Winner, ICQI 2022 Outstanding Qualitative Book Award In Writing the Self in Bereavement: A Story of Love, Spousal Loss, and Resilience, Reinekke Lengelle uses her abilities as a researcher, poet, and professor of therapeutic writing to tell a heartfelt and fearless story about her grief after the death of her spouse and the year and a half following his diagnosis, illness, and passing. This book powerfully demonstrates that writing can be a companion in bereavement. It uses and explains the latest research on coming to terms with spousal loss without being prescriptive. Integrated with this contemporary research are stories, poetry, and reflections on writing as a therapeutic process. The author unflinchingly explores a number of themes that are underrepresented in existing resources: how one deals with anger associated with loss, what a healthy response might be to unfinished business with the deceased, continuing conversations with the beloved (even for agnostics and atheists), ongoing sexual desire, and secondary losses. As a rare book where an author successfully combines a personal story, heart-rending poetry, up-to-date research on grief, and an evocative exploration of taboo topics in the context of widowhood, Writing the Self in Bereavement is uniquely valuable for those grieving a spouse or other loved one, those supporting others in bereavement, and those interested in the healing power of poetry and life writing. Researchers on death and dying, grief counsellors, and autoethnographers will also benefit from reading this resonant resource on love and loss.

Techniques of Grief Therapy: Assessment and Intervention continues where the acclaimed Techniques of Grief Therapy: Creative Practices for Counseling the Bereaved left off, offering a whole new set of innovative approaches to grief therapy to address the needs of the bereaved. This new volume includes a variety of specific and practical therapeutic techniques, each conveyed in concrete detail and anchored in an illustrative case study. Techniques of Grief Therapy: Assessment and Intervention also features an entire new section on assessment of various challenges in coping with loss, with inclusion of the actual scales and scoring keys to facilitate their use by practitioners and researchers. Providing both an orientation to bereavement work and an indispensable toolkit for counseling survivors of losses of many kinds, this book belongs on the shelf of both experienced clinicians and those just beginning to delve into the field of grief therapy.

This groundbreaking anthology represents the critical inquiry of literary scholars into the trope of loss and mourning in the work of women writers from the Caribbean archipelago. There is a great deal of recent scholarly interest in the relationship of loss and mourning yet there are no books specifically devoted to an examination of this trope in the works of Caribbean women writers. To fill this gap, this collection of original essays examines subjects that encompass the brutality of slavery, oppressive dictatorships, AIDS, and the catastrophe of the Mount Pele volcano that appear in the writings of women from the English, Spanish and French speaking Caribbean. It is an important addition to the contemporary discourse on loss and mourning. The project is an exciting and vital one because it brings together a multiplicity of perspectives and critical approaches to examine the works of writers such as Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, Julia Alvarez and Maryse CondÃ(c). What emerges is a complex portrait of loss, mourning and remembrance that both enriches and challenges customary discourses of loss, mourning and melancholia.

Writing autobiography is a risky business. What is shameful can be inadvertently rather than deliberately revealed. Yet reading autobiography can also be risky, as it may lead to the confrontation of shame in ourselves. Perhaps it is this element of risk, together with the magnetism of another person's confession of shameful experience, that make us such avid readers of autobiography. Rosamund Dalziell proposes that shame is the driving force in many Australian autobiographies. Indeed, she suggests that the representation of shame is fundamental to the autobiographical process. Shame seeks concealment-and this, she argues, explains both why this fascinating link has not before been explored and why, when it is pointed out, we immediately know it to be authentic. Shameful Autobiographies looks at pervasive patterns of shame in the autobiographies of such leading Australian writers as Germaine Greer, Sally Morgan, Bernard Smith, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Morris Lurie, Ruby Langford Ginibi and Robert Dessaix. In so doing it establishes the centrality of shame to problems of Australian identity and to current political debate-for instance, it is shame that fuels angry repudiations of the so-called 'black armband' view of history. The calm clarity of Rosamund Dalziell's writing strengthens her powerful insights and arguments, the most potent of which is that autobiographical confrontion with shame can heal deep wounds, both for writers and for readers. This mature and innovative book will enrich the experience of all readers of autobiography.

This is the first of four intended volumes (only two of which got published) devoted to critical analysis of Irish writing since the 1950s. Each was intended to present a collection of essays that, taken together, should provide a solid foundation for scholars and students interested in the extraordinary achievements of Irish writers in the last three decades. The essays in this volume map out aspects of the cultural, social and political context of contemporary literature and predominant concerns within a given genre. The contributors as Anthony Bradley, Terence Brown, Gerald Dawe, John Wilson Foster, Tamsin Hargreaves, Claudia Harris, Dillon Johnston, Colbert Kearney, Edna Longley, Arthur E. McGuinness, Christopher Murray, Fintan O'Toole, Andrew Parkin, Anthony Roche, Michael Toolan, and Walentina Witoszek and Patrick F. Sheeran.

Exploring nearly sixty years of memoir and autobiography, Writing Desire examines the changing identity of gay men writing within a historical context. Distinguished scholar and psychoanalyst Bertram J. Cohler has carefully selected a diverse group of ten men, including historians, activists, journalists, poets, performance artists, and bloggers, whose life writing evokes the evolution of gay life in twentieth-century America. By contrasting the personal experience of these disparate writers, Cohler illustrates the social transformations that these men helped shape. Among Cohler's diverse subjects is Alan Helms, whose journey from Indiana to New York's gay society represents the passage of men who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, when homosexuality was considered a hidden "disease." The liberating effects of Stonewall's aftermath are chronicled in the life of Arnie Kantrowitz, the prototypical activist for gay rights in the 1970s and the founder the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation. The artistic works of Tim Miller and Mark Doty evoke loss and shock during of the early stages of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Cohler rounds out this collective group portrait by looking at the newest generation of writers in the Internet age via the blog of BrYaN, who did the previously unthinkable: he "outed" himself to millions of people. A compelling mix of social history and personal biography, Writing Desire distills the experience of three generations of gay America. Finalist, LGBT Studies, Lambda Literary Foundation

DIVA study of melancholia, sexuality, and representation in literary and visual texts that can be read at the crossroads of psychoanalysis and the arts in modernism./div