Trauma in Creative Writing Classroom

The Tale of Two Bethanies: Trauma in theCreative Writing Class

Vicki LindnerThe English Department, University of Wyoming, USA

The author, a Creative Writing teacher at a university in an underpopulated Westernstate, reflects on the number of traumatised students in her nonfiction classes whohave come to the class to bear a ‘healing testimony’, as well as learn how to write.Citing works by writing teachers and trauma therapists, she describes the simi-larities between Judith Lewis Herman’s ‘trauma narrative’ and the good writing awriting teacher asks students to produce. Using two case histories from her ownteaching, she asserts that a writer can help students heal emotional scars and becomebetter writers, and offers advice and precautions.

Keywords: trauma narrative, creative writing as therapy, workshopping

Troubled students often sign up for my courses in creative non-fiction. InAutobiographical Writing, Women and Writing, and Personal Essay, under-graduates have written stories about addiction, surviving homophobia,divorce, illness, death and eating disorders. But the most poignant narratives –those that challenge me most as a teacher – are by victims of trauma: physicaland sexual abuse, incest, violent crime, war and suicide.1

Few of these students have read popular memoirs about dysfunctionalchildhoods. Most don’t cherish fervent desires to create great literature or tobecome published writers. Yet, citizens of a confessional age, they come to awriting class with a sophisticated awareness that public testimony in the formof art might restore damaged psyches. To wit, when I asked an Autobiographi-cal Writing student, an honours science major, if he’d had therapy for child-hood beatings from a brutal stepfather, he rolled his eyes; ‘Oh, tons...and Ithought writing about it might be a final step in the healing process’. After apolitical science major in the same class wrote a detailed narrative about adate rape in a foreign country, she thrust her thick manuscript, vivid withimages, including Photo Shop illustrations, away from her and said, withrelief, ‘It’s in there now!’

Psychological literature indicates that students like these, determined to writeabout trauma, have probably embarked on a salutary path. Freud thought, andhis successors believed, that only a psychoanalyst, trained to ‘witnesses theunconscious’, can help the traumatised achieve a ‘talking cure’. By contrast, somemodern researchers think that repressing bad memories, not digging them up,is what enables trauma victims to cope.2 But others are convinced that writing,a verbal expression quite different than talking, provides the best path to recov-ery. Suzette A. Henke, a literary scholar, argues in her book, Shattered Subjects:Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life Writing (2000), that the process of articulat-ing painful experiences in written form itself can prove therapeutic, and analyses

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7Trauma in the Creative Writing Class

the ‘narrative recoveries’ of Anais Nin, Sylvia Fraser, and other women writers.Scientists claim that the therapeutic results of writing – even writing that doesn’tpurport to be art – can actually be measured. In his book, Opening Up – TheHealing Power of Expressing Emotions (1990), clinical psychologist James W. Penne-baker reported that students who wrote about ‘the most traumatic experiencesof their lives’ in a laboratory environment experienced better physical health andbrain wave congruence than those who recorded their daily plans. Inhibition, Dr.Pennebaker maintains, requires arduous physiological work, that, in turn, createsbiological stress – a compromised immune system and higher blood pressure.According to him, confronting a trauma in a language-based experience furthersunderstanding and assimilation of the trauma. ‘In writing …I often came to anew understanding of the emotional events themselves’, he wrote. ‘Problems thathad seemed overwhelming became more circumscribed and manageable after Isaw them on paper…Once the issues were resolved, I no longer thought aboutthem’.

With Pennebaker’s theories in mind, it isn’t surprising that the ill, the grief-stricken, prisoners, and rape victims all sign up for writing groups as likelyto be facilitated by poets as therapists. Writing helps all. A 7-year studyrevealed that prisoners who participated in arts and writing programmes had75% fewer disciplinary problems…3 The Journal of the American Medical Associ-ation reported that asthma and rheumatoid arthritis symptoms abated whensufferers wrote for 20 minutes a day for 3 days in a row….4 No wonder thatwriters reputed to invoke healing were engaged to lead workshops for victimsof the Oklahoma City bombing and the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Curing the sick and wounded, however, is not the traditional province ofuniversity-level creative writing instruction. Although a Kansas State Univer-sity study reports that students are suffering from increasingly complex andsevere emotional difficulties,5 we don’t expect them to seek improved mentalhealth and college credit at the same time. Writers, who teach for a living,often avow that they can’t and don’t want to be therapists. Some, confrontedwith a trauma victim’s unsettling narrative, are apt to seek shelter behind thepillar of craft. They may say to their students what Vivian Gornick (2001) saysin her book, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative: ‘Whathappened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sensethat the writer is able to make of what happened’.

