over and over again — sometimes we think, “Well, nobody needs to hear about Colin anymore, that was a long time ago.” And they do, because, of course, losing someone at that age rewired me on a cellular level.

[23:00] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Yeah.

[23:00] Jill Christman: Right. And as my children could tell you, my parenting, my loving, everything about me was changed by that experience. So, I can’t talk about any of those things without talking about Colin. I’ve tried, and what comes out is not the truth, and my goal is always to say the truest thing. So I try to tell shorter versions of it sometimes, but I kind of addressed that here — before we lost the baby, correction, before we chose to end my pregnancy and let our brokenhearted baby die — Colin’s accident was the grief story at the center of my life on this planet, almost burning me to ashes, as he had been burned.

Like all stories of grief, this one began with love. One year after we met, Colin dropped to his knee in the sand and asked me to marry him. I can still see his face looking up at me — earnest and in love, but also mischievous, sparkling, confident, pretty sure he had this locked in. There were drops of water in his dark hair, catching the last of the day’s soft light. Mist on the Oregon coast — there is always mist. I said yes.

And then, less than a month after Colin’s proposal, the phone rang in the house we shared with his sister. Again, a lifetime later, if I listen, I can hear the phone, the scream, the sound coming out of the dark with the news that Colin was dead. I know — this is how accidents happen. Suddenly, randomly, crushingly.

In the slow months after Colin’s death, my heart took in this knowledge like a sea change: I could love a breathing someone, and then, like that, he could be gone. I talk about that kind of cellular restructuring — I think this is one of the magics of memoir. There’s so much magic to memoir, you all need to try it if you haven’t.

I don’t want to be a spoiler, so I’m just going to read the last line. I end Dark Room at Colin’s gravesite, which was at the ranch where he grew up as a kid. We basically made a pile of his ashes, and then the family left me there, so I was the last one with him on that mountain. I wished for the rain to come hard. I held those ashes in my hand and decided he hadn’t been cooked long enough — that perhaps it takes longer to burn the body of such a young man, he wasn’t done. Colin’s pile was gritty with chunks of bone, like coarse sand — not dust, not ashes to ashes. I kissed the grains of him that I held in my palm, kissed him, and licked his granules from my lips, crunched him with my teeth. “I am taking you into me,” I told him. I caught up his dryness with my tongue, knowing he would cling to me.

And that was the end of that book.

And then, when I was writing about baby brother, I learned about the way fetal cells cross the placenta and become part of our body — microchimerism — and how, literally, we carry in ourselves every baby we’ve ever carried, whether or not they were born. This idea of how we carry with us those we love and lose felt not sad to me, but just like a gift. As I wrote The Heart Folds Early, I was gathering up this power of knowing that I carry them with me — that felt magical. It just felt magical.

I don’t know if that answered your question, Lisa. I think it sort of did. That’s why they had to be told together — because as I went through it, not only had losing Colin rewired me, but Colin was with me when I was losing baby brother. If I prayed, it was to him, and my grandmother, and my uncle Mark, and those I’ve lost, who I carry with me. And I remember specifically saying to Colin, “He’s coming — watch for him, watch over him, don’t let him be hungry, keep him warm.” And knowing that that was okay.

So that gets pretty spiritual, but that was my sense of it — that I was carrying my people with me, and my people were carrying my people. Yeah.

[27:16] Lisa Cooper Ellison: First I’m just going to take a deep breath, because — it’s making me teary. I do think that’s the power of it. He is part of the story, he’s part of your story, and sharing his death at the beginning sets the stage for both how you grieve and how you live —

[27:34] Jill Christman: Which —

[27:34] Lisa Cooper Ellison: — is essential to understanding what happens with baby brother, and how you’re going to wrestle with it, and what you’re going to lean on in order to be able to make this really difficult choice that is ultimately made from a space of compassion. I’ve told people before — sometimes the most powerful love we have is the love to be able to let go, to understand when it’s time to say goodbye, and that is really difficult for most of us. But how beautiful that you had Colin on the other side, that you could hand baby brother to.

