Writing Trouble

“The Tough Stuff—Write Well, Feel Better” is the title of a talk I gave with Jessica Handler in 2012 at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, a title at the heart of what I do and teach.

Twenty years before that talk, my newborn daughter had almost died after a birth injury, and my journey into writing about trauma began (I mean, it probably started around age 9 with an essay about wishing for world peace, and continued through a lot of poems, but this project burst the banks of poetic form, for me, and was my first real prose thing.) Creating a record of what happened, I realized that I wanted it to be accurate, and also good–what started as journal entries turned into a personal narrative. I also found that I couldn’t write anything else until I finished writing this story.

I’d been teaching a summer memoir workshop in Iowa, and, considering the work participants had been doing, and the work I was doing, I re-branded the course as “Survival Stories.” We would learn from each other. How could we write stories that were as compelling to the reader as they were for us? We’d find commonalities in our stories of difficulty and refine strategies to make them work. Along the way, we would write what we needed to write, creating a bridge from who we used to be to who we had become.

As I wrote my own story, which would develop into my first book, Near Breathing, I read widely in a genre that hadn’t been defined in the 1990s: true stories of difficulty. Those stories kept me company. I found them in literary journals and various sections of bookstores, and whether the stories were about illness, identity, loss, poverty, being struck by lightning, or whatever the writer had contended with, they became my text models.

“However different the nature of the trauma itself…what the writers share in common is an impulse to represent the overcoming of the wound, whether through repair, reconciliation, or redemption.” Sven Birkerts, “Trauma and Memory,” in The Art of Time in Memoir. As for me, I focus on his second r-word, reconciliation, because while telling our stories may or may not repair or redeem, we can work toward a truthful, expressive, creative reckoning with whatever the hell happened back there.