Welcome to Months To Years on Substack!

We are thrilled to start building community around writing and creativity as a tool for coping with grief and loss.

Welcome to Months To Years’ new community on Substack! We began publishing as a digital literary journal in 2018 and continue to publish quarterly. On Substack, our purpose is to engage the Months To Years community—and anyone with an interest in terminal illness, grief, and loss— in exploring journal writing and creativity as a means for coping.

This Substack will evolve as the community does, responsive to what draws interest and participation. Our primary focus in the beginning will be to offer grief-related reflective readings and writing prompts. Our hope is that, regardless of whether you consider yourself a writer, that you might use these prompts to get your thoughts on the page. Perhaps these thoughts stay on the page, just for you. Or maybe they grow into a larger topic or essay. And we hope that you might share snippets of what you write so that we can engage in community conversations about the readings and the writing.

We will explore the many facets of how writing can aid in sorting through grief. Whether that’s raw grief from a death last week, anticipatory grief from a terminal prognosis, or grief from a loss thirty years ago, it doesn’t matter. Our writing and reflections will be relevant to them all. While not a support group, this is a supportive space for developing a writing practice as a tool for coping with grief. We’ll also read together a varied range of writers on grief. If you’ve ever felt alone in navigating grief, this space is to help you feel a little less alone.

This space will offer writing prompts and our hope is to grow a community over time that will engage in reflective writing and conversations related to grief, loss, and creativity. We will share a range of prompts—some based on a brief reflection, others based on longer readings or poems. We will also welcome your ideas for prompts and look forward to hosting guest prompts.

At this time, all content is accessible for free. We do hope, though, that—if you find value in what we offer—you will consider a paid subscription. In time, we hope to offer special conversations and activities solely for paid subscribers. Until we can reach the level of enough subscribers, your paid subscription will support the work of Months To Years. It takes a lot of labor—editorial, technical, graphic, managerial, administrative— to produce our digital literary journal as well as the frequent content for Substack. Most of our team is volunteer or receives a minimal stipend. We are deeply grateful for any support you are able to offer.

You can still—and will continue to be able to—find the current and past issues of Months To Years (all accessible online for free) at www.monthstoyears.org. The work we publish going forward in Months To Years will also be posted to our Substack. And be sure to check out our most recent issue of Months To Years here. We are open for submissions until December 1; you can find the submission guidelines here.

Also, we still have a couple spaces available for our free grief-writing session this Sunday at noon Pacific/3 pm Eastern. You can sign up here via Submittable.

We are so thrilled to get started and we hope you’ll join us and spread the word to others who might be interested. Stay tuned for our first writing prompt!

Best,

Renata

Editor and Co-Founder, Months To Years