Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 1:45
How Talking to the Dead Dislodged Some of My Sorrow with NYTimes Journalist Maggie Jones
I know because I had the opportunity to work with her at Pitt's MFA program. Many years ago this year, Maggie published an essay at the NY Times Magazine called How Talking to the Dead Dislodged Some of My Sorrow. The essay is about how Maggie left voicemails for her mother after she passed and how it helped her grief. The essay made me cry. I was so moved by Maggie's story and how it captured the power of using our voices and connecting through voice
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 0:43
Can you say a bit about how speaking aloud helped you develop a different kind of relationship with your mom? And how the experience of leaving those voicemails continues to impact you to this day?
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 1:28
I'm curious, what do you think it is about speaking aloud that has so much power in healing us? I know I asked something sort of similarly in relationship to your mom, but I'm wondering what it is on a more collective scale that you think draws us so much in to speaking aloud, even if we know the person cannot reply quite in the way maybe they used to
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 0:41
But I'm wondering, just based on what you've learned from the project that inspired your own voicemails, if you have any tips or potential advice for helping people who are grieving right now
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 1:01
It is definitely one that I will continue to be sharing and go back to. I'm curious if you might be able to share anything about what you're currently working on or have been working on since this essay came out earlier this year and what readers and fans like myself might be able to expect in 2023. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your gift and your work with us. Maggie
Maggie Jones
@maggiejones · 1:33
And for writing something so personal, it's not as you know, what I usually do things that I care about deeply influence my work, but I don't write a lot of personal essays, I write some. I think, though it's very personal, it immediately felt to me very universal and and I'm hugely interested in grief and mourning and that felt universal, so it certainly was raw, but it felt not unique and maybe that helped me write about it
Maggie Jones
@maggiejones · 1:56
And with my mother, the physicality of speaking to her and speaking to her at a time not only when I was grieving her, but I was grieving other things in my life. And it was the height of COVID and there were a lot of losses going on and transitions in my life. It made me feel like she was there. And granted, it's a one sided conversation, but it actually helped me channel her more
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
Maggie Jones
@maggiejones · 1:18
Yeah. Part of it is what I said before about the physicality. And I think also with that physicality comes a presence. You're speaking aloud. You can be multitasking, but it's harder too, and you're less likely to sort of drift off to do something else if you're speaking aloud, I think, than if you're just sort of speaking in some way, however you want to define it internally. I think it is like the wind phone in that we want to feel connected
Maggie Jones
@maggiejones · 1:15
Yeah, that's a great question. I think you just don't need a phone to speak aloud to somebody. You don't need voicemail to do it. I kind of let go of my mom's phone number, assuming that I could transition to something on my own and speaking aloud. And I think partly this is is about ritual and creating space
Maggie Jones
@maggiejones · 0:38
Thank you, Bowie. It is such a treat to be connected to you and to have this conversation with you. I really appreciate it. As for upcoming stories, I don't like being cagey about what I'm working on. But sometimes there are reasons that one must. And this is a case for two stories I'm working on right now. But they are both related to mental health, and they are super important to me