An ecosystem of stories, grief rituals, and quiet revolutions.

Welcome, Seekers and Sojourners

Grief is not the end of the story.
It is a portal where new forms take root.

You’ve arrived in a forest of words, altars, and living grief practices. Here, grief is composted rather than cured. Here, stories become companions. Here, we honor death, transformation, and the strange, luminous shapes that liberation can take.

This is a space to be held through writing, through shared ritual, through the quiet breath between one loss and the next becoming.

Enter the ecosystem

Receive Monday Mournings, my weekly grief letter, a soft practice and ritual to start your week.

Subscribe to The Underground Dispatch, speculative transmissions from the mycelial world.

a spirit farer for collective liberation…

I’m Michelle Carrera, a writer, grief tender, and spirit farer. My work is rooted in the ancestral soil of Borikén and is shaped by this lineage, by the waters and stories that hold me, and by a deep reverence for life in all its forms.

Through essays, obituaries, zines, and speculative grief fiction, I hold space for mourning that is both deeply personal and wildly collective.

I offer my words as altars, as places to sit with what aches, to remember what still wants to bloom, to find new language for your thresholds.

As a queer person walking multiple thresholds, I hold space with tenderness for complexity, for the in-between, the unseen, and the unspoken. Whether I’m writing obituaries, tending the dying, or imagining new ways to mourn together, my commitment is the same: to show up with care, with curiosity, and with reverence.

While writing and collective storytelling are my primary offerings, I also hold a limited number of one-on-one grief companioning spaces each season.

Ways We Can Work Together

  • For those navigating fresh loss or approaching death. This is space-holding, not fixing. A quiet presence. A grief-literate hand to hold. Read more.

  • I write bespoke obituaries, for your loved ones, ancestors, other species, or selves. For remembering. For ritual. For release. Read more.

  • I partner with individuals, collectives, and organizations to co-create grief-centered projects, rituals, or events. From writing to teaching to public mourning. Read more.

  • I facilitate spaces around grief, memory, and collective care. For schools, mutual aid groups, spiritual communities, and movement spaces. Read more.

  • Zines, field guides, grief tea, and transmissions from the underground. Tangible companions for your process.

  • I write about grief, death, memory, collapse, and collective liberation through essay, fiction, and ritual text. If you’d like to commission a piece for your publication, blog, newsletter, or collective, I’d love to talk. My writing is shaped by lived grief, justice work, and years of companioning the dying and the remembering.

Take the Next Step

As you wander through this space, I invite you to linger. Let the obituaries, reflections, zines, and offerings meet you wherever you are. There’s no right way to grieve here. No pressure to transform. Just room to be.

If you feel the pull to stay close, you’re warmly invited to receive Monday Mournings, a weekly grief letter sent every Monday. It’s a quiet companion. A gentle ritual. A way to be held, even in small doses. You can also subscribe to The Underground Dispatch, my speculative grief fiction series unfolding in transmissions from the mycelial world.

And if something here stirs something deeper , if you're grieving, dying, remembering, or imagining something through loss, I’m here as a witness and a fellow traveler. Reach out when you're ready, and we’ll begin from wherever you are.

May this be a place where your grief feels less alone. May you find companions in the stories. May you remember that you, too, are compost and bloom.