ALL WRITE NOW Episode #9

Be Prompted: What is Your Goodbye Ritual?

Welcome to this week’s episode of ALL WRITE NOW where I propose prompts and offer nuggets of creative nonfiction craft wisdom. And a very special welcome to my new subscribers—thank you for joining me. I am thrilled to be sharing this week’s stage with the fabulous Elizabeth Austin who has been crafting generous, heart-stirring narratives about life after her daughter’s leukemia diagnosis. Today she is speaking to Writing as Ritual.

This week we are talking about creating goodbye rituals, a theme that came to me after reading Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad. In gorgeous prose, she shows us how illness can rob a young person’s sense of promise, mold their identity into painful shapes, and force them—too soon—to think about creating goodbye rituals. After scattering her dear friend’s ashes at the Taj Mahal, Suleika writes, “It has introduced me to the role of ritual in mourning—the ceremonies that allow us to shoulder complicated feelings and confront loss; that make room for the seemingly paradoxical act of acknowledging the past as a path toward the future.”

How do you acknowledge the goodbyes in your life, whether large or small?

How, as writers, might we incorporate ritual into our practice to awaken our creative spark?

This week’s wisdom à la Elizabeth Austin:

Letting go is rarely a clean break. Often, it’s a slow, uneasy shift that leaves us suspended between what was and what comes next. As writers, we often face this liminal space not just in life, but also in our creative practice. We carry old drafts, abandoned projects, stories we’re struggling to finish or afraid to start. We carry grief, anxiety, and the clutter of should haves and what ifs.

How do we release that burden enough to create anew?

I’ve found comfort in ritual, not just as a personal balm, but as a writing tool. Ritual allows us to externalize what weighs on us, giving form to the formless. For me, it began after my daughter finished cancer treatment, and the oncologist who guided us through the darkest years of our lives retired. I wasn’t prepared for the grief of that transition, and I struggled to cope. I was afraid that this sudden change would tip the balance of equilibrium that was keeping my daughter in remission and slide us into relapse.

I began writing letters to my daughter’s retired oncologist. They went unsent and unpolished, but before every follow-up appointment I’d scribble one in my journal. Afterward, though I knew I would never have the opportunity to share them with her, my anxieties eased. The letters were a ritual of release. They were how I made space inside myself for something new.

Writing itself can be a ritual– not just the act of typing or scribbling, but the way we frame it. Try this: before beginning your day’s work, write down what you’re letting go of: doubt, fear, perfectionism, even a sentence that refuses to behave. Burn it, bury it, or simply close the notebook. Then begin.

Or: end your writing session by jotting down a few lines to whatever guided you that day, be it gratitude to a character, a scene, or the silence that helped you focus. Letting go doesn’t mean forgetting; it means making room.

This is not busywork; it’s intentionality. Writing as ritual helps us access the subconscious, sidestep resistance, and hold space for emotional undercurrents. It allows us to move through transitions, on the page and off it, with more grace.

Let your writing be more than output. Let it be ceremony, and honor the work— and then honor the self doing the work.

This week’s prompt:

Write about a goodbye you experienced that provided a major turning point in your life. This could be a death but any kind of goodbye that happened to you. Did you create a ritual to mark the closing of a door or the opening of another one? Describe the goodbye itself and open the lens to the greater meaning of the goodbye.

Now, go write!

With love,

Megan

Elizabeth Austin’s Substack chronicles her family's post-cancer life: writingelizabeth.substack.com. Find her at writingelizabeth.com and on Instagram@writingelizabeth