Writing Without A Net

My closest companions after the death of my husband were the books I wrote. Long into the exhaustion of countless nights after finishing my day as a psychotherapist and throughout the weekends where the sounds of my aloneness were deafening, I wrote my second book on a contractual deadline that taught me I could write without waiting for a muse of any sort.

I did not have the luxury to wait for her to show up. Psychosocial Care of  Cancer Survivors: A Clinician’s Guide and Workbook for Providing Wholehearted Care was a strong teacher of discipline and craft. In the end, I was only slightly sad to lose the original title, Wholehearted. Another lesson in the world of publishing .

While I envy people who have peaceful, secluded writing cabins, solitary rooms in dark green forest glens, dedicated spaces close to the crashing waves of an azure blue ocean in which to create, I have learned to write anywhere. I wrote my first book in my garage, sitting at a makeshift desk in front of the washing machine. Such is the way of woman who create, we write in- between picking up the kids and cleaning up the kitchen.

I was once confronted by a writing teacher who told me to take myself and my work seriously. This is invaluable encouragement to all women who have a story within their hearts and minds that wants to be written.

I write with a soundtrack. Music seems to shift my brain into a spaciousness far beyond the daily tasks of my life. There are pieces of music that relate to my memoir and, when I hear them again, I am transported to certain passages and chapters of the book, oftentimes in storms and floods of feelings.

Odyssey of Ashes: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Letting Go, the memoir that tells the story of John’s sudden death and the ensuing healing journeys I embarked upon, brought me to the center of my heartbreak and threw me time and time again onto dark and foreign shores of experiences that I struggled to understand. Writing through waves of grief brought me to tears and there were times I was sobbing so deeply that the words before me blurred as if rivulets of water had fallen upon ink. I broke open as I wrote about what terrified me and what I somehow couldn’t speak out loud. No one else heard these stories except for my editor who held me gently throughout the process of writing this book.

“Write raw”, was the message that my writing teacher, Diane di Prima had instilled in me decades previous to the writing of the traumatic experience that became this memoir. This instruction, this edict, to cut out the fluff and to recognize and avoid writing that is stale or trite continues to serve me when I write but in no other manuscript to date has it been more essential. And while I am not a writer who carefully plans my books, preferring to wander around like a traveling troubadour, I have learned the importance of structure as a way to create flow in a manuscript.

My editor, Brooke Warner, patiently urged me to make sense so that others would actually understand what they were reading. My writing demands that I weave together raw emotion, a poetic tone, and a strong scaffolding to hold the work.

I feel called to write that which gives back to the reader. I have spent decades of my life listening to the stories of other people with the intention of helping them discover their innermost selves. I’m a listener to the stories of other people. I write with the wish that the reader receives something that they can carry with them, something that, I hope, helps them along their path.

The importance of this goal made me wonder if my starkly personal memoir would translate to those other than myself. Wonder, if not worry, about putting this deeply private story of sorrow out into the world haunted me. And so, I concentrated on the universal themes of grief and loss, those inevitable moments of life shared by us all.  In the writing of the memoir, I would intersperse my own experience by reaching beyond the pages and taking the hand of another in the hopes of offering solace and inspiration.

Memoir comes from the French word for memory. The memory of an event, a moment in time, people both living and dead fill the pages of a memoir.  We write to remember, to honor, to heal, and maybe to give ourselves just one more chance to relive a part of our life that is now slipping into our past. I wrote Odyssey of Ashes without a net during a time in my life when I lived on a ledge that I hoped would hold until I had the power to soar into a future that I did not anticipate without my husband.  I am grateful to this book for helping me to fly.

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CHERYL KRAUTER is a San Francisco bay area psychotherapist with more than forty years of experience in the field of depth psychology and human consciousness. A cancer survivor, she is the author of Surviving the Storm: A Workbook for Telling Your Cancer Story (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Psychosocial Care of Cancer Survivors: A Clinician’s Guide and Workbook for Providing Wholehearted Care (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her memoir, Odyssey of Ashes: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Letting Go, was published by She Writes Press in July. She lives with her personal assistant, a cat named Amie.

Find out more about Cheryl on her website http://www.cherylkrauter.com/

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Odyssey of Ashes: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Letting Go begins with the sudden death of Cheryl Krauter’s spouse. Five months later, in a stroke of irony and magic, her husband wins a long-desired guided fly fishing trip in a raffle—and Cheryl decides to go in his place, fulfilling a promise to scatter his ashes by a trout stream.

Part I of this memoir is an account of the first year after Cheryl’s husband’s death, where she becomes an explorer in the infinite stream of grief and loss, a time traveler between the darkness of sorrow and the light of daily life. Part II concludes with stories of the poignant and humorous adventures she had during the ensuing year. Tying it all together and woven throughout is Cheryl’s account of the creation of an altar assembled during the three-day ritual of Los Días de los Muertos.

Poetic and mythological, Odyssey of Ashes is a raw story of loss and the deep transformation that traveling through darkness and returning to light can bring.

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Category: On Writing