A SELF-PACED COURSE AND WORKBOOK
Legacy Writing
A Practice for Those Leaving and Those Left Behind
Legacy writing exists because almost everyone, at some point in their life, will stand in one of two places.
Either they'll be the one running out of time, aware of the words they haven't said yet to the people they love.
Or they'll be the one left behind, holding whatever remains, wishing for just one more sentence from the person who's gone.
Both of those are the same prayer in different directions.
And writing — specific, honest, unperformed writing — is one of the few practices humans have ever found that actually meets that longing.
Not fixes it.
Meets it.
It's what my mother did in the journals she left behind, which I've read a hundred times since she died.
It's what my father did in the paintings he left on the walls, which speak to me even without words.
A painting of my mom, by my dad.
I built this course because I have watched, over and over, how the people who write — before, during, or after loss — are the ones who help carry the relationship forward.
Writing is the way the love keeps moving.
Writing is how what mattered doesn't disappear.
And it's a practice anyone can do, with a pen and a page and a few quiet minutes a day.
You don't have to be a writer.
You just have to be someone who has loved somebody.
・Inside the Course・
Module One
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Module Two
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Module Three
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Module Four
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Module Five
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Module Six
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Dear person who found this course,
I don't know what brought you here, but I can guess.
You're either someone who has become aware that there are words you want to leave behind — maybe because of a diagnosis, maybe because of your age, maybe just because you've gotten honest about the fact that you won't always be here and the people you love will outlive you.
Or you're someone who has lost somebody.
Maybe recently. Maybe years ago.
And you've been carrying something unwritten about them for a long time.
Either way, I want to tell you a few things before we start.
First, you don't have to be a writer to do this.
You don't have to be good at writing.
You don't have to have anything figured out before you pick up the pen.
The whole practice is designed for people who have never written anything on purpose in their lives.
You will be fine.
Second, I'm not going to try to fix your grief, if you have any.
I'm not going to tell you to look on the bright side.
I'm not going to promise you that writing will make the pain go away.
I used to tell audiences that practicing gratitude could help them weather any storm, and then I buried both of my parents and realized I had been lying without knowing it.
Some losses aren't storms. Some losses are more like tornadoes, and no amount of positive thinking will put the house back together.
What writing can do is give you somewhere to put what you're carrying.
And in my experience, that is enough.
Not to fix anything.
But to let you keep living with it, instead of being flattened by it.
Third, this practice is ancient.
Humans have been writing their way through love and loss for as long as we've had writing.
People have done it in letters home from war.
In the margins of Bibles and prayer books.
In the backs of recipe books, in handwriting the family would read for generations.
Fourth, the research is real.
There is forty years of neuroscience showing that expressive writing changes the brain, the body, and the capacity to carry hard things.
We'll talk about all that in this course.
But I don't need you to believe the science to begin.
I just need you to trust me enough to try.
Me, at my kitchen table with my favorite writing partner.
Here's what I'm going to offer you:
Six modules.
Video and audio you can listen to on a walk, in your car, in your kitchen.
A workbook that is mostly empty, because the writing you're going to do is the point.
Prompts that have worked for the dying, the grieving, the ones who sit bedside in hospice, and the ones who find a parent's journal twenty years after they've died and finally understand who they were.
And my voice telling you what I know, because I have been in both of those places.
I have grieved people I didn't get enough words from.
And I have written my way through losing almost everyone who raised me.
I am not going to pretend I know what your grief looks like.
But I know what this practice has done for mine, and I know what I have watched it do for others.
If you came here looking for a trick, I don't have one.
If you came here looking for a companion, you found one.
Welcome.