[28:08] Jill Christman: Thank you for saying that so beautifully. Having read the book, you know this — I break down this decision really, really carefully in the book. And I come to this conclusion: that imagined choices are not choices. We are only really making a choice when we are in the moment, making the choice, and then we, in fact, make the choice. And not making a choice is also a choice — doing nothing is also a choice. But if we just imagine it, it’s speculative, and not really a choice.

So — I would run those scenarios in my mind, because, as you say, at the center of our decision — and again, I say “our,” and Mark — I knew that the decision ultimately was mine, because it was my body, and I was carrying our baby in my body. And this was our family together, and our baby together. So, well — sometimes I thought, “Oh, does that make me a bad feminist, that I’m somehow saying Mark was part of this decision with me?” And then I think, well, Mark was fully part of this decision with me — that’s the truth. So, I’m trying to tell the deepest truth, even as I sometimes hear, “Would this be an argument against this, or would this be —”

So, when we made this choice — it came down to many things. But there’s a moment, and I tell this story in the book, where Mark asks the pediatric cardiologist, who had been sketching on a piece of paper these percentages for his survival at each surgery — and they were low, his chances were very bad. The doctor said his condition was incompatible with life. However, there was a possibility he could have all of these surgeries. And then Mark said, “And so he has all these surgeries, and if he survives — with this 30% survival — he still has half a heart?” And the surgeon said, “Yes, he still has half a heart.”

At the time, the oldest survivor of the condition — which is called hypoplastic left heart, though it also has a lot of variations; our baby didn’t have an aorta, there were whole parts missing — no child had survived beyond their teen years. And of course, in the interim, there was much suffering, and we could not choose that life for him.

We had a preschooler at the time, Ella, who gets to be in the book a lot — she just graduated from college, and she is still the wise and kind and empathic little person. And I thought, if it weren’t for her — because it would have been selfish, and I often thought I would have done this, to carry him as long as I could have, and gone through the birthing process so that I could hold him one time right before he died. But I’ll never know, because that felt like a cruel thing to do to Ella.

It was complicated in so many ways, and the decision had to happen so quickly, because we were coming up against the end of the window where we could choose — only about 2% of abortions happen in that 18-to-20-week window. So I do hope that this book will show people a real family and a real mom making a real decision from the middle of a life that has a lot of other pieces to it, and I hope people will look upon that choice with compassion, and maybe take that compassion into their own hearts for whatever they need it for.

[31:33] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Yeah, I second that. And I’ll say I felt the relentlessness of having to make a decision so quickly — it required travel, it required so many things from you to be able to do that. And knowing that two very likely outcomes were: you go through the whole birth process, which for you was fraught, because you almost died when Ella was born —

[31:57] Jill Christman: Yes. And then —

[31:58] Lisa Cooper Ellison: — you could go through that and risk your life to possibly hold a baby that’s stillborn, or a baby who dies right away. Or, if you had made the decision to have all of the surgeries, he would be whisked away almost immediately to try to save his life, and then you may never see him again. There were so many scenarios you share with us where the outcome was so poor — it helped me understand. And yet you also allow us to see what the opposite is, because some people make a different choice, and you don’t judge that choice.

I think one of the biggest takeaways for me is to not judge other people’s choices, but also to give yourself tremendous grace with the choices you have to make in your own life — or that I have to make in my life — because there are so many factors that go into it, and we’re always trying to do the best we can with the time we have, and with all of the constraints and pressures that we have on us.

[32:58] Jill Christman: Yeah. And with love for our children — fully made out of love for our children.

[33:04] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Yeah, 100%. I’m loving how deep our conversation has already gone, and how much we’ve talked about — my heart is both aching and full at the same time, because I’m connecting with you, and you don’t even know all the things we have in common, because there’s a lot that goes beyond this — including our propensity to ask five-part and ten-part questions.

