When fire took her townhome, UCLA Extension instructor Nancy Spiller turned to the one respite she has leaned on throughout her life – putting pen to paper.

Spiller is a big believer in the therapeutic nature of creativity in the wake of trauma and disaster. In January, when her home burned down in the Palisades Fire, she began processing the event almost instantly by channeling her kaleidoscope of feelings onto the page.

“What has been helpful for me is the writing,” she said. “I take notes. In the first couple months after I went into my stoicism shell – I was an observer and I bore witness. And I wrote. This is what I did to get through this, and this is what I want to help people with.”

Spiller is hosting a seminar, After the Fire: A Writer’s Approach to Surviving Disasters, on Saturday, Nov. 22. The one-day class has already been waitlisted, and expected attendees will hail from as close as the Palisades to as far as the Philippines, where citizens have been devastated by earthquakes and typhoons in recent years.

“I don’t know exactly where most of these people are going to be coming from, but it strikes me that there is a real hunger for this,” Spiller said. “And people all over the world are facing significant disasters that affect their lives and surroundings.”

Spiller’s lecture will examine expressive writing, what she calls “solastalgia,” concerns about climate change and examples from published writers. Then students will participate in a writing exercise and have the opportunity to share at the end.

Spiller grew up in the East Bay of Northern California as the youngest of four children in what she would call “a challenging childhood” where “nobody was really paying attention to me.”

“Writing allowed me to get my voice down on the page,” she said.

She attended San Francisco State University as an English major with a creative writing minor. After, she was caught in the excitement of a more literary journalism of the time, and she worked and freelanced all over, including at publications like the San Jose Mercury and Los Angeles Herald and Los Angeles Times Syndicate, after she and her husband had moved south.

As she settled into Los Angeles, Spiller signed up for a UCLA Extension creative writing course taught by Kate Braverman.

“She was a tough cookie but really had reverence for the word and encouraged us to take our writing very seriously,” Spiller said.

The students in the class created their own writers’ workshop once the class had concluded so that they could continue to support one another beyond the classroom. Spiller began to thrive. She published a novel and a memoir that focused on food and her own personal experiences:

· “Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned From My Mother’s Recipe Box”

· “Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (with Recipes)”

“In the chaos of my challenging childhood, my mother was a really great cook,” she said, noting her parents’ divorce threw the simple act of dinner into flux. “Food at that point became a mode of survival, and also a connection to the world at large.”

Ever since she was young, she has enjoyed cooking for friends and family. And that act of cooking is linked to her writing.

“I can remember food very clearly and powerfully, whereas I forget a lot of the other things – maybe they’re best forgotten,” she said. “That’s the food connection for me, though.”

Spiller helped develop two UCLA Extension Writer’s Program courses she still teaches today, Creative Café: Food and Writing and Words & Pictures: Creative Writing from Visual Art – as she is also adept at painting and creating in other visual mediums as another form of expression.

Almost nothing could prepare her for Jan. 9, 2025, when she received word that her townhome, and her entire 46-unit townhome community, had been lost in the fire.

“It’s surprising to me, and others who have gone through this, that it is actually a little harder to talk about the further we get from it, instead of the opposite,” she said.

Knowing the risks of living in the area, she had moved quite a few important items to her family’s Oxnard home, but she still lost a great number of sketchbooks and paintings. She is grateful for the extent to which her neighbors have come together in the fire’s aftermath.

“It’s a tremendous community,” she said.

Prior to the fire, Spiller had already been developing the tools to process tragedy. In 2019, she was diagnosed with Stage 1 breast cancer. She thankfully caught it early, but that inspired her to start a writers’ workshop at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica at The Margie Petersen Breast Cancer Center. Lessons learned there and throughout her life have equipped her for the harder moments since, and she hopes those lessons can be applicable to students confronting the same.

“My experience is just how beneficial any type of writing can be,” she said. “You tell your story, and your story becomes a flotation device to help you survive – not only in the immediacy of the event, but also in the aftermath and all you will have to go through.”