An online writing community that cares about writers as whole people who are processing, living, and creating at the same time. A space for writing through trauma, together. We are not content machines. We have bodies. Moods. Tuesdays. I also offer workshops for teams and narrative strategy for Recovery Leaders and Clinicians.
"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.
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A trauma-informed writing & wellness practice
A community for people writing through trauma and other difficult material. Reflection and inner work is paired with writing work to serve the whole person. We explore persona, myth, fragment, and genre shift as possible ways of expressing trauma with the goal of finding the right approach for your individual needs, writing style, and voice. Opens July 1.
Learn MoreWriting-based workshops on conflict, communication, and bias
Writing-based workshops on conflict, communication, and implicit bias. Someone on your team needs to say something difficult to someone else, and every version they rehearse is from their own frustration, their own version of the story. Participants leave with a revised message and a repeatable method for a real conversation. Words they can use on Monday. 90-minute to full-day, plus quarterly retainer. 90%+ satisfaction rate.
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 am a trauma survivor, and so much was unspeakable to me for so long. Then, I started writing letters to Buffy Summers. And memories I was never before able to write or speak flooded out.
This work became two books: My Buffed Up Life and Gellar Studies. From there, I developed a trauma writing course at UCLA Extension from this personal writing methodology, drawing on my previous trauma-informed teaching and facilitation work, and have convened workshops on trauma, pop culture, and identity at venues such as USC. My work has also been featured in Psychology Today.
Survival Kit Writing Collective was born from this work around writing trauma and I am so excited to share it with all of you.
I also run workshops and events for organizations dealing with conflict and coach recovery leaders and clinicians on narrative strategy and public writing.
“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