[33:24] Jill Christman: Maybe there’s some connection there between the life experience and the “but wait, and then there’s this, and then also this.”

[33:34] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Yeah, well — I mean, life is a prism, and we look at it from all sides — at least that’s how I look at it, and I love being able to do that. So, yeah, whenever I’m thinking about stuff, it’s like, “Oh, the prism…”

[33:47] Jill Christman: I have a writing exercise with my students that I call “opposite world.” I think sometimes, especially when we’re writing really difficult material, we can get mired in the darkness of it. So, I’m like — okay, “the whole summer at sleepaway camp was awful — the mosquitoes, the mud, the swim shoes, the filthy showers” — but I was like, was there one day where something incredible happened? Was there one day where you were the one who got to swing from the rope swing, right after years of failing the presidential fitness test — which, by the way, is coming back, and I’m against —

[34:26] Lisa Cooper Ellison: That test.

[34:27] Jill Christman: Oh my gosh, it practically — yeah, could have a whole other podcast on that. That could be an anthology — the shame the presidential fitness test brought to so many of us. Anyway — so that moment of glory, where people saw you for who you really were at camp — whatever that thing is, the opposite — I think it can help us crack open a window and see everything else more clearly. So, yeah.

[34:52] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Thank you for sharing that exercise. And listeners, I want you to rewind and write it down so you can try that — regardless of whether or not you’re writing a book — because even from a neuroscientific perspective, when we are thinking about difficult and dark things, it begets more difficult and dark memories. It’s very easy for us to go down these deep, dark rabbit holes of pain, because that’s how the brain works. So, this is a very conscious exercise that helps you disrupt that pattern.

What I would say, if you are writing something really dark and you’re in that rabbit hole — one, it’s okay, we all love you, love yourself through that process, take breaks as you need to. But also, when you look at the “opposite world,” it may not be something that’s superb and glorious — and I think that’s important, because I’ve had so many writers come to me, and I’m sure you’ve had this too, where they’ve written something, and we’ve been deep, deep, deep in the pain for a really long time, and you’re asking, “Where is the lightness, where’s the levity, we’ve got to have a rest” — a breath note of some kind. And I’ve seen writers feel really frustrated because they suddenly feel like they have to create the “birthday party that went so well” moment of life — and they don’t. It just has to be something that gives us a little breath, a little breathing room, so that we can rest and sit with the rest of the darkness.

[36:24] Jill Christman: Yeah. And the truth is, I think that when we are able to let in that light and air — be it with a moment of humor — just because we’re going through something tough doesn’t mean we leave our personalities at the door. I’m a laugher, I love to laugh. And I have learned in this life that when the opportunity arises to laugh, why would I stop that? I’m not going to stop that. The other stuff will be waiting for me — I know it’ll be there. So, if you can laugh, laugh — that’s just life advice.

But when we have those moments that give the reader a chance to come up a little with us, it has to be real. That’s why the “birthday party” thing doesn’t work — it has to be real. I think we edit these moments out because we think, “Oh, this moment is too serious for that.” Let yourself have that fullness of being, even when you’re writing tough material. And then, the truth is, you can actually take a reader — and yourself — to harder places, deeper into the place where you need to find a way to turn on a light. That place you’ve been trying to get to, because of that air and that light — you’re not sacrificing that depth, you’re opening the door to it. I think that’s a really important thing to remember. The window, whatever metaphor you want — open it up, let in some light and air.

[37:48] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Yeah, I was working with one of my writing critique partners recently, and one of the things she said is, “If you can make people laugh, you’ve got them.” I have two pieces in this project I’m working on, and there’s a decent amount of darkness in it — but I talk about cooking macaroni and cheese on this fireplace I built in the middle of the woods and serving it to these kids in this really angry way.

