Breathing Life into Loss: Q&A with Raven Reighard on "About Grief"
- Dec 8, 2025
- 9 min read
Stop me if you've heard this one before: two university transmascs walk into a coffee shop to discuss grief and writing over (somewhat) overpriced drinks.
Raven Reighard (they/he)'s order of choice was a caramel macchiato, one espresso shot, please, because they don’t actually like coffee. Their drink came out white and gold, a blend so perfect in its clear plastic shell that it was impossible to tell where the drink started and where the whipped cream ended. Raven’s alt-meets-artist attire was an amusing contrast. It was the vision one might not expect reading their piece “About Grief,” but like the drink itself, writer and piece become a seamless blend.
The twelve-page personal essay is, as the title teases, about grief and its many shapes after experiencing great loss. The piece follows the narrator as they muse on their grandmother’s passing when, while writing this very essay, more groundbreaking news comes to light. It is no coincidence that the work resembles a working draft as this is exactly what grounds the piece — grief may change with time, but it still so often stays with you.
In addition to family, Reighard’s piece discusses elements of religious trauma, punishment, and intrusive thoughts. Readers, keep this in mind when you read their piece, as these topics may be triggering for some people.
It was therefore somewhat ironic that Christmas music played as I interviewed Raven on this carefully crafted piece. Yet the conversation we had afterward was nothing if not as genuine as Raven’s work itself.
Francis: All right, well, first of all, it's an incredible piece. Works like this can often be difficult to talk about, but the love and passion that comes into a piece about grief is just incredibly important and you have a great way of like incorporating dry humor with that as well.
So if you wouldn't mind, I would love to start by talking about the original conception for this piece. So what was kind of the original idea and how did that shift into what you pitched?
Raven: Yeah, so the piece is kind of... a bit meta in itself, and it sort of acknowledges in like, why, how it came about. Because it's like, it started with the sort of crisis that I had. And it was like, I was thinking about that whole summer. And it's, mostly, like, the why. Why did that happen? Like, what in my brain was like, yeah, this is the direct, the correct order of operations. What happened was I ended up meeting with my professor many, many times, like, trying to figure out, this idea of, like, how this happened.
And it ended up not being a pitch. It ended up just being on spec because it was too complicated. And I was thinking about it way too much anyway. So Campbell [their professor and editor] was just like, you just got to write it. And I did. and that's sort of how it came about.
F: Perfect. Yeah. All right. So let's see. I know that this piece originally started as spec, but are there any changes and growth from this piece that wasn't there in the original conception that surprised you?
R: Oh, yeah. So, I mean, even from the in the piece, it's the sixth month to the seventh month, was me actively right writing it, and that is sort of the change. You get to see it in the work itself. But it was because when I started thinking about it, it became the punishment thing that you've seen in the “sixth month” mark, and I was like, yeah, okay, that makes sense. But then I kept thinking about it, and I kept not feeling right about that conclusion. And it sort of came about in a conversation that I had with my sister, but it didn't come out during the conversation.
It came together significantly afterwards, because during the conversation, she mentioned like the five stages of the briefing, like I don't think there's, like, really evidence for them, like, being true. But it was a surprise that, oh no, this isn't a punishment thing. This is a distraction thing. And I think that was the biggest thing. That came about while I was writing it.
F: Yeah, that's very fascinating. And it's really interesting how that's able to switch the perception of a piece, which actually perfectly leads up to my next question. One of the primary elements of this piece is perception, understanding, and how the relationship between the two changes as more information surfaces, making this a sort of living draft, just as it is a complete work. In what ways do the structure and sections end up taking you by surprise as well?
R: Yeah, so my first draft of this was really, really messing with the time. It was all over the place. I had no, like, structure. Everything was happening all at once-type of deal. And so this is, again, [Campbell]'s idea of making it more segmented, dealing with time. She came up with a lot of examples of like how to structure it. And the thing that I held on to was sort of the idea of doing false starts. And this isn't necessarily false starts, but it's a lot of starts over and over again. Moving through time rather than starting over at the same time.
F: Your piece also juggles between knowing and unknowing of vital family history. We see that both in the past narrator and in the present narrator who's currently writing the piece. When did it feel right to further your knowledge of a certain event and do that research to kind of go back, try and find out more details? And when did you decide to learn to leave that unknowing to musing?
R: Well, with this question, my original thoughts are sort of... Once again, I talked to my professor so much during this. And it was a thing where I like, needed to know how to write it, like, first. And something that she suggested was doing research last. So I didn't talk to my sister until after I had that first draft, so she wasn't in it in the beginning at all. And I had talked to my mother just like a little bit, but it was mostly a lot of things that I just remembered happening. And it is a thing where I don't — I don't know a lot about my grandma. So it's like, pretty easy to just put in these musing sections of like, I don't know. I have no idea. And I still, I still don't know. Still. And it's literally… I still don't know anything.
