AMY SHEA

WRITER, EDUCATOR, ADVOCATE

Below you’ll find a curated list of readings, films, and other resources that I found intriguing and useful for my writing, research, and advocacy.

Organizations
Suggested Readings & Films By Theme (although there’s a lot of crossover!):

Illness / The Body / Facing Death

  • The Undying, Anne Boyers
  • Modern Nature, Derek Jarman
  • In Gratitude, Jenny Diski
  • Two Kinds of Decay, Sarah Manguso
  • Gratitude, Oliver Sacks
  • The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit
  • I am I am I am, Maggie O’Farrell
  • Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World, Barbara Ehrenreich
  • On Death and Dying: What the dying have to teach doctors, nurses, clergy, and their own families – Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
  • Stories from the Shadows, Dr. James O’Connell


Grief

  • Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, Terry Tempest Williams
  • Notes on Grief, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  • Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Claudia Rankine
  • The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit
  • Grief is the Thing With Feathers, Max Porter
  • Death’s Door, Sandra Gilbert
  • Say Something Back, Denise Riley
  • Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders
  • microbursts, Elizabeth Reeder & Amanda Thomson
  • Heaven’s Coast, Mark Doty
  • Nox, Anne Carson
  • Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Max Porter
  • ‘Kinds of Water’ (from Plainwater, with intro), Anne Carson

Palliative / Hospice / How Some Write/Think about Death

  • Twelve Breaths a Minute – edited by Lee Gutkind
  • Being Mortal, Atul Guwande
  • We All Know How this Ends, Anna Lyons & Louise Winter
  • With the End in Mind, Kathryn Mannix
  • The Fall of Freddie the Leaf, Leo Buscaglia
  • Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Questions from the Crematory, Caitlin Doughty
  • Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death, Caitlin Doughty
Collective Experiences and Disparity
  • In The Wake by Christina Sharpe
  • Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman
  • The Mushroom at the end of the World by Anna Lowenhaut Tsing
  • How to Survive the Anthropocene
  • No Fixed Abode: Life and Death Among the UK’s Forgotten Homeless – Maeve McClenaghan
  • Craft of Dying by Lyn Lofland
  • The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford
  • On Death & Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Family by Elisabeth Kubler Ross
Essays
  • “Mississippi: A Poem in Days “| Kiese Makeba Laymon
  • “After My Son’s Suicide, I’m Learning to Navigate Emotional Minefields in My Home” | Rachel Dickinson:
  • “Indigent Disposition” | Christopher Notarnicola
Film
  • Prison Terminal: The Last Days of Private Jack Hall | Directed by Edgar Barens
  • Serving Life | Directed by Lisa Cohen
  • A Certain Kind of Death | Directed by Grover Babcock & Blue Hadeagh
  • Extremis |Netflix
  • End Game | Netflix
Podcasts
  • Listen to Podcast: Hidden Brain: “We’re All Gonna Die” and “We’re All Gonna Live Forever” episodes.
  • Death, Sex and Money – Anna Sales’ podcast with various episodes which discuss death
  • The Bitter End, Radio Lab
On Writing
  • Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose
  • The Art of the Personal Essay ed Phillip Lopate
  • The Writing Life, Annie Dillard
  • The Autobiography of Fiction, Micaela Maftei