she asked.
“What?” Tom said, not missing a beat. “Well, first they wrap you in a towel, then they put you in a box, then they put you in the ground,” she answered.
A few days earlier, we’d buried Buford, our gentle, elegant, orange and white cat, and I’d hoped she’d forgotten about it. At least she was talking about her first experience with death, however tersely practical her summary. I’d just read aloud to Emma E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (her first real book, as I wrote on the flyleaf) about the spider, Charlotte, that spins webs for her friend, Wilbur, the pig, to read. Wilbur, the runt of the litter, had been rescued from death by Fern Arable, the owner’s daughter. Wilbur again faced his fears of death when the geese told him that his new owner, Mr. Zuckerman, was planning to fatten him up for the Christmas dinner.
Charlotte promised to save her new friend. When she spun the phrases, “some pig,” “terrific,” and others into her web, Wilbur began acting like some pig, doing tricks and stunts to amaze the people around him. This beautifully-crafted, simple story has much to say about people and nature and the cycle of life and death. But it’s also about the powers of expression, of words and what they can do, especially during those times when our lives become redefined for us. At that time in Paradise, Missouri, it never occurred to anyone to talk things out, much less to write it up. Somehow, the word and the image did not exist for such purposes. But when we’re jerked into a new reality, facing the unfathomable, composing through words and pictures can help us sort things out, understand, and go on.
***
In this book, I use writing interchangeably with composing, and both terms apply to any medium or symbol system. As well, composing through trauma has two meanings here. First, to create or write or compose something in words and images related to the trauma. If you compose in word and image, you’ll often arrive at the second meaning—to compose yourself—emotionally, physically, and spiritually. This all means coping, yes, but it goes beyond that.
At a recent international conference called “Making Sense of Pain,” there was much talk about “coping strategies,” from medical doctors, medical anthropologists, counselors, and others. Just as often, the question kept surfacing from different people: “But what do we do with pain?” I finally spoke up, first explaining that while I understood the usefulness of the phrase, “coping strategies,” I found it limiting, and second, more importantly, what we should do with pain—physical, emotional, spiritual—is simple: transform the pain into something else—create a mission, perhaps a mission that is connected with the pain, one that can help others: a written composition, a film, an essay, a scholarship, a garden, a poem, a barn, or a video. The first step in transforming pain is to get it out into the light, through purposeful action. Only then does it become more visible and, therefore, less scary, subject to reflection, manipulation, revision, and re-conceptualization into a more ordered and calmer internal landscape.
I’ve believed in composing through trauma for a long time—creating words, piling up brush for burning, painting a portrait or a house, constructing anything—in order to bypass the pain, to lessen its gnawing at my consciousness. I’ve somehow found these construction sites all along the roads I’ve taken through my personal and professional life. As a kid—since I could sit at a table, according to my mother—I spent all my time drawing and painting. The best thing my mother ever did for me was to keep me supplied with blank white paper. I guess that I was told that I, too, was “some pig” and maybe even “terrific,” so maybe I believed it. I was an art major for a few years before going into English, but I’ve continued composing to this day. I’ve spent my life shamelessly cajoling my students to compose, too, whether it be basic writing or advanced composition, or technical and professional writing, or poetry, or creative nonfiction, or doctoral dissertations and research articles.
No matter when or where or who, I’d often encounter people who somehow changed when they wrote about what was most important and confusing and troubling to them. The traumatic experiences that had festered within them had never been freed because they thought it was “not academic,” or because, if and when they did venture such writing, they were shut down by their teachers. I’ve seen this scenario time and again: in “mainstream” college writing courses; in remedial writing classes; in teachers and students in a state-run youth offenders program; in undergraduate and graduate students studying to be schoolteachers and college professors. People need to make sense of what’s most important to them. Their issues seep under doors and ooze out of closed lids and cracks. Many teachers receive such trauma-focused writing from their students, regardless of what is assigned.
More often, composing through trauma occurs, sadly, only by accident, when circumstances happen to align. When we carry a serious trauma within us and fail to do anything with it, then it is often published in some way. If it’s not written or somehow processed through language or art or some other form, it can be acted out with far more severe consequences—acted out through violence or social isolation or substance abuse.
Cleanly defining composing through trauma always seems to fall short, but here’s my version. The essential concept runs under different aliases: “writing as healing,” “expressive language,” “writing for wellness,” “transitional writing,” “therapeutic writing,” and more. Regardless of the label, any useful definition has to be broad; if not, it defeats the whole enterprise. In short, I define composing through trauma as any kind of communication or product that focuses on any kind of traumatic experience—any experience that harms, worries, saddens, scares, or makes the writer anxious; any experience that creates feelings of violation, dissociation, isolation, alienation, confusion, depression, or inferiority.
Some topics that are often written about include, but are not limited to, the following: death of a loved one; suicide; rape; alcohol or drug addiction; divorce and other forms of separation; gender orientation; disease and illness; relationships with parents, children, and siblings; Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); cultural and racial bias; and all forms of physical and psychological abuse. Keep in mind that these “traumas” necessarily exist on a continuum—from the less serious to the most severe. This notion of “How severe is your trauma?” calls to mind the posters in doctors’ offices that show a series of ten circular faces, progressing from Mr. Frowny to Mr. Smiley. However, I’m not sure that pain can be a number. As well, one woman’s minor irritant may be another man’s demon. We have to take people at their word, as to the degree of severity of any given trauma, at any given time.
Lucy, whom you’ll meet in the pages ahead, defines composing through trauma this way:
“And when you say writing as healing—what am I healing? It’s not like I am going to heal or be on the mend—so I guess what I am healing is my . . . spirit, my identity—how to integrate this new aspect of my life that has caused a rupture in who I was, how I saw myself.” Lucy understands that she must fuse her “new” present into her past. As Anderson and MacCurdy (2000) state, “the chief healing effect of writing is . . . to recover and to exert a measure of control over that which we can never control—the past” (7). Also, the term healing is problematic for Lucy, as it is for many of us, which is why it should be treated with some nuance, as Anderson and MacCurdy recommend:
Healing is neither a return to some former state of perfection nor the discovery or restoration of some mythic autonomous self. Healing, as we understand it, is precisely the opposite. It is change from a singular self, frozen in time by a moment of unspeakable experience, to a more fluid, more narratively able, more socially integrated self. (2000, 7)
In the following brief excerpt, David, who described himself as a “latchkey kid” after his parents’ divorce, illustrates this definition:
Alone in those hours, I created a world of my own self-expression. I sang loudly in operatic voices, my reedy swellings filling the great acoustic voids of the empty house. I talked to my dog, to our
