Kathryn Rhett, author of Survival Stories: Memoirs of Crisis, and Jessica Handler, author of the forthcoming Writing Through Grief, talk about how writing the tough stuff well can be good for you, and for a community of like-minded readers. Everyone will experience difficulty at some point in their lives, and, being writers, we may want to write about the tough stuff, either because we need to, or with the notion that getting it down on paper will be cathartic. The strategies we use for strong literary writing dovetail neatly with the strategies for writing therapeutically. This talk introduces cross-disciplinary research and suggests a variety of compelling writing exercises.