Expressive Engagement
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Expressive Engagement
A Dialogue of Two Should and Their Savior
by Suzanne M. Stone with S. Gregory Stone
What happens when the person you love forgets your name—but you're still standing right there?
When the Clouds Lift is a poetic dialogue between two souls walking through Alzheimer's: the one losing herself to the fog, and the one watching helplessly as sixty years of shared memories slip away. Into their anguish steps a third voice—the Savior—who speaks directly to both.
This isn't clinical. This is intimate.
Born from the real journey of a couple married sixty years, this booklet captures what so many families live but struggle to express: the sufferer's terror of vanishing inside her own mind, the caregiver's invisible grief, and those stunning moments when the clouds lift and recognition flickers back—if only for a heartbeat.
Woven throughout are original artworks by Linda J. Stone (1941–2019), whose own hands eventually forgot how to hold a brush. Her paintings of old barns, lighthouses, and ocean waves remain as testimony to the beauty Alzheimer's could not erase.
This book is for:
Caregivers who feel unseen in their exhaustion
Those watching a parent or spouse drift away
Anyone losing themselves to memory's fog
Families searching for words when words fail
Hearts seeking divine comfort in the longest goodbye
Rooted in scripture and written with tenderness, When the Clouds Lift offers no easy answers—only the promise that no child of God is ever lost to Him.
"I know you. I know you both by name—
Beloved, held within My Grace."
“"I'm going to be honest--I'm not big into poetry, yet I was genuinely moved by this book. Getting a glimpse of a lifelong faithful marriage centered on Christ was incredibly encouraging, especially how it weathered even the sever trial of Alzheimer's. The perspectives of both the husband and the wife, along with the ever-present comfort of the Savior, were very well mixed and presented. Overall, it was a great reminder that the Lord is faithful to help His people, no matter the trial at hand."”
Kaleb J
Where voice, grief, faith, and hope find words
Suzanne M. Stone is an author, educator, musician, and voice teacher whose work explores the quiet, deeply human places where faith, grief, expression, and belonging meet. Since 1982, she has helped singers and speakers find freedom, courage, and authenticity in their voices through decades of teaching and study in vocal performance, contemporary vocal pedagogy, vocology, and Body Mapping. Her books—including the Expressive Engagement Series, When the Clouds Lift, and Small Invisibilities—give language to experiences that are often carried in silence: performance anxiety, memory loss, invisible sorrow, spiritual longing, and the ache of feeling unseen. Rooted in faith and shaped by a lifetime of walking alongside others in tender moments, her writing offers both honest witness and hope. She lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, with her husband Greg.
Speak and Sing so People Want to Listen
You don’t just want to sound “right”—you want to move people. Expressive Engagement is your hands-on action planner for speaking and singing with power, nuance, and heart. You’ll investigate the building blocks of your voice—pitch, intensity, timbre, rate, rhythm, tone, accent, and more—then translate those insights into clear choices that serve your music, your message, and your story. Step by step, you’ll craft programs that land, shape character and emotion with precision, and use body language that matches what listeners hear. With practical checklists, vocabulary tables, rubrics, and the “Performance Playground” for daily reps, you’ll turn careful preparation into genuine connection—on stage, in the studio, at the mic, or in the room. Show up prepared. Leave them changed.
Master Your Talent with SMART Goals and Deliberate Practice
You train like an artist—and now you’ll practice like an athlete. Expressive Practice gives you a clear, step-by-step system to turn scattered effort into steady progress: set SMART goals that actually matter to your repertoire, run focused sessions that target one skill at a time, capture immediate feedback, repeat clean reps, stretch beyond your comfort zone, and protect your voice with rest and recovery. Then you’ll apply it all with whole-body warm-ups, breathing mastery, song-by-song plans, and a built-in Progress Journal so you can see your growth. You leave guesswork behind and build a voice that’s reliable, expressive, and stage-ready.
To Transform Performance Anxiety
You don’t have to “power through” stage fright—you can transform it. Expressive Strategies to Transform Performance Anxiety gives you a practical, science-informed roadmap to convert nerves into usable energy. You’ll learn what’s happening in your body (fight-or-flight, breath, tension), borrow proven tools from sports psychology, build a steady pre-performance routine, and protect your voice with smart recovery, nutrition, and sleep. Then you’ll assemble a personal toolkit: mindset resets, body mapping cues, breathing protocols, visualization, and a performance-day plan—plus reflection worksheets that turn each appearance into data you can act on. You step onstage present, prepared, and steady—so your story, not your stress, takes the spotlight.
Alone and Invisible in the Crowd
Small Invisibilities is a faith-rooted poem about the quiet ache of being unseen in the very places where belonging is supposed to come naturally. Moving through scenes of church pews, church assignments, children excluded from friendship circles, parking-lot grief, and the pain of being measured by usefulness rather than inherent worth, it gathers private sorrows into a shared human experience. At its heart, the poem turns toward the compassionate presence of Christ, who sees fully, does not ask us to become smaller, and reminds us that our worth has no limit.