‍"Soul is something creative, something active. Soul is honesty. I sing to people about what matters. I sing to the realists, people who accept it like it is."  — Aretha Franklin

This week, I’m talking with my friend Carla Fernandez. You’ll love her. She’s the co-founder of one of my favorite organizations The Dinner Party and the author of Renegade Grief: A Guide to the Wild Ride of Life After Loss.

Carla and I met a decade ago when I was researching how secular communities were fulfilling religious roles in the lives of their participants—and here was this network of young people getting together for dinner to talk about grief, and building deep and meaningful community.

If you’re in NYC on Tuesday, come join us for her book launch event or join one of the other events across the US, including LA, Oakland, Chicago, DC, Boston and many more. But in the meantime…read on to learn about how grief interacts with pasta-making parties, intimacy, and caregiving, and see our adorable silk shirts from Carla’s book event :)

Hey Carla, thanks for chatting! So, you’ve done this big book thing. What's the conversation you wanted to open with us, your readers?

I will never ever in a million years forget the feeling that was sitting down to the initial few meetings of The Dinner Party. It’s now a nation-wide peer-support community for young-ish adult grievers—but at the time was a weird, art-project, social experiment that Lennon Flowers and I led with a few other friends-of-friends who’d also experienced a significant loss.

It was in 2010, during a very fun era to be young and free in Los Angeles that looking back on seems a little bit like a fairy tale. Obama was the freaking President. The food scene was exploding with creative experiments, like Roy Choi’s first food truck and secret supper clubs like Wolves Mouth. The sharing economy was still in its thrilling early era where it felt like people were really sharing and caring. Brené Brown had just given her seminal TED talk on vulnerability, and people were getting game to go there. Despite the fact that my Dad had just died of super aggressive brain cancer, it was a great time to be alive—and there was lots of creativity in the air at this intersection of food, art, social innovation, community, and mental health.

So, that was the climate that The Dinner Party was born in, and where I first started hearing stories of how other people who had also experienced a loss, and who felt similarly unmoored by the whole thing, were finding ways to move through it. And not in ways that were tepid, or sad, or felt pitiful—but ways that were interactive, social, brimming with creativity and rawness.

Around our dinner table, I heard the story of someone taking the overflow of bottles from her dad’s drinking habit that got worse in the months after her mother’s sudden death, and building herself a clubhouse to live in out behind his house. I got to know another person who decided to jiu jitsu flip her dead dad’s birthday from a day of isolation and sadness, into an annual open-house pasta making party, where friends could come and celebrate his life, and gorge on plates of handmade bolognese. I met another woman who wrote a one-woman show about her mother’s passing, and performed it in a friend's living room. I realized there were actually ways to interact with our grief, not as a thing to hide, to distance ourselves from, or ignore but as material for our own evolution, and as a fast-track to deep friendship. I was hooked. I realized, in talking to others, that hosting our first dinner was my version of that.

In a time in life that can feel like such a shitty dead-end, these stories of life after loss felt like a beginning, an invitation into so much possibility. My hope is that reading this book gives folks a sense of that openness, an invitation to take the space, and find the people with whom they can dig into their grief. It’s not about digging in and staying there—but about moving it through, having grief be something that doesn’t paralyze us but that enlivens us, and seeing who we are with it integrated, not ignored.

Oh my god I’m obsessed with the pasta-making party idea! Wow. And yes! I loved that focus in your book about living *into* our grief—rather than running away from it. So, who do we become when we no longer fear grieving? And what do we lose?

For the record, I still very much fear grief. I think about the big losses ahead of me, hopefully none of which will occur for a very, very, very long time, and my stomach still sinks. To name a few that will ass-kick me into the next level of the grief video game: my soulmate and witch's familiar dog, Biscotti; my husband, although he takes better care of himself than I do me, so I’ll probably go first, knocking on all the wood; friends; siblings; my mother! Fuck me! Grief is an intense and brutal bitch of a teacher. I feel appropriately and respectfully terrified of her.

Also also, we all know that the hardest, scariest shit is oftentimes also where the treasure is buried. And we all know that we can’t control when it happens or hide from it—as much as we might think we can compartmentalize and predict. And if we try to, it comes shooting out from other literal and metaphoric orifices, regardless of how hard we’re holding on. For example, at the core of so many of the places of pain in our nation, seems to be a story of un-metabolized loss. I loved this article in the New York Times about the “story within the story” of anger and division during the election. What was it attributed to? Unprocessed grief.

So, who can we become when we approach it? When we find ways to minimize the social isolation and social constraints that get layered on top of the grief itself, and create space in our life to tend to it? We can become more awake to our existence; more honest and empathetic in our relationships; more able to communicate our needs, wants and desires, not just in our grief, but for our life. I would argue, maybe even a little bit funnier. Think of the world’s greatest comedians, and the way they can take the topics everyone else is afraid to touch, and alchemize it into belly laughs? That is Renegade Grief.

