Gather Together

Gather Together

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In my Story Forest creativity course, Little Red Writing Hood, I ask writers the question: what medicine does your story carry?  In the fairytale, Little Red Riding Hood is bringing food and drink to her sick grandmother.  As writers, we bring medicine in the form of stories to the world.  It’s the kind of healing our world needs now more than ever.

But who heals the healers?  

That’s where community comes in.  

I’m just back from a two week residency at a low res children’s writing MFA program in Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN. The day I arrived, Renee Good was shot and killed by ICE agents.  The city was full of fear, masked agents, and defiant residents.  In the midst of this pain and trauma, we dared to create a small community of writers and dreamers whose sole goal is to help kids navigate this inexplicable world.  It was a balm to be in community, group wishing and group writing for a better tomorrow.  The fear didn’t go away any more than the masked men did, but something else arrived:  hope.

Coming together is how we survive hard times.  It can be out front protesting, or a softer gathering, loving and creating.  Both are forms of protest in a landscape that thrives on separatism and fear.

I’m home now and it feels a bit colder despite the fact that it was 5° degrees when I left, and 80° at home.  I need a community blanket again!  That’s why I’m looking forward to joining in conversation with two beautiful writers, Aimee Liu (Glorious Boy) and Elena Georgiou (The Immigrant’s Refrigerator) on February 9th on the Writer in the World substack that Aimee hosts. We are calling our conversation Writers In The World, Live: Create to Survive. I worked with these two women at Goddard College back in the day, and learned so much from them.  Elena has a poet’s ability to shape the world with words.  Aimee has the heart of an explorer, diving into the past to illuminate the present.  And as Shakespeare knew, when three women gather to talk about the world’s troubles, magic follows.  When those women are writers, that’s how magic spreads.

I hope you’ll join us on 2/9 for Writers In The World, Live: Create to Survive for a little community care.  We’re also gathering in Vermont this June for the Two Trees Solstice Retreat with the same goal in mind. However you can, reach out to your own writing community to lift each other up, to inspire, and remember we have power to do good.   

Stories are a safe place for hard conversations.  Let’s find the medicines we can offer the ills of the world, and infuse our work with healing.  The world soul is asking for it.  And there is no better way to heal the world than doing it together.

Hope to see you soon,

Sherri

Monday, February 9, 2026, at 10am PT/ 1pm ET

Writers In The World, Live: Create to Survive

Please join WITW’s Substack Live MFA faculty reunion, as Elena Georgiou, Sherri L. Smith and Aimee Liu discuss the essential role of creativity as an engine for solace, hope, and resilience in today’s tormented world.

Register in Advance/Join the Conversation Here

Elena Georgiou is the award-winning poet and fiction writer who formerly directed Goddard’s MFA in Creative Writing Program and currently teaches in the PhD program at the Rubenstein School at the University of Vermont. Sherri L. Smith is an award-winning author of fiction, nonfiction, and graphic novels for young adults and kids, and a faculty member of Hamline University’s MFA in Children’s Writing. Aimee Liu, the bestselling author of four novels and numerous books of nonfiction, helms the substack MFA Lore.

Rubble and Remembrance

Rubble and Remembrance

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Hey writers and creative souls,

In case you missed it and are interested, Reiko was invited to deliver the Trinity College Distinguished Scholar Lecture this year. In it, she talked about trauma and healing narratives in connection with the 80th Day of Remembrance (Feb 19, 2022), which you can read more about below.  Here is a link.  She discusses how she became a writer, and how her own experiences and process affect the structures of her book.  It’s the other side of the tarot persona, and definitely worth a look:   

Rubble and Remembrance: Trauma Narratives and Healing On and Off the Page

 2022 marks the 80th anniversary of the incarceration of the Japanese Americans during World War II, an event that would change Rahna Reiko Rizzuto’s life, though she would not be born until decades later. Rizzuto grew up not knowing that her mother spent her first years of life as a prisoner of her own government in a pop-up camp in the Colorado desert, and once she learned the truth, the camp had been reduced to a makeshift graveyard and some concrete barracks footprints. Her quest to understand her family’s experience and the silences that surrounded it grew into three books, and took her to Hiroshima, Japan, where she was interviewing the survivors of the first atomic bomb used on civilians when the 9/11 terrorist attacks unfolded before her Brooklyn-based family’s eyes. At Trinity, Rizzuto will discuss her experiences chasing lost histories and missing memories, and her intentions, as a writer, to construct her narratives to depict and mimic trauma.

Pele’s Fire Memories

Pele’s Fire Memories

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“Honestly, I was surprised at just how amazing this retreat was. I expected it to be great, of course, but there is something about this place that opened all of us to possibility, new ideas and joy.  Of course, Hawaii is my home, and working with writers is my intellectual home – a calling that feeds my soul.  But I did not expect to be dancing in the line for dinner or sleeping so deeply to the sounds of the night.  It was a privilege to be a part of this retreat, and when the community of writers insisted that it should happen again in 2017, well, there was no argument from us.  Here’s a video of what it was like for us through the images of Rose Sabangan (with the addition of an image from the current eruption that shows what it’s like right now).  Join us this year! We’d love to have you.”

– Reiko