Nicholas Reiner
Nicholas Tino Reiner is an American poet of Mexican heritage. His debut poetry chapbook Levitations is co-winner of the inaugural Alta California Chapbook Prize, available in a bilingual edition from Gunpowder Press. His poems appear in Spillway, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, Western Humanities Review, Zocalo Public Square, and elsewhere.
Nicholas is senior press strategist at the ACLU of Southern California, where he works to protect the liberty of all people. He holds degrees in English from Stanford University and University of California, Irvine, where he completed an M.F.A. He lives in Southern California with his wife and two daughters.
Say It With Your Chest: Writing Tools to Navigate Grief
Whether your grief journey is like a rushing river or moves like a slow stream, writing can be a life raft. Join us for a generative writing workshop exploring loss, memory, love, and what it means to be human. All levels of writer welcome!
What was the catalyst for you stepping into this work? How did you end up here, at this moment, doing what you do?
I've been a poet since I was a small child, I remember writing a poem when I was 5 years old about a ladybug and reading it to my mom and dad. When I was nine years old, my dad died suddenly. One night he was there, the next morning his physical body was gone. As my family was under the tidal wave of grief, I remember I wrote a poem called "My Friend" about the loss in the immediate aftermath of his death. I showed and read it to my family and it seemed to resonate. I think early on I connected writing with moving through difficult times in my life. My first chapbook of poems, published in 2022, reckons mostly with that early grief, and the love and memory of relationships through time.
Because I sustained loss from an early age, I am not afraid to talk or think about death. It is very difficult to deal with but I like listening to people, learning from people about their grief journey, and preparing in my own life for how to deal with my own death and the death of loved ones.
What do you hope people get from working with you or interacting with your services?
I hope to approach our interactions and workshops with curiosity and empathy. What a gift it is to encounter a person's mind. Sometimes people don't think they can write. I had a writing teacher tell us once, "Writing is transcribed thought." Nobody would say "I'm not a thinker." But everyday people say, "I'm not a writer." If you can think, you can write. I hope to empower people to believe that they can write, that their thoughts are powerful, and that their words matter. In my workshops, I always hope the writer can leave with something, that our workshops are generative and that the writer can have tangible proof that they can create something unique.
What do you wish was different about the way we are supported when dying, grieving, and navigating end-of-life in general? What would you change?
I wish more people felt that they could talk openly about death, their grief, and loss--in everyday life. I also aspire to be a listener to people when they are talking about death. I believe most people when grieving need someone to be alongside them, not to give advice or consolation in the form of words. Often, I have found people want someone to just be there or to listen to them. There's this incredibly beautiful picture book, "The Rabbit Listened" by Cori Doerrfeld, which gets at this idea.
What would you say to someone who is nervous about attending events about death or grief?
I'd say, "You might be surprised at how life-giving they are." Often, in grieving spaces, I'm overwhelmed with how much life and love and resilience there is in the people communing. If death is a part of life, then life is a part of death, at least in my experience.
If someone meets you at the resource fair - what's a question you invite them to ask you?
"How are you doing today?" I love answering the commonplace "how are you?" with honesty and I love when people answer it with honesty. I think genuinely inquiring about how someone is doing is a generous act, because it gives them the opportunity to let you into their interior world, and vice versa.