Or — my grandma, her mother died, and she was stuck in this grief for years and years. And she would always talk about the day her mother died — of course, that’s tragic and terrible. She told me this the first time when I was five years old, and what she asked me is, “Have you ever heard the death rattle?” Right — we’re talking some dark stuff. But she starts trying to imitate it, and she can’t get it right. So, my dad’s like, “Is it like this?” And then I start trying to imitate it, and then my brother starts trying to imitate it, and it becomes this ridiculous moment that — yes, it’s tinged with “that’s pretty messed up,” but it was also pretty funny.

So, if you can find those moments of absurdity in your own story, I think sometimes that’s where the lightness comes from, rather than trying to make it up. And I know we’re on the same page on that — but allow yourself to laugh, allow the reader to laugh, and allow yourself to find that absurdity.

One of the things I tell people — I’m curious to know if you interpret this the same way or not — is when people are writing about traumatic material, I often tell them: before you write the hardest stuff, it doesn’t have to be everything, but you want to go in with a flashlight, so you know what you’re shining the light on, and you also know what you’re bringing with you — your strategies. And you shared something similar in your intake — you said, “When you’re in a dark room and feel the need to touch everything before you leave, turn on a light.”

[39:44] Jill Christman: Yeah, that has been like a guiding principle in my living and writing life — they’re very closely intertwined, by the way. Since I was grieving Colin early on, and… the basics of that story — I think some fragment of it really probably appears in every book I’ve written, because it’s so fundamental — but the core narrative is that I was seeing all these therapists after Colin died. Oh, PS, this is also dark — early on, someone said, “It’s such a litany of horrors,” and I was like, “I know, right?”

So, I had been sexually abused as a child, and then I had developed a very serious eating disorder — I was bulimorexic when Colin came into my life. I was pretty much set on self-destructing until I was dead. So that’s kind of an important part of this — because when Colin came into my life and loved me the way he loved me, for the whole person that I was, it saved my life.

And then he left.

[40:48] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Yeah.

[40:49] Jill Christman: Again — who knows what would have happened if he’d stayed? Could we have sustained that kind of relationship, wherein he was the saver and I was the saved? I don’t know. I’ll never know.

So — I was in therapy. This is an important part. After he died, as we well know, therapy can be very useful. I haven’t even gotten back to the question of how I feel about people calling writing “therapy writing” — but we might get to that. And it can also be not useful.

[41:14] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Yeah.

[41:14] Jill Christman: There are good teachers, there are bad teachers, there are good project managers, there are bad project managers, there are good therapists. So, I went through quite a run of therapists, and I was feeling somewhat desperate, and my mom hooked me up with a woman who channeled an angel — stick with me here, people — by the name of Divine Grace.

So Divine Grace was hanging out with me, and what I was looking for was like Colin to talk to me. But Divine Grace wasn’t going for that. Divine Grace had other things she wanted to talk to me about. And I was also, at the time, trying to heal from the sexual abuse — and again, very complicated, you’d have to read the first book to understand it — but it was definitely repressed memory, and also I had just set it aside and chosen not to think about it for a long time.

So when I went back, thinking, “Okay, if I’m going to heal, I’m going to need to see everything that happened to me” — I was abused by an older teenager, seven years older than I was, for many, many years, when I was a small child, and a lot of things happened. So I’d think of a terrible thing, I’d write that one down, and then I’d have to get to the next terrible thing, and the next terrible thing — kind of like the way you were saying about the feeling after your brother died, where it just seemed like there was nothing but darkness, nothing on the other side.

So Divine Grace said, “Okay — you’re in a dark room.” And I thought to myself, “Yeah, I am.” “You need to touch everything in the room before you leave the room. How will you know when you’re done?” —

[42:59] Lisa Cooper Ellison: — which was —

[43:00] Jill Christman: — exactly my circumstance. That was exactly how I was feeling in my life. I’d never thought of it that clearly. And I thought, “I won’t — there’s no way, that’s impossible, that’s an impossible task.” And then she said, simply, “Why don’t you turn on a light?”

