Unlock the Hidden Power of Your Story: Transform Words into Mesmerizing Art with Anne Gudger’s CRAFT
Along with being true to my widow story, my what happened story, I asked myself questions that helped me turn my story into art. How do you bear the unbearable? was my guiding question, the one I didn’t have an answer to, the one I wrote into. I’ve long leaned into E.M. Forster’s quote: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” Ask an unanswerable question. Write your way into it.
Another north star question is from Ann Hood, Why now? That one guided me because it’d been decades since I’d been widowed, since I’d become a mom, remarried, had a daughter. It’d been decades since I worried I’d stay widowed like the women I saw in Greece, forever draped in black, their spines curved like commas, life on pause. Why now? had to be more than because the story still talked to me, still wanted to be written. Why now? led me to do my best to write both accurately about my grief, but also have the long view, not in some tidy and-here’s-what-I-learned-way, but how grief has shaped me, changed me. How I’m a different me than I would have been had I not been widowed at 28. Why now? helped me write from the scar, not the wound.
