Creativity After Loss
What grief does to creative capacity, and what the creative practice holds (A guest post by Kathryn Vercillo)
This week I’m hosting a guest essay by Kathryn Vercillo, author of Create Me Free on Substack. Kathryn reached out a few weeks ago to ask whether I would participate in her Workbook Tour for Creative Health Cartography: The Workbook — a research-grounded, deeply practical guide for artists, writers, and makers who want to better understand how their health shapes their creative life. The workbook is available both as a PDF download and in print.
I was happy to host this essay today as some of the topics (especially this one on grief) closely align with my interests and some of the topics I write about on my own Substack.
A composer I know described the six weeks after her mother died as the closest she had come to understanding what it would mean to lose music entirely. She had been writing music for more than twenty years, usually with relative ease. But she sat at the piano during those grief-laden weeks and found a silence there that was qualitatively different from the ordinary silence of a day when the work was not flowing. This was not “block”. This was the sense that the room where music had lived had been occupied by something else, something that made the piano feel like furniture rather than an instrument, and that she had no standing to object.
And then, at some point in the seventh week or so, she sat down and something came. A short piece. Something that felt less like composition than like transcription, as if the grief itself were finding a form that could be held. She played it to no one for months. It sits now at the center of her most significant body of work. But she didn’t know that was what it would be at the time. She just knew it was what had to come out.
Grief and creative work have a long and complicated relationship. Writers have written from grief. Painters have painted through it. Musicians have made music that holds what language alone cannot contain. The idea that loss can find expression through making is ancient and cross-cultural and real. But it isn’t straightforward. We don’t make our best work because of grief even though sometimes grief leads us to our best work. We can’t always make through grief at all. The relationship between grief and creative work is more intricate than any simple version of it suggests, and those intricacies have practical implications for how creative people navigate loss.
What loss does to creative capacity
The effects of grief on creative capacity vary widely, across different losses and across different periods within the same loss, and the variation defies easy categorization.
What tends to recur in my interviews with people going through this is that grief disrupts the ordinary conditions of creative work: the sustained attention that making requires, the sense of continuity between sessions, the capacity to stay in one place long enough for something to develop. Grief occupies the foreground of experience in a way that leaves the background, where creative work tends to live, temporarily inaccessible or fundamentally altered.
Some creative people find that their practice stops entirely for a period. The work that had been central becomes simply unreachable. This is a natural response to significant loss, and it carries its own timing. The practice tends to return, in its own form, when the conditions allow.
Some find that they can work during grief, but only in particular registers. Shorter pieces. Private work. Forms that carry less demand for the full creative presence that more ambitious work requires. Writing in a journal rather than drafting an essay meant for others. Sketching rather than finishing. Humming rather than composing. These more contained practices are complete in themselves and often carry something the larger-scale work cannot access: a quality of directness, of making without the mediating distance that public-facing work requires.
Some find that certain periods of grief make creative work more accessible rather than less, that something about the loss has clarified what matters, shifted the stakes of making in a way that makes it more urgent or more stripped of pretension.
Continuing bonds and the creative imagination
The psychologists Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman, and Steven Nickman developed a framework called continuing bonds theory that reframes how grief works in ways that are particularly useful for creative people. The earlier model of grief, drawn from Freud and extended through the twentieth century, understood the work of mourning as a process of gradually withdrawing emotional investment from the lost person and reinvesting it elsewhere. The goal was detachment, and the failure to achieve it was pathologized as complicated grief.
Continuing bonds theory, developed from observing what bereaved people actually do, offers a different account: that an ongoing relationship with the deceased, through memory, through ritual, through the ways the lost person continues to shape the survivor’s sense of self and meaning, is a healthy and often lifelong feature of grief rather than a failure to complete it. The lost person remains present in changed form, and that presence is generative rather than merely painful.
For creative people, this framework illuminates something that is otherwise difficult to name: the way significant losses continue to appear in the work for years or decades after the initial period of acute grief, the way a lost parent or partner or friend becomes part of the creative imagination rather than a subject that must eventually be put away. The composer’s piece, the one she played to no one for months, was made from her mother’s presence rather than her absence. That distinction matters. It allowed her to understand the work as an ongoing relationship rather than a completed memorial, which changed both how she held the work and how she continued to make.
What creative practice holds and where its limits are
Creative work can hold grief in meaningful ways. It can provide a container for what needs expression. It can create a productive distance that allows grief to be looked at rather than only experienced from inside it. It can be a means of staying in relationship with what was lost, of continuing the bond in the form of making.
Creative practice also works best alongside human support rather than as a replacement for it. Grief that lives entirely in the work, that has no other community or witness or relational holding, tends to either stop the work or distort it in ways the maker may find difficult to perceive clearly. The work can become a way of managing the grief rather than meeting it, of transforming it into something more aesthetically contained before it has been fully inhabited. This is understandable and human, but it can be problematic for some people some of the time.
The Creative Health Cartography workbook has parts of this that are directly relevant here: what community holds you in your grief? What support is available? The creative person attempting to use their practice as the primary container for significant loss deserves the same quality of attention to their relational health as to their creative health, and sometimes the most useful thing the framework can offer is the invitation to notice that gap.
More on the workbook and grief processing
The Creative Health Cartography Workbook holds the full range of creative health experience, including the experience of significant loss. So many aspects of our health and circumstance are all relevant to grief: physical, because grief is a physical experience that depletes and demands and requires genuine physical tending; psychological, because the emotional landscape of grief is complex; narrative, because loss changes the story you are telling about your life and your creative identity; material, because the medium and conditions of making shift with grief in ways worth attending to; relational, because grief is held or uncontained depending on the community around it; practical, because loss often disrupts the practical and logistical foundations of creative life in ways that create secondary stress.
Making that landscape visible is the starting place from which other things become possible. The map of your creative health during and after a significant loss will look different from the map before. And that is perfectly okay.
Follow Kathryn’s writing and the new podcast at createmefree.substack.com. If you’re curious about your Creative Health archetype, take the free quiz here. And if you decide to purchase the workbook or Kathryn’s Creative Health Cartography services, use WorkbookTour20 for a 20% discount.
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Thank you for articulating this so beautifully. The grief I have been mired in recently has forced me into a different shape, but from it, I am finding new perspective, new forms. I really needed this shared understanding today. ♡ xx