Writing Resilience Workbook
Writing Resilience Workbook is a distillation of the best prompts from my Writing Resilience workshop, designed to elicit your story, the pains and triumphs, and give you the basis of a memoir. It was inspired by people who are affected by trauma, addiction, and/or mental illness, but the book may be used by anyone who wants to share their story. Moreover, you may find a source of strength and resilience in the telling of your experience. Like the sharing in recovery programs, writing your story may lead to greater coping and stability in your life. This is a resource for writing groups and classes, as well as for individual use. In paperback and deluxe hardcover.
“At a time when we need all the resilience we can muster and more, Larissa Shmailo's Writing Resilience Workbook is a valuable resource for writing groups, classes, and individuals—indeed, for anyone who's struggling and who has a story to tell. And isn't that all of us? I plan to use this workbook when I next steer my Literature and Medicine students through the writing of their medical memoirs. Simple, flexible, common-sensical, and generative—highly recommended.”
—Rachel Hadas, author of Piece by Piece and Love & Dread
“Larissa Shmailo knows, deeply, how writing can heal us. This unique workbook offers a loving space for healing, held in experienced hands. Thank you, Larissa!”
—Annie Finch, author of The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells
“Larissa Shmailo’s Writing Resilience Workbook is a brilliant and insightful contribution to self-help literature for writers. Comparable to The Artist’s Way, this book provides an effective toolset for writers who have dealt with turmoil. Prompts point to essential aspects of life: traumas, hopes, fears, successes, and much more. Larissa Shmailo’s commentary is supportive and affirming. The storytelling process becomes cathartic, and enhances treatment and recovery programs.”
—Elizabeth Morse, poet and author of The Future Is Now
Along the lines of work by James Pennebaker (Opening Up) and Louise DeSalvo (Writing as a Way of Healing) and influenced by the 12-step programs promoting healing through writing and sharing stories, Larissa Shmailo has developed a class called Writing Resilience and now, this workbook. As a practicing clinician, this book gives me a valuable new tool to offer to my clients.
—Susan E. Oringel, clinical psychologist, writer and author of My Coney Island
Larissa Shmailo's Writing Resilience Workbook can serve as a useful additional modality of recovery process for people suffering from anxiety, depression, chronic mental illness, and addictions. Writing a memoir, even if the author is doing it for his family and friends, is therapeutic, especially during the pandemic. I could definitely recommend her workbook to those of my patients who like reading and would appreciate this innovative writing workshop.
—Anna Halberstadt, poet, translator, clinical psychologist and author of Vilnius Diary
A vein of anguish unseen in curriculum vitae or literary biographies runs through my life. My bio says that in high school, I won the drama and English awards, had perfect board scores, won national recognition for literary criticism. What it doesn’t say is that a month before, I attempted suicide by taking hundreds of over-the-counter morphine pills in a Lugano hotel, that I was found wandering the hotel halls naked and babbling, and was swiftly taken to a local hospital, where I am told I punched a nun. I was 17; it would be years before I would be diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and more still until I self-diagnosed as an alcoholic. In those intervening years I was a prostitute, a translator too drunk to recognize her renown, and a bride widowed on her honeymoon.
