"What I wish I said." "I'll never forget that room." "Things left behind." These are three of many possible prompts that Bess O'Brien offers to participants in her writing workshops. Rather than fictional stories, the documentary filmmaker from Peacham is looking to elicit real-life response s, always with the goal of emotional release and improved understanding of the writer's lived experience. After completing the 2013 film The Hungry Heart — which laid bare Vermont's opioid epidemic — O'Brien wanted to continue to work with people in recovery. "They are incredible people with resilience," she said. So the following year, she and Gary Miller, a writer and teacher who lives in Montpelier, cofounded Writers for Recovery, a nonprofit aimed at helping those suffering from addiction heal through the act of putting words on paper. They developed a format for workshops that revolve around seven-minute writing prompts. Participants jot down poems, prose or even just notes, then share what they wrote aloud. They offer each other nonjudgmental feedback, bolstered by encouragement and responses from workshop leaders. This spring, Writers for Recovery has broadened its scope, applying those writing prompts to a new group in need of a therapeutic creative outlet: flood survivors. O'Brien, 65, watched her Northeast Kingdom community struggle and unite after the July 2024 flood, which swamped homes, devastated farms and claimed at least two lives. Miller, 63, whose daughter owns a store in Montpelier, had witnessed firsthand the impact on her business and those of other Vermonters when water rose there on the exact same date the previous summer. He suggested a special workshop series for folks who had been stricken by Vermont's climate crisis. Funded by grants from two individual donors and New York's Rona Jaffe Foundation, O'Brien and Miller are offering their new Writers for Flood Recovery workshops in Peacham and Barnet on alternating Tuesdays through April 22 and in Plainfield every Wednesday from April 2 to May 14. On March 18 at the Barnet Public Library, the crowd was tiny but energetic. "We're starting small," O'Brien said, noting that attendance would likely increase as the word got out. The first prompt was "Things left behind." Participant Donna Ellery, a 70-year-old artist who lives in McIndoe Falls, wrote about her basement full of art supplies and partially completed projects, which were lost to the river while she was out of town. "I wasn't here when there… ...read more read less