Cyra Sweet Dumitru joins the Author Spotlight this week to discuss her memoir

Author Name: Cyra Sweet Dumitru

Book Title: Words Make a Way Through Fire: Healing After My Brother’s Suicide

Book Genre: Memoir/Poetry

Release Date: September 2, 2025

Publisher: She Writes Press

Welcome, Cyra! Please tell us about your book.

Words Make a Way Through Fire is about being rescued by honest words. It is about facing horrific memory and loss creatively, and eventually walking a meaningful path to joy. It is about how poetry is uniquely capable of helping us transform traumatic experiences into spiritual growth.

You’ve mentioned, “Words are magical, poems are healers.” Can you tell us more about that?

I knew as a child that words were alive. My parents were wonderful storytellers and immersed us in stories as small children. I grew up knowing that language created worlds that lived on the page and inside my mind.

As a teenager, I discovered that my poems and journals gave voice to confused feelings and traumatic imagery, thus allowing me to focus and learn—feel joy as well as sorrow. Seeing my thoughts and feelings become meaningful poems helped me learn to trust myself again. The process of drafting and even revising poems taught me to listen attentively inwardly, and to hear the guiding voice of my soul. This was the beginning of my using poetry as medicine, although I didn’t know it at the time.

What do you hope readers will receive from this book?

I started writing this memoir to help me untangle feelings I harbored after witnessing my eldest brother’s suicide when he was 19 and I was 16. I felt stuck in confusion and sorrow, and I had lots of questions. Writing about how the nature of David’s death impacted me gave me a way to articulate emotions and explore questions which weren’t going to have solid answers yet needed exploration anyway. As I moved past the trauma of David’s death, I remembered more about my brother’s life, and wanted to record as much as I could about who David was before he died. In this sense I wanted to recreate my brother, even as I was recreating my shattered self.

Over the course of about 27 years, this book emerged. Its emphasis is upon phases of healing through writing; and, it embeds poems within most chapters as well as some journal entries. I also invite David to share his perspective of life before his final breath. Hopefully this book will convince readers that words are both magical and healers. When we face overwhelming events in our lives, a writing practice can help us make a path to a purposeful life.

What’s capturing your imagination outside of reading and writing?

I am constantly fascinated by how the arts help people become not only more expressive, but also all the more aware. I have a dear friend who painted her way through realizing as an adult that she was sexually assaulted as a child by her priest. So healing for her to trust what needed to be expressed through colors, textures, form and formlessness!  I I believe we are wired to be creative as a significant way to learn, become more knowing. Creative expression such as writing poetry, painting, photography, dance, playing a musical instrument engages all our human dimensions: our bodies, our hearts, our minds, our spirits and our souls.  Making poetry or art is ultimately both an inward conversation, and a conversation with the larger world that increases what we notice and absorb. 

I never get tired of witnessing how much individuals come to understand, release undue emotional burdens, feel renewed and empowered, and increase their trust in the world through a sustained practice of writing poetry or painting or playing the piano. It really is like watching grass turn green and grow in South Texas after rain: a miracle right there before your eyes!

Any new writing projects in the works?

I am pretty much always writing poetry; it is a necessary form of speech for me. Now that my life story has found its body and voice, I am turning my attention to poems and meditations I wrote during the past several years while my parents moved through their final days. Their marriage didn’t survive the suicide of their first born, and neither individual “made peace” within themselves regarding David’s death. Curiously, they both were afflicted with degrees of dementia in their nineties, and died within six months of one another in separate cities, still fairly attached to one another spiritually.

As their health complications unfolded in Ohio and Massachusetts, a severe drought gripped us in South Texas where I have lived for forty-three years. I have gathered the poems I wrote as response to my parents’ affliction and as response to drought into a collection called Drought in the Time of Dementia. I also unearthed a journal of reflections I wrote during this time called Un as in the prefix that means “not” or “reversal of an action.” Maybe these poems and reflections want to merge? Maybe there is also section that wants to be written called “Re” as in “restoration” or creating anew? I will continue to listen for guidance.

Where can readers find you?

I have a website focused on poetry as medicine as well as on my own writing. Feel free to peruse: www.cyrasweetdumitru.com

On Thursday, Dec. 17, 7-8:30 PM (CST) via Zoom, I will be the featured author for the Big Texas Author Talk, as a free event. Should you live near Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Iand wish an in-person experience of poetry as medicine, I will be leading a Poetry Medicine Circle called Words Make a Way Into the Soul at the Prairiewoods Franciscan Spirituality Center on Saturday, Nov. 1 from 1:00-5:00 for a modest fee of $40. For more information, please go to www.prairiewoods.org under Retreats and Programs.

Thank you, Cyra! Words Make a Way Through Fire is out NOW.

Words Make a Way Through Fire

As a teenager, Cyra witnessed her eldest brother David’s tragic suicide, an event that left her shattered. She shares her journey of recovery, tracing her path through decades of creative expression, spiritual discovery, and the gradual rebuilding of her life. Through writing poetry, journaling, and swimming, Cyra learns to heal, finding solace in a transcendent presence called Voice, and ultimately transforms her grief into personal empowerment. Her words shine a light on the impact of losing a loved one to suicide and emphasize the importance of breaking the stigma around suicide, encouraging open dialogue and stronger support networks for families affected by such loss. 

Author Bio:

Cyra Sweet Dumitru is a published poet and instructor of poetry, and one of four certified practitioners of poetic medicine in Texas. Her poems have appeared on the walls of City Hall, been spoken on national public radio and in museums, and appeared in city newspapers and national literary journals. Her collections of poems include What the Body Knows, Listening to Light, Remains, and Elder Moon. She offers therapeutic writing circles for adults learning to live with trauma, bereavement, depression, anxiety, and religious trauma. Cyra lives in San Antonio, Texas with her family.