Gornick, who describes the process of shaping a professional memoir, teachesin sophisticated MFA programmes. In undergraduate classes, however, shockingexperiences are more likely to emerge in naively constructed stories, unmediatedby advanced literary skills. Many teachers, feeling uneasy when they read, forexample, a beginning student’s childhood memoir about being coerced into prac-tising oral sex on a sister’s boyfriend, want to run from the clumsy, depressingnarrative, the truth in its missing details, and the suffering the student may havecome to class to dispel. To protect themselves, they maintain that the therapeutictask transgresses the boundaries of the teaching profession, and steer the studenttoward other subjects, or focus adamantly on technique. Although a traumatisedstudent may want to improve her writing, if she senses that her piece has madethe teacher feel squeamish, or if the story’s power gets dismissed in the workshopbecause it’s deficient in skill, she won’t get what she signed up to pursue:

8 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

a healing testimony. She may retreat into silence, or a darker space – an innocuousstory that has no profound personal meaning for her. For the trauma victim, thisretreat can represent what psychiatrist Dori Laub calls, ‘A defeat…a sanctuaryas well as a place of bondage’.6

In fact, from one trauma therapist’s perspective, teaching writers literarycraft and helping them heal are not incompatible goals. In her book abouttreating victims of violence, Trauma and Recovery (1992), Harvard psychiatristJudith Herman describes the creation of a ‘trauma narrative’ as a necessarycomponent in a patient’s therapy. According to Herman, the construction ofthis written narrative ideally begins once the patient’s post traumatic stresssymptoms (re-experiencing the traumatic event, avoiding stimuli associatedwith the trauma, emotional numbness, and symptoms of arousal, likesleeplessness) have been stabilised, and a safe atmosphere, including usefulboundary lines between analyst and patient, has been established. The analyst,Herman adds, must define her own role as she avoids usurping the patient’sability to recapture power and mastery.

Ultimately, Herman implies, the narrative is more therapeutic if it’s writtenwell. As the patient is often dissociated from the traumatic experience, herinitial account is liable to be repetitive, emotionless, and incomplete, its imagesburied, or not verbalised. Herman’s description of the healing narrative thatmust be constructed, then, resembles what a creative writing teacher wouldidentify as effective writing – ‘An organised, detailed, verbal account, orientedin time and historical context’. Evoking sensuous aspects of the experience,like sounds, sights, and smells, is required in the therapist’s exercise, as inthose I give beginning workshop students. Revision, with the therapist’s help,is also part of this restorative creative process. The resulting testimony, whichHerman describes as ‘confessional, spiritual, political and judicial’, offers anew and larger dimension to the victim’s experience, enabling her to rejoinsociety and form new relationships.7,8

Despite the documented link between effective writing and psychic healing,it is easy to sympathise with professors who discourage ‘scriptotherapy’ inuniversity classes. My students’ stories are often disquieting; they weigh onmy mind, poking their crude horror into my own writing time. Invoking themmakes my job more time-consuming and emotionally demanding. What’smore, there are no guidelines to help a writing teacher engage in – and yetsteer clear – of a process resembling psychoanalysis. Wouldn’t it be wiser torefer troubled students to a counsellor, as Ann Landers did her letter writers?Sometimes I do. But I also encourage them to write the story I have trainedmyself to recognise they came to my class to tell, to confide its details, andinvestigate its levels of meaning with me as a guide. I say what I suspectthese students already know: Writing is better than talking or repressing. Totransform a painful, life-threatening experience into art, an abiding, transcen-dent, public testimony, makes its significance available to others whileobliterating its power over you.

I know this because I, too, came to understand the connection between writ-ing and healing when I began scribbling notes for a piece about finding myselfa crime victim in a Muslim country’s medical culture the hour I regainedconsciousness in an Egyptian hospital. I also have confidence – hubris, if you


will – in my ability to trespass into mental health’s territory. Shortly before Iwas hired by the University of Wyoming in 1988, I co-authored a book aboutwomen’s psychological relationship to money with a New York psychotherap-ist, Annette Lieberman. By the end of the two-and-a-half year collaboration,I had helped conduct clinical interviews, lead money therapy groups, andacquired a rudimentary knowledge of feminist psychoanalytic theory and themechanisms of therapeutic relationships. I must also confess that my dia-logues with traumatised students prove more interesting to me than the nutsand bolts of writing instruction – inscribing the equivalent of ‘show don’t tell’in hundreds of undergraduate margins.

For all of these reasons I do facilitate the creative writing version of a‘trauma narrative’, whether or not the writer is skilled. To supply some infor-mation about how I do this – and the don’ts my mistakes have taught me – Iwill describe two case histories. As both women students shared the same firstname, I will call them ‘Bethany Number One’ and ‘Bethany Number Two’.

Bethany Number One was a student in my Women and Writing class, aworkshop and literature seminar cross-listed with the Women’s StudiesProgram. The writers began the term by reading Carolyn Heilbrun’s Writinga Woman’s Life and identifying subjects that women have not addressed inautobiography. Bethany, like the others, submitted a list of ‘UncomfortableSubjects’ – thematic areas she intended to avoid in her work. Ironically, thisstrategy encourages students to write about themselves, (including the taboosthey’ve named), in memoir or fiction.

