★Even before its publication, this book was awarded the Barrow Street Press prize for an unpublished non-fiction manuscript in 2023
★Soren Tae Smith discusses grief, maternal love, and how to find solace through storytelling! This memoir is an intensely personal journey. She reflects on the pain of losing a child, her ongoing struggle with grief, and the emotional challenges of continuing to be parents after such a profound loss. She also shares how she discovered her passion for writing, her love of novellas, and the role storytelling has played in her healing process.

One parent's journey through grief and the loss of a child
There is no way to 'come to terms' with parental grief: it is like being killed while still standing, being born in mid-life and having to learn to exist again, becoming a hybrid creature, partly buried.
For Soren Tae Smith, the dead have always been mentors. Their deeds have ended but their influence continues. But what does it mean when your child, who had just begun to talk with you about Kafka and Camus, is suddenly closer to them than to you? What does it mean to be able to write or work when a young person didn't get the chance?
Written as a means of survival, Honey from the Ground upends genre and resists explanation. It follows the rhythms of lived time and memory, accepting illness and limitation. Through glimpses of a personal past, it rummages for what can be saved and known even in the absence of answers.
Those who die before us are not left behind but are a step ahead. It is for us to navigate the path toward them.

Soren Tae Smith
Soren Tae Smith is a writer and a tutor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Melbourne. She has contributed to publications such as The Southern Review, TEXT, Antipodes, Opposites, and Writing Letters, and her creative nonfiction has been longlisted for Yumeguri magazine. She has published essays including “Kafka and Weil: Self-Detachment and De‑Creativity in the Writing Practice” and “Quantifying Shakespeare,” among others.