I'm Still Writing by Virginia Ann Byrd

Author:Virginia Ann Byrd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

26

Roxane Gay

• TRAUMA •

“When you’re finally ready to write about trauma, there is a temptation to offer up your testimony, to transcribe all the brutal details as if that is the whole of the work that needs to be done. There is a temptation to indulge not so much in writing but in confession. Sometimes suffering becomes more bearable when you can share the whole truth of it.

Not all writing about trauma is created equal. As with most subjects, writers can be careless with trauma. They can be solipsistic. They can write concerned only with what they need to say and not with what an audience might need to hear. They assume their trauma, in and of itself, is the only story they need to tell, or that having experienced trauma is inherently interesting. Or trauma serves as pornography—a way of titillating the reader, a lazy way of creating narrative tension, as if it is only through suffering that we have a story to tell. We see trauma as it unfolds but are rarely given a broader understanding of that trauma or its aftermath.”

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