I teach people how to write about difficult material using persona, myth, genre, and form. The structure carries the weight so the writer does not have to.
"I often felt trapped inside the narratives of my abusers. I was never the protagonist in my own story." Writing in the horror genre, and writing letters to fictional characters, gave me control over my monsters. That process became eight books, a methodology, and a community. Psychology Today
Author of eight books · Featured in Psychology Today
Ph.D., University of Glasgow · MFA, University of Notre Dame · PMP
Build Your Own Writing Survival Kit: 5 Days to Slay Your Ghosts (free course)
For writers who've been in spaces that claimed to be safe but weren't.
Featured In
A trauma-informed writing & wellness practice
A community for people doing inner work and writing work at the same time. We use persona, myth, fragment, and genre shift to write about what happened without the costume party where the costume is your worst memory. Form carries the weight so the writer does not have to. Opens July 1.
Learn MoreWriting-based workshops on conflict, communication, and bias
Every question someone asks in a meeting has a question underneath it. In these workshops, people write from the other person's position and leave with the actual words for the conversation they have been avoiding. Nothing private is shared. Safety is designed into the structure.
Book a WorkshopGhostwriting and thought leadership
You are doing important work and your public presence does not reflect the depth of it. We find the methodology underneath the practice, build the language for it, and turn it into a voice that sounds like a person, not a brochure.
Start a ConversationStarts with a 15-minute call.
I started writing letters to Buffy Summers. And memories I was never before able to write or speak started arriving on the page.
That became two books: My Buffed Up Life and Gellar Studies. It became a writing methodology, workshops and events for organizations dealing with conflict they keep rescheduling around, and a community for people writing through and about trauma.
“Erik’s teaching helped me transform the traumatic events in my life into art. I started to release a lot of pain that I experienced into light and to have a greater sense of compassion for myself.”
Trauma clogs and disrupts narrative. My mistake was not seeing these disjointed sequences as narrative. I saw them as broken rather than as their own jagged story that didn't need smoothing. Psychology Today