Writing into the Wound: Understanding Trauma, Truth, and Language by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-03-23T15:20:27+00:00

PUBLIC SPEAKING FILLS ME with anxiety, even now that I’ve become experienced with sharing my work, my life, for an hour or two with a large audience. I can make it seem like being onstage is effortless, but inside, I am silently screaming, deeply uncomfortable with so many eyes on me, worried I will say or do the wrong thing. I feel a similar anxiety in the classroom, the students looking at me like some kind of authority figure, expecting me to be the adult in the room.

That first night back at Yale, I turned onto a narrow street to get to my classroom in Harkness Hall. I distinctly remembered wandering around trying to find my way at seventeen years old, armed only with a paper map and an inability to ask for directions. I was nauseous then and I was nauseous now. The radiator clanked loudly as I walked into the building. It smelled musty now as it did then. Bulletin boards were plastered with notices for all kinds of progressive student organizations and an apartment for rent and a used laptop for sale and an upcoming concert. Students milled about waiting for their classes to start. I walked slowly, studying the room numbers until I found my classroom. Most of the students were already there, and I was fifteen minutes early. They looked at me expectantly and I took a deep breath and thus our class began.

I’m a big believer in the importance of reading as a writer—examining texts not for meaning but to understand how writers elicit the responses and reactions readers have to their work. To better understand the range of strategies they could use to write about trauma, I gave my students a heavy reading list. I made a digital reader, with essays on the language of trauma, how to write memoir, ways of writing about violence, the use of humor to process trauma for an audience, writing about the trauma of others, writing about collective traumas, and how to conduct research when writing about trauma. I also assigned novels and memoirs like Possessing the Secret of Joy, by Alice Walker, Heart Berries, by Terese Marie Mailhot, Bastard Out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison, The Chronology of Water, by Lidia Yuknavitch, Heavy, by Kiese Laymon, and Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. Developing that reading list was one of the most exciting and humbling parts of thinking through the workshop. There is a whole lot of brilliant writing in this world. And the writers who write about trauma well do so exceptionally well.

In each of the books, the writer left me in awe. They took ugly experiences and made them beautiful. They wrote things that were uncomfortable and provocative and unbearably human. They demonstrated that there is no singular way to write about trauma, and that sometimes to write about trauma did not require excavating intimate details. In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch wrote a memoir about her life with an abusive father. The nature of the abuse, the severity of it—these things are clear, but she offers not one explicit detail.

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