Tip for Writing Elegiac Poetry

I worked through my grief about my dad by drawing, and my mom by writing. here's some tips I found about writing about loved ones we've lost:

Naomi Shihab Nye gave us an exercise: 1) Write down three questions you'd like to ask someone who's lost to you, either through death or estrangement. 2) List three to five physical items that come to mind when you think of this person. 3) Write down three to five quotes that you associate with the person. Then take bits and pieces of what you've written and work them into a poem of a few lines. You might find that those few lines are enough on their own, or you might expand them into a longer poem or even (for the purposes of this site) a prose piece.

Writing and Loss originally appeared on About.com Fiction Writing on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 18:13:55.