Writing about trauma

Don't know the name of the artist, but painting was found at Evidently Cochrane.


It all started with Phil Collins.

Yes. That Phil Collins. I was in the writing center and a student brought me a paper she wrote on the life of Collins. She was a superfan of his and was having difficulty deciding how to fit the man's extensive career in the limitation of six pages. I found myself having a debate over which carried more significance: the album Invisible Touch or the film Buster. My grad work in comp/rhet did not prepare me for such a discussion.

The unexpected examination of Phil Collins' body of work dug a song out of my memory, one that I really liked in my teen years and still do to this day. Only it was not memories of high school that came back to me, but somewhere else.

It's called "Take Me Home."





"They don't tell me nothing
So I find out what I can
There's a fire that's been burning
Right outside my door
I can't see but I feel it
And it helps to keep me warm"

For exactly one year now, I have been writing about something that was most traumatic for me. As a writer, this has caused me to consider a few questions, such as "How do I tell this story without relentlessly traumatizing the reader?" "How do write the narrative without drowning the reader in pathos and offering little in the way of objective substance?" Perhaps most critical to me, "How do I write this without burning myself to a cinder?" I mean, when I'm not writing it, I'm thinking about it. In so many ways, I relive what happened on a daily basis. One time last February, I watched the video of the announcement of the college's closing seven times in a row.

Seven times.

I had to. For accuracy.

"I can't come out to find you
I don't like to go outside
They can't turn off my feelings
Like they're turning off a light"

And they did turn off the lights. Thus, the trauma. In my work, I must revisit the trauma multiple times and in multiple ways. Again and again.

And again and again and again.

I suppose for a moment, just as philosophers do, we should define our terms before proceeding with discourse. I fully realize that using the word "trauma" is a dicey proposition. Unlike other writers who have published gripping accounts of enduring trauma, I have not been sexually assaulted. I have not spent a tour of duty in a war zone. I have not survived a concentration camp. In light of all of these examples and my own awareness as a ten year supporter of Amnesty International, I know that I have not suffered trauma to the degree so many other people have and that in the grand scheme of things, I'm actually quite lucky.

At the same time, I don't believe that trauma and pain are contests. Pain is pain. If you have suffered a loss or had pain visited upon you, that is trauma. Your experience was, as existential philosophers might say, authentic, and your feelings are valid. Therefore, they are valid subject matter for writing, dare I say, they are essential, much needed stories for the world to read. They serve many purposes. Consider Elie Wiesel...

Wiesel wrote the book Night. It is a gripping and often gut-churning account of his experience in a Nazi concentration camp. The book stands as a testament to those who suffered, and in many cases died, in such a horrific example of humans being inhumane to humans. There are many reasons Wiesel wrote the book, but there are two that stand out to me. For one, he wanted the text to be a testament, an account of what these people went through for their stories deserved to be known to the world. Secondly, I once read an interview with Wiesel (exactly where is lost to my memory and therefore I apologize) where he said that he was able to get through his concentration camp experience by seeing himself on the other side of it, telling his story to other people.

I once more must make clear that when I write about trauma, my experience is in no way on parity with someone who endured a concentration camp. It was still a loss though. I lost someplace that meant everything to me. I witnessed the dispersing and dispossession of a community of people who meant everything to me. As if all of that were not bad enough, I found myself in a place where I had no idea how I would continue to work and make a living and provide even the basics for my family. That brings with it a loss of dignity. A loss of self-worth. A loss of humanity.

This didn't just happen to my community. I found more and more examples of these experiences as I did my research into closed colleges. This is from an interview I did with a former faculty member of Dana College, which closed last decade:

"It was like a death...and it had everything that comes with that. The campus is closed off and empty now. And I have to pass it every day on my way into town for coffee. I've had to mentally callus myself."

I just kept nodding in grim understanding as he told it all to me. It became clear to me that there were many more people with similar experiences and their stories deserved to be read.

So I started to write. I needed to write my way out of this state of mind. There were a few complications, however:

Compounding these emotions was the knowledge that the loss of the community was caused by a select group of people.

"I've got no far horizons
And I wish upon a star
They don't think that I listen
Oh but I know who they are"

Oh I do.

That brings anger. Hatred. At times, I would stop writing, stand up from my laptop, and start walking in circles. I was like a fuse burning down. I was like a Navy fighter jet, revving and engines flaming, just waiting to be shot off the deck then switching to afterburners to go intercept the enemy. This rage is a fuel. It's an engine for the writing.

It's not exactly the most healthy thing for you, though. As the old saying goes, if you hold flaming coals to hurl at your enemy, do you not burn your own hand in the process? Not only is it unhealthy for the writer, it's bad for all those around him or her. Such intense feelings are hard to just shut off and they have an insidious way of being visited upon those who deserve it the least. So how does a writer create an accurate, authentic account of a traumatic occurrence without turning all around him or her to scorched earth?

