Journalists reveal how they take their private grief public in times of loss at Institute event

Veteran journalists Keith Woods and Tom Huang explained their approach to writing about deeply personal loss in a lively online conversation Friday with the National Press Club Journalism Institute.

“Grief and writing for me are intertwined,” said Huang, assistant managing editor for The Dallas Morning News Journalism Initiatives.

He writes of losing his mother and caring for his ailing father in this pandemic: “I need to write things down to discover my emotions, things about myself, and how I’m relating to the people I love.”

Introducing the webinar, “Writing through: Grieving together, alone,” Julie Moos, Institute executive director, said both journalists taught her how to “grieve in very, very personal ways and yet in public” through their writing.

Woods’ writing process is nothing like Huang’s.

“Most of it is speaking,” said Woods, National Public Radio’s chief diversity officer. “I tell the story a lot before I write the story. I have to sit down and revisit the emotions. My challenge is to sort it out and find words for it. I can’t start writing until I feel certain what I’m going to write is representative of something true in me.”

Huang’s mother died in January, and his story of grief during this pandemic, we’re told, will appear soon. “The writing has helped me process the grief," he said.

In an earlier published piece on taking his then 80-year-old parents to winter in Hong Kong, he watches his mother struggle to walk.  

“I’ve seen things in my parents that I didn’t want to see, didn’t expect to see, and it makes me fearful of growing old,” he writes. “We are coming full circle, a son helping his parents stare down time.”

Woods reported for the New Orleans paper, The Times-Picayune, and on the Hurricane Katrina’s fifth anniversary, he wrote a letter to New Orleans. In it, he describes looking everywhere for “Shorty” the Crescent City shoeshine man who shined his father’s shoes and inspired the letter.

Shorty always talked to Woods while shining his late father’s shoes, and the writer became a man while listening to Shorty. “Writing gives me a place to safely feel my grief,” said Woods, a New Orleans native and former faculty dean of the Poynter Institute.

Woods described a scene in Huang’s upcoming story where he feeds his dying mother applesauce and vanilla ice cream in her hospital room, and why that scene works.

“The actions of life in the ordinary, the granular, is a universal experience,” Woods said about the power in even the smallest detail. To an online question about privacy, Huang replied, “What I struggle with is how much to share in my writings.”

As his searing tale of travels to Hong Kong ends, Huang observes “how small and fragile his mother had become.” His final sentence: “We spend so much of our lives trying to acquire wealth or wisdom, but sometimes I wonder whether it’s really about the surrender, giving away what’s in our hearts, giving in to the joy and the pain of what’s to come.”