“What I wish I said.” “I’ll never forget that room.” “Things left behind.”
These are three of many possible prompts that Bess O’Brien offers to participants in her writing workshops. Rather than fictional stories, the documentary filmmaker from Peacham is looking to elicit real-life responses, always with the goal of emotional release and improved understanding of the writer’s lived experience.
After completing the 2013 film The Hungry Heart — which laid bare Vermont’s opioid epidemic — O’Brien wanted to continue to work with people in recovery. “They are incredible people with resilience,” she said.
So the following year, she and Gary Miller, a writer and teacher who lives in Montpelier, cofounded Writers for Recovery, a nonprofit aimed at helping those suffering from addiction heal through the act of putting words on paper. They developed a format for workshops that revolve around seven-minute writing prompts. Participants jot down poems, prose or even just notes, then share what they wrote aloud. They offer each other nonjudgmental feedback, bolstered by encouragement and responses from workshop leaders.
This spring, Writers for Recovery has broadened its scope, applying those writing prompts to a new group in need of a therapeutic creative outlet: flood survivors. O’Brien, 65, watched her Northeast Kingdom community struggle and unite after the July 2024 flood, which swamped homes, devastated farms and claimed at least two lives.
Miller, 63, whose daughter owns a store in Montpelier, had witnessed firsthand the impact on her business and those of other Vermonters when water rose there on the exact same date the previous summer. He suggested a special workshop series for folks who had been stricken by Vermont’s climate crisis.
Funded by grants from two individual donors and New York’s Rona Jaffe Foundation, O’Brien and Miller are offering their new Writers for Flood Recovery workshops in Peacham and Barnet on alternating Tuesdays through April 22 and in Plainfield every Wednesday from April 2 to May 14.
On March 18 at the Barnet Public Library, the crowd was tiny but energetic. “We’re starting small,” O’Brien said, noting that attendance would likely increase as the word got out.
The first prompt was “Things left behind.” Participant Donna Ellery, a 70-year-old artist who lives in McIndoe Falls, wrote about her basement full of art supplies and partially completed projects, which were lost to the river while she was out of town. “I wasn’t here when there were 30 people in my basement throwing all of my possessions away,” she recalled.
“Water is completely vital to a human being’s existence, like air, but then it can turn, and it can pillage. It can ruin. It can change your life.” Bess O’Brien
Although Rhoda Donovan of Peacham didn’t personally experience losses in the flood, she used a river as a metaphor to write about rediscovering her sense of self later in life.
Water is a powerful symbol that can be used to “address whatever trauma we’re going through,” O’Brien noted, responding to Donovan’s sentiment. “Water is completely vital to a human being’s existence, like air, but then it can turn, and it can pillage. It can ruin. It can change your life.”
As O’Brien explained, anybody is welcome to attend the Writers for Flood Recovery gatherings, and the same goes for the regular Writers for Recovery sessions. “Everybody is recovering from something in life,” she suggested, noting that folks with eating disorders and gambling addictions have attended, alongside people with opioid-use disorder and addictions to alcohol.
When it comes to writing, “One rule is that you can’t do it wrong,” O’Brien said firmly. “Writing is a skill, a tool to be used to express your feelings … Sometimes the prompts reveal something to you that you didn’t even know you were thinking about.”
Although she runs many of the Writers for Recovery sessions, flood-themed or not, O’Brien doesn’t always use the written word to confront life’s challenges. Documentary filmmaking is her primary medium for storytelling. Her more recent films, such as 2016’s All of Me, about the suffering caused by eating disorders, and 2024’s Just Getting By, which explores food and housing insecurity, delve into social and emotional issues crucial to Vermonters.
Asked if her next work will deal with the flood, she explained that it will, but not exclusively. “The film I’m working on now, Everyday: Big and Small, is going to focus on things people are doing within their communities to make a difference,” she said.
One portion of the film will be about how neighbors came together to support Jenny and John Mackenzie and their two teenage daughters when they lost their Peacham home. As the water inched closer, O’Brien recalled, neighbors dug up Jenny’s cherished perennials and replanted them in a safe place. Later, townsfolk formed a human chain across a field to move household items that had survived the river’s rampage.
Along with water, the concept of home is another theme that O’Brien frequently considers in planning Writers for Flood Recovery events. “What is home?” she queried as the workshop session drew to a close. “Is it your house? The apartment you live in? Or is home inside of me or in my family or community?”
As the series continues, she said, “One thing I expect I’m going to see more of is conversation around how traumatic experience created incredible resilience within community members and how people felt so taken care of by their neighbors. That’s an extraordinary thing for someone to go through. It’s a gift that comes from trauma, having an entire town or community or village rally around you and help you get through something.”
Soon, O’Brien said, she and Miller plan to extend the series to Barre, Lyndonville and Johnson — other towns hit hard by flooding in recent years. For now, she said, Peacham, Barnet and Plainfield “are our maiden voyage.”
Asked if she would continue writing after the workshop, Ellery hedged but noted that “If you’re confused, writing down your thoughts is much easier than holding on to them and letting them spin.”
Donovan, who had attended both of the first two workshops, said she would happily join in again: “It shows people in the throes of trauma that they’re not alone and that their situation isn’t as unique as they thought. We can all relate.”
Writers for Flood Recovery workshops run Tuesdays, April 1 and 15, 6:30-8 p.m., at Barnet Public Library; Tuesdays, April 8 and 22, 6:30-8 p.m., at Peacham Library; and Wednesdays, April 2 to May 14, 5-6:30 p.m., at Cutler Memorial Library in Plainfield. Free.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Word Flow | At Writers for Flood Recovery workshops, Vermonters process torrential change on paper”
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This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 1, 2025.
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