Creative and Aesthetic Ways of Grief by Mórna O’connor

Creative and Aesthetic Ways of Grief by Mórna O’connor

Inspired by the grief of Australian musician Nick Cave, this edited anthology presents a host of creative and aesthetic ways of living with grief. In doing so, it challenges persistent attempts to homogenise grief and frame it as a solely negative and barren state from which the bereaved must expediently escape.

Across 11 chapters, each an account of lived grief by multi-disciplinary academics, artists and funeral professionals, this book showcases the potential for creativity and aesthetic experience within grief. Through autoethnographic and research-based approaches, communicated through evocative imagery as well as text, contributors describe creative and aesthetic ways of grieving that are spectacularly rich, profoundly idiosyncratic and fantastically diverse, forged artfully, playfully and inventively within their contexts, knowledges and realities.

Via these layered and living articulations, this book reflects our capacity—and indeed our right—to craft griefs resonant with our own ways of being, lives and contexts, and it attests that forging our own griefways is a creative enterprise that can be enriching, transforming, connecting, protecting and even beautiful. This anthology will be of interest and inspiration not only to diverse academics and grief practitioners alike, but to all of us who are mortal and all of us who grieve.

Mórna O’Connor, PhD, is a grief scholar specialising in digital-age grieving. Mórna’s work examines how grief is conceptualised, constructed and commodified in contemporary digital environments.

Dorthe Refslund Christensen, PhD, is a grief scholar with an (auto) ethnographically based focus on ritualisations of death and loss and the embeddedness of individuals’ grief repertoires in everyday life. Her work is both empirical and conceptual.