Writing as Emotional Release

* Writing gives form to emotions that feel too chaotic to express any other way. Chris described reaching for journaling at 3am in the hospital because it was the one thing that helped him vocalize what he couldn’t otherwise say.

* Revisiting difficult experiences through writing helps you understand them more fully, often revealing things you didn’t know you were carrying. Chris discovered the depth of his PTSD only after writing about it.

Living Life Twice

* The Anaïs Nin quote that opened the session frames the whole conversation: writers return to experience through the page and find meaning they couldn’t access in the moment.

* Circling the same experience across different forms, poems, then prose, then again, is not repetition but deepening.

Poetry vs. Prose

* Poetry compresses; prose expands. Chris found that writing in longer form allowed him to be more descriptive and to trace the full arc of Brayden’s story in a way his poems couldn’t.

* The two forms feed each other. The poems were the raw material; the memoir piece was the synthesis.

Authenticity Over Audience

* Write for an audience of one first. Metrics and readership are secondary to honesty on the page.

* Discomfort is a signal, not a stop sign. If it makes you uncomfortable to share, that is usually where the real material is.

Permission to Feel

* Caregivers and writers often mistake perfectionism for strength. Giving yourself permission to break down is not a weakness. It is what allows you to come back.

* “Don’t mistake our strength for obligation.” Stepping in isn’t the same as wanting to.

Craft Tips

* Read your work aloud once right after writing, then again a few days later. If it still hits, you have got something.

* You don’t have to publish everything you write. The emotional release has value in itself.

* Dig until you hit bone. You’ll know when you’re there.

The Underrepresented Caregiver Voice

* Caregiving is largely absent from literary writing, in part because caregivers are too overwhelmed to write. That is exactly why those who can should.

* The sandwich generation, people caring for both children and aging parents, is a vast and underserved readership hungry to feel seen.

On Community and Publication

* Writing needs a reader to complete its purpose. Live sessions and Substack help close that loop.

* Collaboration across forms, poems turned to songs, prose turned to community conversation, extends the reach and life of the work.

Resources

People and Publications

* Jeannie Ewing — I Grow Strong Again on Substack

* Becca Roth — singer-songwriter on Substack who turned Chris’s poem “604 Daydreams” into an original song

* Hi-Fi Amateur — Substacker who set Chris’s poem “Alpenglow” to music

* Zoe (I Grow) — creates art poems where the words are shaped visually

* The Alchemist’s Cabin — Substack publication accepting Chris’s three-poem pack for publication at the end of July/early August

Events

* Write Doe Bay — writing retreat that Michelle and Joe attended together

Chris’s Work

* There is Grace in the Breaking — guest essay published on I Grow Strong Again

* Last Rites — poem read during the session

* Above Water — poem read during the session, accepted for publication

Find Chris and Michelle

* Chris’s Substack: Chris B. Writes

* States of Matter — Michelle’s Substack

* Michelle’s memoir Lessons Unplanned — releasing September 2026

Thank you for listening, reading, and being with us!

All the best,

Michelle and Chris

Show Notes: A Conversation with Poet Lupe Eide Tucker

In this live session, I sat down with my longtime friend and award-winning poet Lupe Eide Tucker to talk about poetry: how it begins, why it matters, and why it’s more accessible than most of us think.

Lupe is a poet, educator, and translator based in Florida. She holds an MFA, has been published in journals including Third Coast, and was mentored by Maggie Smith through the AWP Mentorship Program. She also translated Venezuelan poet Oriette D’Angelo’s collection A Homeland of Swarms.

All the resources below are such a treasure!

Resources Mentioned

Programs & Communities

* AWP Mentor-Mentee Program — A matchmaking program pairing emerging writers with established mentors for a structured three-month experience. Open to writers at any stage. (awpwriter.org)

* Diverse (diversepoets.com) — An online poetry community that posts prompts twice a week. A great low-stakes place to start writing and sharing.

* O-Miami — A Miami-based poetry festival and creative writing community.

* The Binders — A Facebook community for writers that normalizes rejection by celebrating 100 rejections a year as a goal.

Podcasts & Shows

* The Slowdown — A daily poetry podcast started by former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. Past hosts include Maggie Smith. Each episode features a curated poem with a brief reflection.

* Poetry in America — A PBS series now in its fifth season. Each 30-minute episode offers a close reading of one poem, featuring a range of guests and cultural figures. Also has a Substack called Along These Lines.

* On Being with Krista Tippett — Lupe credits a 2013 episode featuring poet Marie Howe as the moment that brought her back to writing after fifteen years away.

Websites

* American Academy of Poets (poets.org) — Offers a Poem-a-Day feature publishing contemporary poetry from living poets. Also, a great place to explore prose poems and hybrid forms.

