Encore Episode: Breaking the Silence with Melanie Brooks

Send us Fan MailIn this encore conversation, author and teacher Melanie Brooks and I explore the lifelong impact of silence—within our families, our communities, and our writing lives. Drawing from her memoir, A Hard Silence, Melanie shares how unspoken truths shaped her understanding of grief, identity, and faith, and what it took to finally claim her voice on the page. Together, we discuss how silence keeps writers stuck, the power of finishing the stories that haunt us, and how narrative medicine helped her weave two complex narratives into one.Episode Highlights2:55: The pain of living with secrets5:54: Navigating anticipatory grief15:45: The transformative power of finishing your story20:00 The magic of timing and the stories we tell ourselves26:00 The influence of narrative medicine on Melanie’s story30:00 Marrying two stories into one37:00 Melanie’s best writing adviceResources for this Episode: My Family Kept My Dad's Secret For Years. I Wasn't Prepared For What Telling The Truth Would Mean.Interrogating the Cost of Silence and Finding My VoiceDitch Your Inner Critic Now Melanie’s Bio: Melanie Brooks is the author of A Hard Silence: One Daughter Remaps Family, Grief, and Faith When HIV/AIDS Changes It All (Vine Leaves Press, September 2023) and Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma (Beacon Press, 2017). She teaches professional writing at Northeastern University and creative nonfiction in the MFA program at Bay Path University in Massachusetts. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast writing program. She recently completed a Certificate of Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Psychology Today, the HuffPost, Yankee Magazine, the Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, and other notable publications. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, two children (when they are home from college), and two Labs.Connect with Melanie:Website: melaniebrooks.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/melanie.brooks.1690Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melaniejmbrookswriterX: https://twitter.com/MelanieJMBrooksLinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/melanie-brooks-504826121Book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-hard-silence-one-daughter-remaps-family-grief-and-faith-when-hiv-aids-changes-it-all-melanie-brooks/20151761?ean=9783988320209Building Better Memoir Scenes: https://janefriedman.com/building-better-memoir-scenes-with-lisa-cooper-ellison/Connect with your host, Lisa:Get Your Free Copy of Ditch Your Inner Critic: https://lisacooperellison.com/subscribe/Website | Instagram | YouTube | Facebook | LinkedInProduced by Espresso Podcast Production