Writing About Trauma and Helping Others Write About It Too
Incredible questions were asked by E.J.
1) Do you find creative writing to be useful in processing different experiences, identities, and potential traumas? How so?
I do. Several years ago I read a quote by Nikki Giovanni. She said “Writers don’t write from experience. They write from empathy.”
I’ve used that quote as the baseline, essentially, for most of my own writing over the years ever since I read it (especially the second sentence). That goes for when I read poems, too. If I’m writing about something, then I need to either have empathy for the people who are experiencing it, empathy for the identities I’m writing about, and so on. I don’t mean in the sense that if I’m writing a poem about a perpetrator I need to feel empathy for that person. I need to feel empathy for the victim of that perpetrator. And if I’m reading a poem about a situation I have never experienced - for example, a poem about someone whose father has died, then I will read that poem again and again until I experience empathy. If I don’t feel empathy for someone or something in a piece, then I cannot allow myself to engage with that piece fully until I do.
But at the same time, I think experience and empathy can also easily go together. For situations of trauma, however, personal experience and empathy for oneself are often placed on opposite sides of the scale. Experiencing a trauma like sexual assault, or a car accident in which a friend died but you survived- you experienced that. You went through it. But how do you begin to cultivate empathy for yourself after all the guilt you have? You might think, “I shouldn’t have lived through it.” Or “I did something to bring that upon myself.” And when you begin to write about that experience, you have put down a new point of view on the page. Sometimes you put down a point of view you didn’t even know you were harboring. And that point of view changes you.
Sometimes I ask students or someone whom I’m mentoring or editing work for, “What would someone else tell you about your trauma? You think it’s your fault. But would someone else agree with that? Now write down what they would tell you. And write it down until you begin to internalize it. Until you realize it wasn’t your fault.”
Processing an identity, an experience, a trauma, whether any of those three things are painful or not, can come through writing down your story. When you write your story, you begin to understand that you own it. And when it is written, it is no longer inside you, but outside you at the same time. And when something is outside you, it becomes concrete, and visible, and tangible. So you can hold onto it, and keep it as your story, with all the guilt and shame and blame and confusion and despair. It’s there, and when it’s outside you and it’s there, that’s when you can begin to wrestle with it and deal with it. You can’t ask a boxer to fight something with his gloves that’s located inside his body. It has to be outside first, appearing, written, to begin.
2) How do you (personally or as an instructor) teach/use creative writing to process trauma?
As I mentioned with Nikki Giovanni’s quote, sometimes I rely on quotes. I remember my creative writing class in high school, we learned a quote from Natalie Goldberg from her book Writing Down the Bones. She said, “Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” So when I teach a workshop, or when someone who approaches me wanting to write a piece for my magazine comes to me and tells me they don’t think they can do it, I tell them, “You have to be willing to be split open.” I always tell people that quote. Haven’t they already been in the process of being split open for so long? By keeping that story, that trauma inside? The splitting already is in the process of occurring. They just have to take that last step. So I get these students or these curious writers, and I ask them what they have to be afraid of. I tell them they’ve already gotten through what they thought they could never get through. The trauma happened. The experience, the pain of an identity, happened. The aftershocks are still there, but the earthquake passed. And they’re still alive after that quake. So now they have to dig deeper to get out that rubble.
Oftentimes they’ll tell me that the worst thing that could happen is that they’ll relive the experience by writing about it. So I tell them that we have to take it slow. Step by step. If they write a paragraph a day, then they write a paragraph a day. If they write a word a day, then that’s what happens. Each piece is important. Nothing, with trauma, is unimportant. If you were wearing a certain color of shoes that day, when that thing happened to you, and you think that’s important to mention, then it is. If you merely write the words “yellow shoes” one day and nothing the next, you have a start. You’re already getting there. You have to go slow sometimes.
A woman who had a piece published in my magazine said it took her 40 years to write that piece. 40 years. So I use that story sometimes to tell to other students or submitters. I tell them you don’t have to write this in a day. You can take 40 years. You can take more. You’re doing your best.
So basically, I set the stage with that quote, with the expectation that being split open will happen at some point, that this is just reality. And I question the students, the writers, about their fears about the process. And when you dig into those fears and consider them, they become less scary. And when you reassure people that they can take it slow, that helps a great deal.
3) How do you support people in the classroom/room during this time when they may feel triggered or overwhelmed?
I think grounding is always helpful. A lot of people have this expectation or this mentality that you need to write a piece all in one sitting. That’s what I do when I do my own writing; I write everything in one sitting. But that’s not realistic or helpful for everyone. So if someone is feeling overwhelmed, I tell them they can stop, that they should let their piece marinate. Just sit awhile. Breaking that expectation that everything needs to happen at once can be so useful. And on the other hand, sometimes people will say something like “No no, I just need to finish. I need to get it out.” And I’ll tell them that’s okay; they can do that, and they’re going to check in me with after each new line or paragraph, and we’re going to check in with each other until they’re finished. Showing art and playing music while people are writing can help too. Because when you’re processing trauma through writing, sometimes you reach that stage where you dissociate, where you kind of go out of the classroom and into your own head. So if people have art they like, or music they’re familiar with, going on around them while they’re writing, that can help center them.
Even just leaving the space you’re in - if you’re writing about a trauma you might begin to associate the room you’re writing about the trauma in with the trauma. So if we need to change locations, or you need to leave for awhile to get out of that space- do so. If you need to write about your trauma in the same place that it happened, then we can make that adjustment. Whatever works, whatever needs to be done.
4) What methods/techniques do you and your students use when this occurs? Can you explain them in detail?
I think I already mostly went over this - the big things are the grounding, the playing or showing of music and art, the taking breaks and reminding students or writers that they can go slow and finish another time, or checking in with them if they decide to keep going, the change of setting, etc. Something else I haven’t done, though, and am thinking about is taking space for breathing exercises or meditation before writing, during writing, or after writing (or all three or a combination). Kind of just to increase mindfulness and get everyone relaxed. Unfortunately there’s not always much time for discussion, but setting up a kind of discussion circle after everyone has done their writing, kind of an informal support group, would really probably help ground the students/writers and get them to feel less overwhelmed. Kind of emphasizing the positive aspects of community and the fact that everyone is in this together and can listen and share and not be judged.
5) Anything else you’d like to tell me about your experiences teaching, writing, etc. that you feel are relevant or helpful for this study.
This article is awesome if you want to take a look, and so relevant to your project! What stuck out to me most was that writing about trauma in a group of students or workshop attendees shouldn’t involve criticism or editing or “corrections.” That doesn’t help anyone who’s experienced trauma. The trauma happened; it can’t be edited. Sure, the writers can edit their poems, but having someone else tell them “You need to fix this line” doesn’t help - there’s nothing, technically speaking, to fix when it comes to a poem or a piece about a situation that never should have happened in the first place. The real fixing would come from preventing that situation before it came to be, not in “fixing” the writing.
“While leading workshops, Mirriam-Goldberg realized that people weren’t interested in craft but rather in giving their lives meaning. She explains, “It goes back to that Yiddish saying ‘Anything can be survived if it’s part of a story.’”