* Poetry Foundation (poetryfoundation.org) — Another excellent resource for discovering prose poems and learning about poetic forms.

Books & Authors to Read

* Ross Gay — Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. Lupe’s top recommendation for accessible, gorgeous, everyday poetry.

* Dorianne Laux — Imagistic, lyrical poetry. Recently nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

* Marie Howe — The Good Thief. Lupe calls her a must-read.

* Maggie Smith — Poet and memoirist. (You Could Make This Place Beautiful — Michelle is currently reading her memoir.)

* Gregory Pardlo — Poet and memoirist. Lupe quotes his definition of voice: “Voice is choice”—the accumulation of decisions a writer makes about diction, imagery, and line.

* Adolfo Bécquer — The Spanish Romantic poet whose lines Lupe transcribed as a student in Ecuador, sparking her love of poetic musicality.

* Mario Benedetti — Uruguayan poet, also read during Lupe’s schooling in Ecuador.

* Jean Toomer — Harlem Renaissance writer whose prose poems Lupe especially loves.

* Eleni Vakalo — Greek poet whose line “it’s your breath that freezes around the moon” became the seed of Lupe’s poem Ode to the Sugar Ants.

* Oriette D’Angelo — Venezuelan poet whose collection A Homeland of Swarms was translated by Lupe. Rich in prose poetry.

* Kevin Young (ed.) — An anthology of African-American poetry spanning the 1800s to the present, featuring poets including Rita Dove, Langston Hughes, and Jean Toomer.

Poetic Forms Discussed

* American Sentences — A 17-syllable single-line form, a contemporary riff on the haiku. A great bridge from prose to poetry.

* Ekphrastic poetry — Poetry written in response to a work of art (visual, musical, dramatic, or literary). Example: Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo.

* Prose poetry — Poetry written without line breaks, in paragraph form. Lupe recommends exploring this form, especially for prose writers curious about poetry.

* Triptych — A poem or piece structured in three movements, as in Lupe’s Triptych of Dayphilia Disowned, also published in Third Coast.

Books on Craft & Creativity

* Julia Cameron — The Artist’s Way. Introduced Lupe to morning pages and the practice of identifying and releasing internal censors.

* Rick Rubin — The Creative Act. On writing for yourself as the first audience and lowering the stakes.

* Elizabeth Gilbert — Big Magic. On creative channeling and remaining open to ideas before they move on.

* Maggie Smith — You Could Make This Place Beautiful (memoir).

Where to Find Lupe

* Website: notenoughpoetry.com

* Published in: Third Coast (Western Michigan University)

* Also on Substack (focused on her work as an educator supporting homeschooling families)

* Search: Lupe Eide Tucker

“Someone kicked my ass. Can I talk about that?”

Yes, yes, we can, Lynn.

On Friday, I sat down with Lynn Broderick of Writing Unfiltered, but I didn’t want to interview her. Because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about curation, and how writers (okay, mostly me) plan, edit, and revise like a carpenter with sandpaper, too eager to smooth out the edges. I didn’t want to sand down the conversation. Partly, I wanted to honor Lynn’s Substack vibe, Writing Unfiltered, and partly because of our writing focus this month: the lyric essay.

Over the past few weeks in the Story Space community, we’ve been talking about personal writing in a fragmented form, a structure that mimics memory rather than the familiar three-part structure. We’ve focused on how we can tell our stories, but in this conversation, we stumbled into some pretty solid reasons why to write your story.

Maybe the format helped; instead of prepping questions, I came up with six topics: identity, self-help, kicking ass, falling apart, body time, and write-or-bust. Then I rolled a die and let the number decide what we talked about, no chance of a predetermined arc.

I rolled, and we landed on sugar addiction, yoga, grief, getting beaten up because of a cornfield indiscretion, and how showering is optional on deadline days. I rolled a four three times in a row, but the conversation still found its own rhythm and coherence. We kept coming back to what mattered most: writing, family, and the cost of both.

The Why

And we eventually landed on the why.

Why do we excavate these memories in the first place? Why do we dig through the hard stuff–the grief, the body we’ve misunderstood–or revisit the past selves we would rather forget? And what does turning it into a story do for us?

Lynn didn’t set out to write about her mother’s death in fragments. She had been keeping notes all year, searching her app for the word “mom,” and when the time came to write about her mother’s final days, she just stitched them together. The form of the post was created in pieces across moments of her mother’s decline, and it matched the shape of Lynn’s life when her mother was gone.

“I didn’t really say to myself, hey, why am I doing this versus my normal way,” she told me. “It was just a different technique.”

That’s the thing about writing that comes from real life. The structure isn’t always a craft decision. Sometimes it’s just the shape the experience left you in.