And I thought, “Whoa, Divine Grace — that is some solid advice.” And from that moment on, I found ways to turn on a light. And I realized that healing from something does not involve a scrupulous cataloging of everything that was done to us. I think we need to know enough to be able to move forward and step out into the light. From that day forward, I never made it my task to make sure I could remember every terrible thing. There was no reason to.

This is another side note about Colin being with me — I didn’t realize how woo-woo I am, I guess I’m pretty woo-woo — but it was some weeks after Colin died. He’d been helping me heal from my bulimia, he was really working hard with me on it, and I was making good progress. And then after he died, I thought, “Well, at least I can go back to being bulimic again, because that’ll be a relief.” And I was in the bathtub when I had this thought — I remember it really specifically — and I heard him say, “I don’t even have a body anymore.” And I was like, “What?” And I never made myself throw up again, because I thought, here I am, I have the privilege of having this body — Colin doesn’t even have a body anymore — and I cannot do that to this one. I never did again.

So — do I recommend this as a cure for serious eating disorders? No. No, I do not. Do I recognize it as a cure to my own eating disorder? Absolutely.

[44:49] Lisa Cooper Ellison: And I think you just shared a beautiful way that you did let the light in, in your own life. And by the way — I am super witchy and super woo-woo, I channel the Akashic records, so, listeners know this — okay, I’m right there with you.

[45:04] Jill Christman: I don’t want to be alarming you or anything — Lord, I’m also like, I’m solid in a lot of ways, and I’ve just seen a lot. I’ve seen some things go down, so —

[45:14] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Right — you’ve lived life, and you understand there’s a lot there.

[45:18] Jill Christman: Yeah.

[45:19] Lisa Cooper Ellison: So, I think there’s a way that, even in the darkest of your experiences, you allowed the light in. Thinking about that moment in the bathtub — you heard Colin’s voice, and you recognized something, and it changed you. And sometimes we have these spontaneous — I’m going to call them healings, maybe that’s not the right word — but these spontaneous moments of change that happen in our lives, and that’s one way that we allow the light in. We allow ourselves to be changed.

And then there are the things that we do on the page that help us turn the light on, and that’s a conscious process. So, it’s always that dance between: how will you allow yourself to be changed by the process, and then how will that change show up on the page? And then, how do you let readers know that the person who has no idea how things are going to turn out, who is bumbling through the world, is not the person who’s writing this book — and how do you do that in a way that doesn’t feel hokey or contrived, like, “Break, break — this is the author, I’ve got a little bit of wisdom I need to drop right now, get ready to listen”?

[46:37] Jill Christman: Yeah — well, I think I might do a little of the “breaker breaker one” thing, fully honest with myself — hopefully with more subtlety, but maybe not always. I think this ties in a lot of things we’ve been talking about, but I want to say this out loud for your listeners who are trying to write hard stories.

I think, as a teacher, there are two fundamental questions — students don’t always know right away that they’re asking them, but this is what it boils down to. The first is: “Can I say this? Am I allowed to say this thing?” Because there’s a lot of fear. And my answer to that is always yes. You can do it. I have never, ever, ever met a secret that helped anybody — that’s the foundation of my life — except for maybe a perpetrator, or somebody who’s trying to hurt someone, or somebody who’s trying to control a narrative so that they might hurt or control someone. But for us, in our lives — carrying secrets is not going to help us, no matter what anybody else has told you. It just isn’t.

[47:34] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Yeah.

[47:34] Jill Christman: That’s a truth that I know. And so, I operate from that place, and I try to teach that to my students. And then the next question, of course — which is what you’re getting at here — is: so how do I do that?

[47:46] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Yeah.

[47:47] Jill Christman: So — thanks, lady, that’s super helpful! Writing this first book, Dark Room, was a big step on that for me, because I had all these dark areas in my own brain that I couldn’t even walk through, and once I let the light in, it wasn’t lurking there to scare or control me anymore. So, I could move forward into the rest of my writing, living, loving life.

