time for every word in the sentence, each time emphasizing a different word to see what difference it would make in meaning. I sat before the television, repeating dialogue of the talk show hosts, the newscasters, the PBS painting instructors—trying to say their own words before they said them, trying to predict what they might say, what they might think. I watched Mr. Rogers without the sound, supplying my own explanation soundtrack for tours of dairy farms and goldfish aquariums. (Course Document 1993)
As an adolescent, David fought his intense loneliness through exercising his voice, through engaging in language with television and painted imagery. He seemed to neuter his loneliness by hearing a real human voice, even if it was his own—in a sense, explaining his isolation to himself as he resisted it. Also, as an adult, David accomplished much the same thing by writing about these experiences. Then and later, he reduced or even avoided being “a singular self, frozen in time” by this negative situation. His breaking free of “time-binding” is an important victory when composing through trauma, as Anderson and MacCurdy (2000) clarify:
Traumatic events, because they do not occur within the parameters of “normal” reality, do not fit into the structure and flow of time. Instead, they are imprisoned within the psyche as discrete moments, frozen, isolated from normal memories. Because they are not connected to the normal, linear flow of time-bound memory, these moments emerge into consciousness at any point, bringing the force of the traumatic event with them. (6)
Voice and language and writing help David become more fluid and narratively able, which allows him to more precisely articulate the issue—and doing so usually indicates that one inhabits a more socially integrated self. Lucy, too, seems driven to narrate her “unspeakable experience,” to integrate it with her “previous” sense of self:
Not only did I privately recite narratives or storylines of hope, read narratives of hope and envision narratives of hope, I had to publically tell my own new narrative. I had to tell my story over and over, out loud, as a way to gain some control over it. Like wrangling a monster to the ground. My disease was so big and overwhelming, I had to find a way to incorporate this new narrative into the existing life I had been living—the 42 year old Lucy, mother of two, professor without terminal cancer. I had to hear my voice, the one I knew, the one that has been narrating my life all along tell this new part. Whether at a department meeting or in class, I told them. Whether it was relevant to the class or not, and as self-indulgent as it might have been, I needed to speak it. (Stanovick 2012)
Overall, though, most definitions remain limited unless they are grounded in specific experience, as David’s and Lucy’s are. Along with such unanchored definitions, writing-through-trauma research, since the early 1990’s, has focused on how writing affects specific and observable changes in our health, such as blood pressure or heart rate. This is a rich, extremely valuable body of work—summarized later—that’s been long over-due. Of course, the bulk of this research is quantitative in nature.
However, we know almost nothing about how, specifically, the written products and processes function in improving health. Researchers in writing, rhetoric, and pedagogy have not focused on how writing about trauma works, in terms of its specific language or its thinking and composing processes. What motivates them to write in the first place? How do they conceive of their audiences? How do they organize their pieces? What evidence appears in their writing—and in their reflections on this writing—that reveals specific critical thinking strategies? What language devices do they employ in their writing?
For these reasons and many more, I embarked on what became a ten-year study to describe, as closely as I could, how and why experienced, effective writers compose to “heal” themselves—the focus of the following chapters. Most of the people described in this book are language experts who have devoted their lives to the study and teaching of reading and writing. These professionals were tenured faculty members in university English and education departments, conducted research, published widely, presented frequently at professional meetings, and received awards for their work. Others were experienced teachers pursuing graduate degrees. A few are middle-school, junior high, and high school students.
In Chapter 1, “Composing through Trauma,” I describe the foundational principles or “pillars” of such composing. Only by immersion in “the thing itself” can we better understand such complex feelings, so I’ll try to anchor these principles in the experiences, products, and processes of all kinds of people, who, in many different ways, seek to compose their way through trauma.
Regardless of the age, background, or expertise level of these writers, trauma has a way of leveling the field on which they find themselves. While improvement in writing itself is not an explicit point or chapter in this book, I believe it reverberates in every line in the pages ahead. One argument behind this book is that writing not only wrestles with trauma, but in so doing, it develops many writing skills. Readers will find identification of numerous thinking strategies in nearly every discourse examined—especially those types of thinking that have long been heralded as necessary for academic prose and success in the workplace. In fact, I think that readers will find that improvement of discourse cannot help but occur when we write about trauma. After all, such writing occurs when we are literally driven to understand immediate issues weighting us down, when hesitancy, self-censorship, and cultural artifice have fallen away, when such “shackles” become, somehow, no longer very relevant. Writers, themselves, recognize when their words and voices ring true, when their knots of fear and confusion get laid out in clearer, straighter lines.
Chapter 2, “Beyond ‘Just Academic Stuff . . . ’” provides the main contexts for this work, describing the course, the teacher, and the resultant study. Writing, reading, visualizing, reflecting, revising, and talking about our trauma not only make us better writers, but they create an environment that leads to deeper, wider understanding of those unspeakable moments that too often lay frozen within us. However, this composing through trauma is by no means a magic bullet. Composing about trauma is not a cure-all or remotely similar to any kind of vague, mystical panacea. Instead, it’s hard work that demands commitment, time, extensive writing, thinking, and many other activities and processes.
Most of the people you’ll meet in the chapters ahead have experienced much worse traumas than I did when I couldn’t grasp the death of my grandfather. At that time, my only way to manage my grief was to bolt out of the dining room, run out to the yard, lay back in the grass, and watch the clouds drift above. Suddenly, brazenly, the world made no sense. When the people in this book turn to composing their way through trauma, they look face-up into that same sky that goes on forever, as they work toward understanding.
Traumas that we are compelled to write about are powerful human ones, which require a uniquely human response—writing to and for ourselves and trusted others—small, human voices that rail against the universe. Such writing is very much like prayer, whether or not we believe in a God. This, we have to believe, is the highest, holiest use of language imaginable.
1 Composing through Trauma
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
William Shakespeare, As You Like It (2.1.14–19)
Claire, a bright young student in my graduate course focused on writing about trauma, insisted that she “didn’t have anything to heal from.” At semester’s end, she did not turn in the long narrative and analysis of a traumatic event. I had constantly assured her that
