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 paintings, to myself. I read aloud, dramatically, and in monotone: I would say the same sentence one 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