From All Saints’ Day to Samhain, from Día de los Muertos to the upcoming holiday season, and from the darkening of our days to political fear, grief sits heavy on our shoulders in November. We need companions for the journey. That is precisely what we have in Jenna Duranko’s Good Grief: A Somatic Approach to the Intersection of Grief and the Arts, the focus of today’s Belief Behind the Book.
Belief Behind the Book is a feature that gives readers a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the beliefs behind books written by progressive spiritual leaders. Inspired by the Ministry from the Margins Books program, Belief Behind the Book spotlights why authors write what they write, offering practical tips readers can apply to their own belief systems.
Grief is not only something you feel. It is something your body carries.
Jenna Duranko came to that understanding late, 32 years after her first loss, which arrived before she had language for it. Since then, grief has become the lens through which she reads her whole life: friendships that ended without ceremony, places that stopped feeling like home, a country grieving in public.
Good Grief is a collection of poetry and prose that follows grief through the body. Trained in thanatology, ministry, and music, Duranko draws on Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing to track where loss lives in the nervous system. She then follows the creative impulse that rises once it is finally felt. The poems move through three sections: acknowledgment, the depths, and the first cracks of light.
Three poems come paired with original marimba compositions you can listen to as you read. The collection closes with a guided somatic exercise for moving from sensation to creation, an invitation to make something from your own grief.
Jenna Duranko holds a bachelor’s degree in music business, a master’s degree in thanatology, and a master’s degree in ministerial leadership. A singer-songwriter, her music is available worldwide. Jenna is a percussionist specializing in marimba and performs in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.
In recent years, she has dedicated time to exploring ways to merge her passions for music, ministry, and grief support. She lives in Frederick, Maryland, with her Australian shepherd, Keiko.
When Duranko was asked why she wrote this book, she responded:
“This book is a culmination of years of poetry, my seminary capstone project, and my passion for somatic therapy work. I first wanted to write a book of poetry because it felt like a natural extension of my creativity as a musician and songwriter. I knew that I also wanted to find some way to publish my seminary capstone project. Through my work with the Ministry from the Margins Books writing cohort, I realized that I could combine my personal poetry and my capstone project and create something unique. The book soon took on a life of its own once I dug deeper into the research around somatic work and the effectiveness of somatic work and the arts on the grief experience.”
Continuing, she shares three practical takeaways for readers:
“The first is that there are so many different types of losses that we feel, including, but not just, when a death occurs, and only we can decide how big an impact any one of those griefs is for us. The second is the importance of the arts in healing. Multiple Intelligences theory tells us that we all have different mediums that resonate with us. We can make use of the arts to navigate heavy emotions surrounding grief. The third is the effectiveness of somatic work. When we take time to settle in and tend to our bodies, we allow our nervous systems to experience safety, and the arts can help facilitate that.”
From the diversity of losses to the impact of the arts and somatic work in our healing, Good Grief provides resources for our grief during this season and always.
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Award-winning author of ten books, including The Authorpreneur Handbook. Founder and CEO of Tehom Center Publishing, a nonprofit press publishing feminist and queer authors, with a commitment to elevate BIPOC writers. Rev. Dr. Yarber’s work has been featured in Forbes, HuffPo, NPR, The Advocate, Ms. Magazine, the television show Tiny House Nation, and more. She travels the world speaking, preaching, publishing, and writing, but she can always be found at www.tehomcenter.org