What do we lose by being on a first-name-basis with grief? For me, and while this might sound like virtue singling, it looks like little tolerance for petty problems and complaints. Too often when the phone rings, I assume it’s one of those bad phone calls, and brace myself for the news. And sometimes, it’s harder for me to connect with people who aren’t also initiated in the grief club, also acutely aware of the impermanence of life, not in a cutesy Hallmark way, but because they’ve seen it up close and personal, and understand the stakes.

At the end of the day, what is my number-one-endorsement, super-important-reason why being in relationship to grief is worth the effort it takes, because it does take effort? It’s about the people you can find, and the quality of friendship you can access, when you go there. I think of friendships, where at some point, we set aside the pleasantries and really dig into the interior experience of facing mortality, ours and others. They have made my life worth living.

Our mutual friend Lennon, my cofounder for many glorious, foundational years, is one of my first examples of that. In an era of friendships looking too much like DMs and not enough like drinking wine on a porch with an elastic back-end or emergency-contact-level care, conversations about grief can be the gateway to intimacy and connection. In an era marked by division and isolation, grief is both something that none of us ever asked for, but that can simultaneously deliver us the type of connection we’re most deeply desiring.

Yeah—when you both lose something precious, the depth of connection is for real.

It’s so interesting, I look at things like Anderson Cooper’s podcast and it seems like there’s a bit of a grief renaissance happening right now. Am I wrong? What are some of the signs you're seeing that we are re-learning to engage grief as a popular culture? And what more needs to happen?

In some ways, absolutely. In other ways, there are miles to go before we sleep!

Here’s why. I think back to the ways in which, when we started this body of work, it felt absolutely radical and magical. The idea of going into a stranger’s house to talk about grief felt punk rock—both because internet connections turning into IRL friendships was super novel, and because conversations about grief were not happening in the same way in the mainstream. Nowadays, there are countless bingeable television shows, that center on grief support groups (Dead to Me), and siblings processing the death of Dad (This Is Us), or a woman moving home to her Midwestern town after her sister’s death (Somebody Somewhere - loved!).

To me, the obvious before and after point was COVID, where this sort of fringe mental health issue we had been banging the drums of became headline news. While the pandemic introduced the idea of grief into culture in a more mainstream way, it’s not clear that we’ve developed the ways to care for that grief to match the amount of loss we collectively experienced, and continue experiencing. It’s been five years to the week this book comes out, and we are all still getting our sea-legs in what feels like a new normal, where the losses are coming at an ever-quickening cascade. Clare Ansberry wrote about this really thoughtfully in this WSJ recently.

With the growing threat of climate change, increased levels of civil unrest, violence against vulnerable lives, an increase in global conflicts, the flavors of grief we’re going to be experiencing are multiplying, coming at us from more angles. It’s never been a more important time to get into right relationship with how you grieve—what it feels like in your system, what’s in your toolkit to tend to it when it comes, who you talk with about it, how it can not be the feeling that paralyzes you but that helps you move into action, as a grief ally to yourself and others. I’m biased, but I think it’s the most important life skill we need for 2025 and beyond.

Some day, we’ll hopefully be able to drop the “renegade” part of the phrase, when the culture we live in respects the potency of times of grief, provides resources and support for the bereaved, and is generally down to pause and reflect after times of loss and ask—but really, what did we learn here? Until that time, we grieve regardless of the fact that it’s not the status quo. Until that time, the grid renaissance is still unfolding.

Renegade Grief is my attempt to introduce folks to a bunch of different pathways in, with stories from real people who’ve tried it, too, and a widening of the lens from outside of the Western world’s constipated relationship to grief. It reminds us that humans have handled times of extreme change and loss for millennia, and that while these particular times are unprecedented, we have what it takes to ride this wave.

Our work still to do? To me, it’s the collective care practices that help us to stay steady in the swell, and finding people who can normalize our experience. To run with the surfing metaphor, peer-support feels less like being buddies with other folks out on the water, but our friends becoming the flotation device, and foundational board under our feet.

Amazing. I’ve been meaning to host a sort of grief circle to just make a space for us to sit down and lament the horrors happening in our federal government at the moment—and this is inspiring me to make that happen. Thank you :)

Obviously, I’m going to recommend the book to everyone—is there anything else you’d want readers to know?

Well, reading Renegade Grief is really the first step in a multi-step process. I don’t say that to overwhelm people; but, once you read a book about the importance of care practices and community support in times of grief, the fun really begins when you go out and start experimenting in your own context, whether in teeny tiny or big life changing ways.

There’s also are two tools we’ve created that are going to be helpful next steps for that. One is a book club conversation guide, and the other is a 21-week Renegade Grief In Practice companion guide, that’ll get emailed once a week with reflection prompts and ritual ideas. (Your tech sabbath makes an appearance!) You can sign up for both of those at my website.

Thanks Carla. I’m gonna show the cute pic of us in our silk tops to prove we actually know each other! See you on Tuesday :)

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