So then — how do you do it? Well, I think a lot of it has to do with handling time in memoir and essays. I also edit the magazine River Teeth — we take any-length nonfiction, but usually somewhere between 1,500 and up to about 12,000 words, sometimes, rarely, has to be really, really good. Listen to me out there. But we also have a journal of flash micro-nonfiction that publishes every Monday for free — y’all should go sign up, it’s called Beautiful Things. At RiverTeethJournal.com you can sign up.

So, in my work as an editor, handling time is an issue at every level — micro essays, standard-length essays, all the way up through long form, all the way to book length. And by the time you get to book length, of course, you’ve got a real bear on your hands, because it is hard to handle time. It’s really hard. It’s one of the most difficult things we do. And by “handling time,” I mean you can’t ignore it — you have to face the complications of it, because you’re going to find new truth there.

So that’s one thing. And for me — this may feel too simplistic to folks — but I really have to find a place to stand. I have to know where I am, because my life is rich and complicated and has spanned many years, and you don’t know what’s going on in my brain. So, if I’m going to take you with me as a reader, I need to find a way to do that, in order to reduce that complication. I have to root myself in time.

So, when I say I rewrote this book from that year after Roe was overturned — that’s where I was standing to tell the story. So, if I was going to go back in time, it’s the past. If I was going to go forward in time, I’m thinking forward. And the “now” was kind of around that time. Because often this is the case with writers who are wrestling with time — they’re like, “Well, maybe I was there, maybe I was there…” And I’m like, figure out where you want to be, stand there, identify the question you’re trying to ask — because time and the urgent question you’re asking are linked together. And then let everything move from that point, almost like a dancer pivoting from that point. That’s how I do it. Easy peasy, huh?

[50:24] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Yeah. Super easy.

[50:26] Jill Christman: I tell my students: what we want to do here is condense this down into really clear language, so we say something beautiful and offer new meaning about the human condition. Easy peasy.

[50:40] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Yeah, just snap your fingers and it’s going to happen.

[50:43] Jill Christman: Yeah — it takes a lot of revision.

[50:46] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Yeah, it does. And I think allowing yourself to embrace that revision is writing, and that it’s okay if it takes a while. For me personally, I think those flash-forwards or authorial asides work best when they’re short —

[51:03] Jill Christman: Yes —

[51:04] Lisa Cooper Ellison: — and I think that’s part of the magic — on the page it’s just a sentence, or maybe two sentences, and then we’re back where we were in the scene. But where it fails is when it’s really long, because then we forget where we are in time, and you’ve told us too much. So, what you need to do is some of that writing off the book, on another page — write as much as you absolutely need to until you find the one true thing that belongs in your book. And when you find that sentence — that powerful sentence — you’ll know it in your body. You’ll have some sort of body awareness, like, “That’s the thing.” Then add that.

[51:45] Jill Christman: Yes — what you’re saying here is something that took me a long time to understand: that memoir writing is not an act of accumulation, it’s an act of extraction and subtraction. It’s tunneling your way through all that memory and everything else that’s going to come in and finding that one little thing — we could call it a diamond, sometimes it’s a piece of coal.

Another thing — and I mention this since we’re getting deep into this question, and I opened the page at random when I saw this — so much of this has to do with something really simple I call signposting. It’s just those moments, especially in a book-length memoir, where we have to move the reader with us, because they don’t have access to everything we have in our brains. So, I’m always like, more clarity, more clarity, more clarity. And I think what writers sometimes resist is, “Well, if I say that so clearly, that’s so obvious.” Yeah — well, it’s not obvious to the person who has no idea where you were born, where you grew up, where this was going, how long, all of that.

So, keeping those kinds of where and when’s clear — the signposting — I can give you some examples. I’m in chapter eight, not quite the middle of the book, called “Becoming the Mother I Am,” and I’m just looking at the beginnings of sections. One section begins: “But back then, five months pregnant with our first baby, I’m ashamed to say that, despite a minor in women’s studies from a flagship institution, I was still woefully ignorant of much of the history of abortion.” So, you know that I’m in the “now,” and I’ve done a lot of research on the history of abortion — no longer woefully ignorant — but I’m looking back on this time when I was pregnant for the first time. So, I’ve brought you with me to that place.

