A client’s win, shared with his permission.
This morning I got the email every editor and writing coach hopes for. Lito (Joselito) Libres, MACP, CCC, an EMDRIA Certified Therapist and a clinical therapist with the Nunatsiavut Government’s Department of Health and Social Development in Labrador, Canada, wrote to tell me that his reflection is now published on EMDRIA’s Focal Point blog: We Are Tired: Reflections on Humility, Shared Burden, and Walking Alongside Inuit Communities.
He has given me permission to share it here and to say a little about my part in it. If you have been reading my monthly notes, you have met him already. He is the clinician I have coached for a few years. In July I wrote about his article being turned down because an issue was already full, and in August about its move to a featured blog post. That blog post is live now.
What the piece is about
Lito has worked in Inuit communities in Nunatsiavut, a self-governing Inuit region in northern Labrador, for more than ten years. His reflection begins in a staff kitchen, over coffee, in the days after two suicide deaths in two communities. His Inuit colleagues looked at him and said, “You must be tired.” He answered, “We are tired.”
The rest of the piece unpacks that answer. A clinician who comes in to help carries one kind of exhaustion. Local Inuit health workers, mental health workers, and social workers carry another: they respond as professionals while grieving as relatives, neighbors, and members of the community, and they are still there after the outside professionals leave. Lito writes about how that difference shapes his EMDR practice, from waiting to be invited rather than arriving first, to pacing the work to each person’s history, and about the humility the work asks of anyone who comes from outside. It is a careful and generous piece, and I hope you will read the whole thing.
How it came to be
Lito first shared We Are Tired with me in June. In July we worked on it as an article for EMDRIA’s magazine, Go With That, and he submitted it on July 16. The next morning the editor wrote back that the fall issue was already full and encouraged him to send the piece to the Focal Point blog instead.
In August the blog invited a first draft. Lito wanted to keep his reflection whole and make the role of EMDR clearer for the blog’s readers, so I sent him an outline of where EMDR could come forward and the questions a reader would bring to those places: what EMDR actually is, in plain words, and how it is timed and used when grief is shared across a community. He wrote the piece, and then I did a light edit, and he submitted the blog post on August 27, nearly three weeks before the deadline.
At the end of September the blog’s reviewers sent their comments, and Lito added background on Inuit and Nunatsiavut for readers who do not know the region. I reviewed his revision, he sent it back on October 2, and the editor replied that it looked great. On November 6 she let him know it was live.
What I hope other writers take from it
The first venue said no because the issue was full, not because of the writing, and the editor who said no is the one who pointed him to a better home within the same organization (the magazine and blog are companions for the EMDR organization more broadly). When a piece is turned down for space, I always ask where else it might fit. We keep going until we find your publication the right home.
My work with this article was reading closely, asking questions, showing Lito where a reader would want more, and a light edit at the end. That is how I coach: the writer keeps the voice and the decisions, and I help them see what the piece already is and what it still needs.
And it took time. From the draft he shared in June to publication in November was about five months, with a full issue, a new venue, and a round of reviewer comments along the way.
The patience of publishing.
Congratulations, Lito.
If you are writing something like this
If you are a clinician or researcher with a piece of practice-based writing you want to bring to publication, I offer writing coaching and journal article editing. You can also book a free strategy call to talk about where your piece is now.
Warmly,
~Jennifer