Why Does Nostalgia Hurt?

Editor Kyna Hart has included my comments in an article on the UpJourney website about “Why Does Nostalgia Hurt?” The link is https://upjourney.com/why-does-nostalgia-hurt

This interview has comments from eight writers about nostalgia and different ways to cope with this emotion. The writers are social workers, psychotherapists, and college professors.

#nostalgia #memories #loss #choices

Janet Ruth Heller speaking at the Kalamazoo Public Library; photo by Hedy Habra

Janet Ruth Heller

I am the past president of the Michigan College English Association. I have a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago. I have published four poetry books: Nature's Olympics (Wipf and Stock, 2021), Exodus (WordTech Communications, 2014), Folk Concert: Changing Times (Anaphora Literary Press, 2012) and Traffic Stop (Finishing Line Press, 2011). My scholarly book, Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama, was published in 1990 by the University of Missouri Press. My fiction picture book about bullying for children, How the Moon Regained Her Shape (Arbordale, 2006; 7th edn. 2022), has won four national awards. My play The Cell Phone won fourth place in a national contest and was performed twice at the Fenton Village Players One-Act Play Festival on June 24-25, 2011 in Fenton, Michigan. Triton College produced another play, Pledging, as part of its Tritonysia Play Festival in May 2017. Choeofpleirn Press published Pledging in Rushing Through the Dark (2022).