I found an article in Writer's Digest by Kelley Clink. Clink wrote A Different Kind of Same. It's memoir about surviving her brother's suicide.

In the article she gives several tips on how to write about trauma. One of them is "Write to heal, then write to publish." This has helped create a balance and an objectivity in my own book. Much of the writing requires research into the experiences of other college communities as well as a fair amount of dry and boring business research. This affords stretches of work where I'm emotionally detached, thus allowing me to recharge. Clink also recommends, as you might expect, stepping away from the work from time to time. It's not as simple as it sounds, especially if you're writing about a particularly intense moment. The advice is, however, still most sound. A good friend of mine pointed that out to me.

"Look at the comics you probably have piled around your workspace," she said. "Aren't they colorful? Aren't they fun?"

Of course, they are. More importantly, looking at them brings me back into the present. I am not actually in the trauma at the present time. I am in a place where I am safe and in no immediate danger. When she said this, I immediately related to something that happened to me not long after the trauma.

It was in early August of last year. I was giving my TV a good thousand yard stare and fighting one hell of an internal battle to keep from going out and buying a case of beer and downing it all. Then this guy showed up.

Chewie jumped up onto the couch. He licked my face once, plopped across me, and promptly fell asleep, complete with deep puppy snores. I stayed right there, stroking his head.

"It's not all bad," I thought. "Not everything is bad."

That little moment changed me. I could change my thinking and find something in the present to give my focus as opposed to the past or future. Sound touchy-feely? Well, I found out Navy SEALS are trained to use this said same mental and emotional practice to get through difficult missions. You focus on what's right in front of you. Once you do this, you begin to see the good in a situation. Once you do this, well, then you can start building a better future.

How successful am I with this technique? Welllll...I'll admit it's a mixed bag of success, but I truly am proud of where I am now after it all. Whatever success I've had in this philosophical shift is due at least in small part to looking to how other writers have written of their own traumas and emerged with scars, but not broken. Here is. to my mind anyway, a great example:

Wild by Cheryl Strayed is about a young woman who hiked the Pacific Crest Trail by herself. She was, by her own admission, not a woodsman of any kind and thus hilarity and cringing ensues in various passages. It's not really about her hiking the trail, though. Her true life account of this journey is about her trying to make sense of the many different things that happened to her during the course of her young life. As she hikes, she comes to terms with those who have hurt her and those she has hurt.

There has been criticism of trauma writers of course. There are those who see memoirs and other accounts of surviving traumas as navel gazing or using the world as a therapy couch. They see a sort of "cottage industry" developing of literature describing traumatic childhoods or recovering from abuse or addiction. People said it about Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation. I heard it from students sometimes when I used to teach The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.

I understand these criticisms. A reading audience can indeed develop "trauma fatigue" and sometimes a writer risks coming off as self-absorbed or even whiny.

And yet...

And yet...

I believe this kind of writing is wholly necessary. The aforementioned Wurtzel had this to say about Prozac Nation, the story of her battle with depression:

Yes. It needs to mean something. No less eloquent is author Melissa Febos, who writes in Poets & Writers magazine that "writing about trauma is a subversive act." You can read it all at the link (and I truly suggest that you do), but I've extracted a few of my favorite quotes:

"Navel-gazing is not for the faint of heart. The risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery. To place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent, broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you."

"Listen to me: It is not gauche to write about trauma. It is subversive. The stigma of victimhood is a timeworn tool of oppressive powers to gaslight the people they subjugate into believing that by naming their disempowerment they are being dramatic, whining, attention-grabbing, or beating a dead horse."

"Don’t tell me that the experiences of a vast majority of our planet’s human population are marginal, are not relevant, are not political. Don’t tell me that you think there’s not enough room for another story about sexual abuse, motherhood, or racism. The only way to make room is to drag all our stories into that room. That’s how it gets bigger. You write it, and I will read it."

That's just the idea. In the singular, we find the universal. If something happened to you and you want to write the story of it, then write it. It doesn't matter if it might seem a "variation on a similar theme." It is unique by virtue of the fact that it happened to you and you are the only one who can tell it. Your own perspective makes it unique. Through such writing we learn what it means to be someone else and in doing so, we find that we maybe aren't so different.

"I'm in pain," a patient once told a doctor.
"Aren't we all?" the doctor responded.

Though flippant, that's the idea. In someone else's struggle and account of trauma, we see our own tribulations and if we're lucky...we also find a way through them to a better future. Through this communal act of writing and reading, we all serve one another.

So I keep writing my book. Of course it is partly an act of catharsis and self-healing. It would be disingenuous of me to claim otherwise. My goal is greater than that, however. The stories of those who shared my experience and those who went through similar closings...those stories matter. Those people matter. They deserve to be known and their stories deserve to be told. My writing is therefore a debt of honor that I take most seriously. So I keep going.

For right now though, I think I'm going to go play with my dogs.

"So take, take me home
'Cause I don't remember
Take, take me home"


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