F: I feel like that's what makes that tension so powerful and so visceral is the fact that it's like, it almost feels unreachable, these sections. When you were later revising this and if you do continue to work on this piece, do you see yourself trying to fill in some of those gaps or do you, again, just kind of want to lean more into crafting more of the piece rather than researching and filling in holes?
R: Yeah. I might do a little bit more research. When I went home for Thanksgiving, my cousin had found a big box of my grandma's old pictures and I went through them and it's, I still don't know, like, her jobs, like, what she did for a living, who she loved. But I did see a picture of her with a drag queen. And it's like, well, a few pictures with her with a drag queen. And it was like that — I didn't know anything about that, and that would have been so cool to know! And I don't think that has, like, a place in my essay, but it's like, I don't know, for my own personal benefit…
F: Do you find yourself still relating to which you kind of left off that narrator, that author?
R: There are multiple present tenses, but the last one, the seventh-month one, I think I do still feel like [him]. He has a place in my heart, I suppose. Because it hasn't changed very much since then. It's been eight months now, so not very long. It was a very revolutionary thing at that seventh month mark, but it was a very, like, a distressing time before that. And I don't know. I hold the place for that. But it's not something that I, like, am actively going through anymore, which is nice.
F: This piece is about trying to grasp things, and it is about loss. And of course, it's also the title of the piece itself. But we also see, once again, flickers of love and compassion, and we also see that resilience there as well — resilience especially. Do you have any other works either in this genre of non-fiction or outside of that in poetry and fiction that reflect these similar themes?
R: I don't have anything published, but I do have pieces that even are about my grandma. There was one that I wrote last year about how I, like, did not want my grandma to die. And it's so interesting looking back on that piece after the fact. But it is like that sort of theme of like, I can't lose this bit. And I even in the piece, I mentioned, like, poems that I had written in high school.
And it was the thing, oh, funny story, to go off on a tangent, I suppose. But there was this one conversation that we were doing, and it was literally back to back. I had written a poem about how much I love my grandma and how much I would miss her and how much her heart surgery had affected me. And then, like a week later or so, I wrote the poem I also mentioned in the piece about how angry I was that she was like, not getting who I am.
I really, really wanted to perform the angry one because it was the one that was freshest in my head. And my coach was like, “You can't, it's not the better one. You have to do the sad one.” And I was like, “But I hate my grandma right now. You can't make me!” But I did, and it went well.
F: (Laughs) I'm excited for the CNF piece about slam poetry! Are there any topics that you kind of dip your toes into with this piece that you are hoping to write more about in the future? I know we discussed the drag queen one, which is excellent.
R: Yeah, this is a harder sort of question. I write about my family a lot, I suppose. And something that does even come up in the pieces, the fact that my dad is in prison. Like, it mentions that he has gone to prison and in its current form, that might go away. But it's, I don't know, it's something that, like, it's also, like, a very emotionally heavy thing, I suppose. And that's sort of what I get into a lot. But I might write something more about my dad going to prison so many times in my life. But I've written, like, not about that specifically, but, like, things that have happened in relation to it. Like, um, I wrote a piece that I'm trying to submit places, but it's not. It hasn't gone anywhere yet.
F: How dare those magazines!
R: (Chuckles) For real. About [the question], it's about the family dynamic and like, splitting apart and a little degradation in my family, or my relationship with my family. But it's like, the overarching thing is the fact that I couldn't go to them about, like, the symptoms that I was experiencing regarding like, my Tourettes. And so it was, like, yeah. So that's something too, that'll hopefully be coming up soon.
F: Hey, and I'm excited for that! Let me, let me know. I would love to read those pieces.
R: Otherwise, I have… I don't know. It's not necessarily something that I want to do soon, I suppose, but I don't know. I also just want to mention that I write fiction! Yeah, I don't always write CNF. I write fiction too, and I write a lot about, like, sad teen boy stories, and it fits very well in the sort of things that I write in my CNF also, even though I am not a sad teenage boy.
F: I also write sad teenage boy fiction. We should compare notes. And let's see, we did kind of talk about next steps for this piece. What are your next steps for your writing overall?
R: I suppose I'm trying to submit things to places right now. Writing even more than I have been before. Something that I'm trying to work on in my writing is setting, because I'm, like, so bad at doing it. Now, this isn't confirmed, but I am on the KCR staff and I've seen the final ‘yes’ sheet and so I should be getting a fiction piece published in there.
F: (Hiding excited surprise) Am I allowed to tell the [readers]??
R: I mean, I assume so. The acceptance stuff is coming out soon.
F: Well, I look very, very forward to seeing what KCR publishes for you!
Raven Reighard is an emerging writer currently going to school for creative writing with a minor in film and screen studies. They are the current head CNF editor for the Southern Utah University lit mag Kolob Canyon Review.
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