The Keeper of Stories

But Lynn’s motivation wasn’t primarily about readers or subscribers. It was about her son.

“I want my son to have these stories,” she said. “I don’t think you realize when you’re young that your parents have stories. And later on it gets to be too late, and they’re gone, and you’re like, shoot, I should have asked more questions.”

Lynn called her mother the keeper of all stories, who remembered every embarrassing detail, every childhood moment, every name and date. But toward the end, when Lynn tried to ask her about the past, her mother said only, “I don’t remember.” That was a long time ago.

So Lynn writes for the keeper of stories, so her son can know his grandmother and his mother, and because she is the keeper now.

I suspect some of us are answering this higher calling to write, so our stories don’t slip into the void because stories are lineage, a thread that links families, people across generations.

What It Costs

We rolled a six, the writing-or-bust number, and shared what writing costs, namely time, presence, and the ability to shower on deadline day. That last one made me laugh because I know it. On the days I was deep in my memoir, I got up at four in the morning, and my husband would find me in the same chair three hours later.

Writing my memoir required me to return to a decade I had already lived through once (and barely survived). The deeper I got, the more it pulled me under. There were days it felt like a hole I kept falling into, no visible bottom, just perpetual descent. It cost me time with my family. It cost me personal security. It cost me the version of myself that felt steady and present.

There had to be a bottom. Eventually, I hit it.

And Lynn said something that describes it perfectly: “Any nonfiction writer that’s really digging into their own story — it costs you security. It costs you pain. A lot of things are going to bubble up.”

But when you come out the other side, you’ve processed something. You’ve made meaning out of what happened, not for you but for whoever reads the words. In my memoir, I wanted women to know they have more choices than they think, and that even when they screw up, it’s still worth taking a risk.

We write because the stories will disappear if we don’t; because the people we love are getting older, and we are too. We write because our bodies taught us something the hard way, and we’re still trying to understand it. We write because something broke us open, and we need to know what was inside.

The form follows meaning, and the why comes first.

Watch the live. Roll the dice and tell me about your why.

Lynn Broderick writes at Writing Unfiltered on Substack. Go find her there.

The why is our focus this week. What’s your why? I’d love to hear it in the comments.

Also, hank you Margaret Williams, MS, ACC, Marlana aka Outtamydamnmind, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lynn J. Broderick!

A personal story is more than just a memoir or an anecdote; it’s a way for you to draw out universal meaning from your life and connect to your readers or listeners or just more deeply with yourself.

I realized this as a teacher when my students would try to trick me into telling stories; instead of whatever the lesson of the day was, they wanted their teacher, not just a learning target. A story always trumps a fact or lesson.

But, I also understand, as a memoirist, that stories can be difficult to excavate because we don’t think they have value, or they remind us of something we would rather forget. By bringing that story to light, you not only help yourself process and change the narrative but also help others identify. We are all humans with universal stories, after all.

So, I’m expanding my Substack, the states of matter, to include a writing/storytelling community I’m calling the story space. Every Monday, I will go live with a story, an idea, a technique, or just a conversation that will help you discover your story—and how to use it to connect with the world.

Anyone can access these live sessions. Free subscribers have access to posts that go deeper into the month's subject, paid subscribers have access to 1-on-1 sessions and Zoom feedback.

Subscribe on Substack, or upgrade for the full experience. Find out more here, or drop me a DM.

Check out these resources from the live session:

Ross Gay, excerpts from The Book of Delights

Lydia Yuknavitch, an Interview about writing The Chronology of Water

Maggie Nelson (Bluets), Interview

with gratitude,

Michelle Ray

This video is a demo of a Story Discovery session, a one-on-one video call that helps you dig into your history to find your story.

What can you do with your story?

More than you think, it’s not just about writing a memoir or examining your past for endless reflections; it’s really about learning how to share your personal experiences to create trust, connection, and even opportunity.

As a free subscriber, you have access to my videos and posts, and next month, we will drill down on what it takes to find and tell your story well. Paid subscribers will unlock free story discovery sessions and access to exclusive group Zoom calls for feedback and to celebrate your work. As David pointed out in this video, finding and telling your story can be a challenge, but it’s always worth it because you not only reclaim your own narrative but also help others understand theirs.

Right now, I’m running a special that lasts until the end of April: a 25% discount on the paid tier. Consider that most coaching sessions run $50-$200 per hour, and with my yearly subscription, you get 4 sessions for less than what you would pay for one hour, plus other perks. I’ve been a teacher for 25 plus years, and I believe in the power of a story and want to help you tell yours.

Drop by the states of matter. Or visit my website to learn more. I would love to hear from you!