Author Q&A with Siobhan Ring: Embracing Grief and Creative Freedom
May 21, 2025
Siobhan Ring is a writer, organizer, and progressive movement-builder in the Pacific NW. She writes about parenting, caregiving, health, illness, and survival in a world that seems bound on destruction but overflows with beauty anyway. Her work has been previously published in The Write Launch, Lunch Ticket, and The Forge: Journal of Organizing Strategy and Practice. She lives with her sweet queer family in Seattle.
Siobhan’s essay “Space / Time” appears in Issue #19 ~ Spring 2025.
Tell us about yourself.
I live with my wife and our almost-adult kid in the beautiful PNW, a place that became my home 30 years ago. I’ve lived in cities most of my adult life, but I carry the small town, rural, kid I was with me. I work in progressive movement organizing and deeply appreciate both cats and coffee in my everyday life.
What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the origin, revision process, and/or final version of your piece appearing in this issue?
Revision is everything. Writing is humbling. This essay took so long to write, and it needed so many revisions. I thought it was going to be a very short, darkly funny story about an absurdist road trip, but it became something else. I revised and revised and revised. I have piles of leftover language that might be seeds of another essay.
What do you hope readers take from the piece?
Give yourself grace. “The past isn’t going anywhere.” (folk singer Utah Phillips). We really have lived through that pandemic, and we are not and will not ever be the same. Grief is unwieldy and like the ocean in its vast, unrelenting, insistence. Our ancestors are right beside us.
What fuels your desire to write (or engage in other creative outlets) and how do you make expression a part of your daily life? Or how do you find a balance between your writing and other responsibilities?
Writing is how I give love to my own voice and experience, amid the cacophony of everything else. I am a very slow writer, both in the pace of writing and in the long pauses when I don’t write a word. I’ve lived in the constrained space between parenting my own child and caring for ill parents for the past 16 years, and I have an intense job and a dirty house and a long list of everything else. I write when I can, when I feel the impulse pull me, and I don’t waste any time feeling bad about not writing enough. The time and energy I do have for it feels precious like water.
What do you think when you hear, “the good life”?
The good life is freedom, safety, love, and community. All of us deserve it, and not enough of us have it.
Thank you, Siobhan, for sharing part of your story and for being willing to spend extra time on this Q&A with us. We’re grateful we had a chance to connect and wish you the best.