Or, for example, the next one: “When I was a child, between the ages of four and thirteen, we lived for nine years on a long strip of sand, separated from the Massachusetts mainland by the Mary Mac River.” So again, I’ve moved you with me — and if I’m doing it well, the signposting, you won’t even notice it. Not really.

[54:12] Jill (cont’d): Right — it’ll be like punctuation, and you won’t be sitting there going, “Wait, where the heck are we? Where did she go? Why are we in Massachusetts, and she’s six?” Sometimes I’ll have a student in my office, and they’ll explain to me where they are, and I’ll say, “What you just said — just write that down. That’s all there is to it.” There’s no secret sauce here — you just say the thing. Or, if I want to get fancy — and I often get fancy —

[54:36] Lisa Cooper Ellison: This is a pretty intricate book, I have to say. When I was reading it, I was right there with you — everything felt seamless. But because I’ve done a lot of editing, I’m always reading with two lenses at the same time, so I’m with you fully, and it doesn’t feel like there are any interruptions. And at the same time, I’m like, “Whoa, she’s doing this really intricate stuff with time — wait, there’s research coming in — but it feels really important for us to know this, and yet it feels seamless.” So, my hat’s off to you.

And what I’ll say is, listeners — if you want to understand how to do this, buy The Heart Folds Early. Actually, buy two copies: one for your bookshelf, and then what I call the “practice copy,” where you get out your highlighter and analyze things, and look at how Jill did this.

[55:26] Jill Christman: Well, thank you — that means a lot to me. The truth is, I love that part of writing — the part where you encounter a technical problem, like, “How am I going to do this?” — and then it’s the puzzle of figuring out how to make it happen, so it becomes textured and rich and real, and doesn’t lose anybody.

I love sections, I love working in pieces. I think this is really helpful for people — oftentimes I’ll write a full-out narrative of something that happened, and then realize I want to break that into three pieces. Say, three pieces on the history of rock climbing — I’m just making this up now — and then I’ll splice those together, and then a third thing that comes in might be the metaphor.

Now I’m thinking of a long essay I wrote called “Falling,” which you can read online for free — it won the Iron Horse Literary Review’s long-story prize, and they made it into a beautiful e-single. You can look up “Falling” by Jill Christman, and it’s a good example of this, because it has a core narrative, but it also goes back in time to explore something, and then has this research piece — about people who do free solo climbing, which is beyond my concept of what a person should do with their body. That’s another way I let in light, I think — by letting my obsessions come in.

So, like — we recently did this other climb, and I was like, “Who does that?” And then I do all this research, and I’m like, “This is an interesting way for me to think about my deep fear for my children.” You wouldn’t necessarily put them together, but sometimes when you put unexpected things together, it can help you find something new in the questions you’re asking.

So, I do a lot of color-coding, a lot of weaving. It feels like we can move things around easily — like in Microsoft Word — and we can, but we always see it in the box, always in that frame. So, if you can print it out, cut it up, and crawl around among the stacks, that can really help you find new and exciting patterns and connections. Don’t try just one thing — try all the different things.

[57:35] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Yeah, it’s so fun — and I’m a huge fan of using closet doors, because we usually don’t have anything on them, and there’s so much you can do. I 100% agree that part of this process needs to be tactile. Anything you can do to get it out of the computer and into your hands is so much more generative, and you’re going to have insights you cannot have when you’re looking at the screen.

Well, Jill, I could talk with you about this forever, because I can tell you are of my tribe, and there are so many things we could talk about in relation to your writing career, your book, all of it — but we have to wrap up. If you could leave listeners with one thing, what would that be?

