By Marian MacCurdy

Poet Lucille Clifton, speaking of children raised in the inner city, said, "Every day some of those children are bearing something you could not bear. . . . Every day something has tried to kill [them] and has failed."

The effects of such trauma are not limited to the inner city. Children in suburban and even rural settings deal with traumatic events ranging from fistfights to drive-by shootings, as well as the destructive effects of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse; addictive drugs; neglect; and poverty. Those who survive such overt and covert traumas become young adults, and many find their way into our classes at Ithaca College, where their writing about themselves challenges our assumptions about the power, place, and purposes of writing. Writing can help survivors deal with these events in ways that mitigate their traumatic consequences and help build community — an antidote to the isolation that often follows trauma — and show us our connections to one another.

My own odyssey with writing and healing began when I started teaching a course in the personal essay. Many students chose to write about painful experiences, and even more surprising, their topics generated sharp imagery, clear sensory detail, and thematic sophistication. I wondered why — and how to help maximize such a result. So I studied trauma and discovered that it produces a mental picture stored deep in the brain, not easily accessible to the conscious mind. We tend to be drawn to our emotionally difficult experiences, to give us a measure of control over what we cannot control — the past. Even if we cannot verbalize them, traumatic memories can surface unbidden when we smell, hear, see, taste, or touch something that takes us back to the traumatic event.

These images must be accessed if a story about the trauma is to be told, both because they form the heart of good writing — effective description — and because through the creation of image and the narratives that can follow, healing can occur.

Here’s an example of how this process can work in the classroom. A young woman was trying to write an essay about her grandmother’s house — and drawing a blank. The piece was unfocused because she could not locate herself in the setting. We tried an in-class visualization exercise, and she discovered to her surprise that even though her grandmother had died when she was 10, she could remember running her fingernail along the grooves in her grandmother’s couch and seeing the half-empty bottles of Canadian Club and Coke on the counter. Her final draft was grounded in both emotional and physical reality:

I used to love going to grandma’s apartment. . . . She would hug me and I would feel the bones in her back and smell her shirt, a mixture of Designer Impostors Giorgio and cigarette smoke. I would stroke her arm because her skin would slide and it was soft like velvet. She was so elegant and so beautiful.

The phone rang one night in my room. It was about 12:30 in the morning. . . . I knew it had to do with grandma. . . .

I didn’t cry at the wake. I was laughing at one point. . . . Grandma’s cheeks were too puffy. She had too much makeup on. When no one was looking, I touched her arm. Her skin didn’t slide on her arm anymore, and she was cold. It wasn’t my grandma, just her body. . . . I watched two strangers close [her] box. I started to cry. . . . I didn’t stop crying until after the car ride, after the prayers, after . . . the cemetery. . . . As we drove down the street, all the other cars followed the Canadian tradition of pulling over and stopping to pay respect. It was then I realized no one had let me say good-bye.

And this is why the writer’s first attempt had produced a blank — her emotional responses had been hidden. She had to connect with how she really felt about her grandmother’s death. In writing about her trauma, she was able to produce both effective prose and its ambient effect — personal awareness, even healing. 

Associate professor Marian MacCurdy is chair of the Department of Writing. You can read more about this process in Writing and Healing: Towards an Informed Practice (Washington, D.C.: NCTE Press, 2000), which she coedited.