Writing After Trauma: How Lived Experience Fuels Creative Writing

In this intimate conversation on Stories and Stanza, Teri shares how lived experience with trauma — including surviving a 14-year emotionally abusive marriage — became the foundation for her most authentic and powerful creative writing. If you're a writer, a reader, or anyone who has ever wondered whether your hardest seasons have a purpose, this episode is for you. This episode explores the impact of a toxic relationship and the healing journey that can follow, emphasizing how true stories can fuel powerful writing.

Born in Athens, Greece as an Air Force brat and now calling the North Carolina coast home, Teri M Brown came into this world with an imagination full of stories to tell. In this intimate Between The Lines conversation on Stories and Stanza, Teri shares how lived experience — including surviving a 14-year emotionally abusive marriage — became the foundation for her most authentic and powerful creative writing. If you're a writer, a reader, or anyone who has ever wondered whether your hardest seasons have a purpose, this episode is for you.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

• How lived experience — even painful ones — fuels authentic character development and storytelling
  What "write what you know" really means: it's about emotions and internal truth, not just facts
  The creative process behind writing fiction, nonfiction, and children's books — and why each demands a different mindset
  How Teri rode a tandem bicycle 3,102 miles across the United States in 2020 — and what it taught her about resilience and self-belief
  Why you should never quit on a bad day — and when quitting is actually the right choice
  How to reframe failure as information, not identity
  Why everything you need to succeed is already inside you

About Teri M Brown:

Teri M Brown is a multi-award-winning author, podcast host, and public speaker based on the North Carolina coast. A UNC Greensboro graduate with degrees in Elementary Education and Psychology, she began her writing career creating content for small businesses while homeschooling her four children.

Her published works span an impressive range:

📚 Sunflowers Beneath the Snow (2022) — historical fiction set in Ukraine
📚 An Enemy Like Me (2023) — historical fiction set during WWII
📚 Daughters of Green Mountain Gap (2024) — a generational story about Appalachian healers
📚 The Youngest Lighthouse Keeper (2024) — featured in the anthology Feisty Deeds: Historical Fictions of Daring Women
📚 10 Little Rules for a Double-Butted Adventure (Feb 2025) — memoir about life lessons from a cross-country tandem bicycle journey
📚 Little Lola and Her Big Dream (April 2025) — her debut children's book
Her nonfiction work has earned First Runner Up at the Eric Hoffman Book Awards, finalist recognition at the USA Best Books Awards, and an Honorable Mention at Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year Award. In 2017, after leaving an emotionally abusive marriage, she turned to fiction — and won the First Annual Anita Bloom Ornoff Award for Inspirational Short Story for a piece about her grandfather.

Beyond writing, Teri is a passionate mentor to women and young girls who are working to discover their own worth and potential.

🌐 Learn more: www.terimbrown.com

Episode Chapters:

0:00 – Writing After Survival
1:06 – About Stories and Stanza
1:31 – Meet Teri M Brown
6:17 – Write What You Know — On the Inside
10:35 – The Creative Process & Finding Flow
20:58 – The Tandem Bike Journey: 3,102 Miles of Healing
28:59 – Reframing Failure & Resilience
36:25 – "You're Already Enough"
56:11 – Closing

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About Stories and Stanza:

Stories and Stanza is a podcast exploring creativity, resilience, and the transformative power of human stories. Through two series — Between The Lines (intimate craft conversations with writers and creators) and Fail With Me (unfiltered mental health and wellness discussions) — we bring you authentic voices from around the world.

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