[58:14] Jill Christman: I know you think a lot about resilience on this podcast, and I would say I believe very deeply in identifying our gifts as human beings and then using them for good in the world. One of the gifts I recognize in myself is that I can go to hard places in my life and writing and say something true — and I’m committed to making that space available to other writers and humans.

I believe you have to look hard, go deep, and allow yourself to move beyond what you thought you already knew — that both healing and writing, when we do them well, are a process of discovery. It’s not so much about courage as it is about finding the path that will help you carry the story you’ve been bearing alone. That’s one thing I’d say.

And speaking of solitude — the other thing I’d say is: let yourself pretend you’re writing only for yourself, that no one else has to see it. I once heard Cheryl Strayed say, in her wonderful way, that there is not a direct line from your laptop to The New Yorker — so you’re safe. Say what you need to say now. I broke that rule when I wrote this book — I invited everyone into the room. But know that sometimes something works for you for a while, and then it doesn’t work anymore. That’s okay — set it aside and do something different.

This might be the most important piece of editing advice I give: when you’re writing something difficult, you’re going to come up against the hard thing, and you’re going to feel it in your body — you’re going to want to leave. This is the moment where suddenly you’ve opened another tab, and you think you must check your email, or see if parking lot R2 is going to be closed on Memorial Day. Nobody cares — but you know, from that flight response, that you’ve come up against something. Recognize this, be gentle with yourself, and stay. Let yourself linger in the uncertainty — that’s a phrase I use a lot. Linger in the uncertainty. Slow down when it gets hard. Breathe into the space where you feel the pain, just as you would in yoga. This works in writing too. Those would be my top three tips.

[1:00:48] Lisa Cooper Ellison: I love those tips, and I love how you help us be courageous and also gentle with ourselves — because it’s so important to say what you want to say and also recognize that in the process of saying it, you may run into resistance.

[1:01:06] Jill Christman: Yeah.

[1:01:06] Lisa Cooper Ellison: And that’s okay — but that resistance is a point of curiosity, and when you can push past it, that’s where insights and realizations happen, and that’s where the big magic comes from when we’re writing.

[1:01:20] Jill Christman: Yeah, yeah. Well —

[1:01:21] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Jill, this has been so fun, and I just want to thank you for writing your book, and for coming on the show. It’s been a delight to have you on today.

[1:01:32] Jill Christman: Thank you, Lisa. It’s been so much fun.

[1:01:35] Lisa Cooper Ellison: Thank you so much for listening. If you’d like to learn more about Jill — and most importantly, buy a copy of The Heart Folds Early and her other books — please see the show notes for this episode.

And if you’d like to take this content a little deeper, grab your journal and begin by writing about a tough topic. It doesn’t have to be the toughest one, but pick something where the experience is hard, and it feels like you’re roaming around in the dark. Write for about 20 minutes, then take a break. When you come back, make a list of the moments within this event where it felt like you were in the “opposite world.” Pick the one that speaks to you and write about that. Notice what you learn about your story and your writing process. You can make my day by sharing your insights in the comments.

And speaking of your thoughts on the show — I’d like to give a quick shout-out and thank-you to Mark Kennedy and Marisa Rusello, who both asked if I could do an episode on reflection and adding insight from the author into your work. Thank you so much for this question — I crafted this episode with you in mind, and I hope you got everything you needed from it. Listeners, if you haven’t reached out to the show, I would love to hear from you too.

That’s it for today’s episode. Thank you so much for listening. I couldn’t do this podcast without your support. If you love this episode, here are three simple ways you can keep the show thriving: One — subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast platform, so you never miss an episode. Two — leave a five-star review, so others can find the show. Three — join my engaged, dynamic community by signing up for the Writing Your Resilience newsletter. As a thank-you, you’ll receive a free copy of Ditch Your Inner Critic: Five Tools to Transform Self-Doubt into Self-Support.

Until next time, remember: as you write and connect with the truest, most authentic version of your story, you become not just the writer, but the person you’re meant to be — and that, my friends, is the real freedom writing can offer.