I soon began worrying about Bethany One. She was dispirited, withdrawn,and wore a heavy coat of make-up base, unusual in Wyoming. My quiz indi-cated that she hadn’t read Colette’s The Vagabond. She’d used up her one cutby the third class. Worse, her seven-page weekly writing exercises were pro-foundly boring. A student, I’ve learned, may signal that she is harbouring atrauma story by appearing anxious, yet churning out dreary writing. So Icalled Bethany One into my office.

There she told me that she was often ill with colds and allergies, why she’dcut class. Because I listened alertly, and, I hope, compassionately, and askedquestions, it didn’t take long for the story to pour forth. Bethany, it turnedout, had been raped the year before by a fraternity boy who worked as ahasher in her sorority. He had tempted her to swill a pint of Southern Comfort(here she admitted to an alcohol problem) and told her he would shatter theempty bottle on her head and f--k her unconscious if she fought back. Thesame misfortune, she learned, had befallen several sorority sisters; but whenshe told her new friends about her traumatic experience, none expressedempathy. Although they’d seen her hanging around with the hasher, theyhadn’t warned her; getting raped by him seemed to represent some warpedinitiation rite. She had approached an authority with her story when thehasher was nominated for student government office, but he was permittedto run, and won the election. She also confessed that this was the second timeshe’d been raped: the first trauma occurred in high school. Judith Hermanreminds us that witnesses to violence often identify with and excuse the per-petrator. (The novelist, Charles Baxter, relating the same theme to fiction,writes about our cultural reluctance to conceive of a true antagonist in his


essay, ‘Dysfunctional Narratives, or: “Mistakes were made”’.) Predictably,then, when Bethany told her mother about her first bad experience, thematernal response had been, ‘You must have done something to deserve it’.

As Bethany One spoke, juicy tears coursed down her cheeks, cutting trailsthrough her pasty mask of make-up. I said, ‘No wonder you’re sick – walkingaround with this burden of pain’. In his essay, ‘Bearing Witness or the Vicissi-tudes of Listening’, Dori Laub warns, ‘The listener to trauma comes to be aparticipant and a co-owner of the traumatic event: through his very listening,he comes to partially experience trauma in himself’. As Bethany One’s tearsdissolved the rust encrusting my Egyptian trauma, I, too, started to bawl. Itold her that I had also been a victim of violence. She hadn’t seen a therapist,and sniffling into a Kleenex, I encouraged her to contact one.

Then, partly to conceal my discomfort at sobbing in my place of business ina power relationship in which I was supposed to be in emotional control, I said,‘Listen, I believe you came to my class to write this story’. (If not, I doubted shewould be revealing her rape history in my office.) ‘You need to do it’, I said.Bethany One demurred. (Students from under-populated, rural Wyoming, oftencalled ‘a town with long streets’, fear, with some justification, that their fraughtstory will turn into gossip, or that classmates may report back to the peoplethey’ve written about.) Again I said that I thought she could and should writethis story; I described the themes, important to all women, that her tale wouldunfurl. I then added firmly, ‘In any case, you do have to read The Vagabond andwrite a three-page paper about it’. And here, my reading about trauma therapysuggests, I may have done the right thing: I asserted my authority, re-establishingthe idea that I was a teacher, not a good mother, therapist, or fellow victim. I letBethany One know that we were telling these stories for a reason that had to dowith a creative writing class and her success as a student. (According to onetherapist I interviewed, students are more likely to impart difficult confidencesto teachers they view as strict.)

Bethany Number One did write about her sorority house trauma, and shedid read The Vagabond. (The 1910 novel contains an attempted date-rape scenethat most students miss.) When the class workshopped her piece, a valuableauxiliary support system kicked in: Chavawn, a warm and empathetic leader,took charge, insuring that Bethany’s testimony inspired an outpouring ofsympathy from the other women. For the first time in this trauma victim’sexperience, the witnesses weren’t sympathising with the perpetrator. Thanksto the other writers, and to her creative courage, Bethany One emerged fromher pained withdrawal. She cut no more classes. She became a good student,if not a great author.

Bethany Two, a greater challenge, arrived 20 minutes late for her first Auto-biographical Writing class. The other new students were silent, concentratingon a writing exercise. She sashayed in, wearing a floppy brown hat, adornedwith a pink cabbage rose, and, making loud excuses, dumped a pile of bookson the seminar table with a thunderous crash. I have a temper and right thenI lost it: ‘You will never be late for this class again’, I said. At the end of thesession she apologised, adding, ‘I know you are going to be my mentor andhelp me write my book about my mother, the Tijuana Dance Hall Queen…’I realised this was the student a colleague had sent me with warnings: Bethany


had insisted on writing about her mother, instead of the meaning of landscape,in his nature-writing class.

It didn’t take long for The Tijuana Dance Hall Queen to make her appear-ance in Autobiographical Writing. The trauma Bethany Two described wasan horrific one. Her mother, depressed, dying of cancer, committed suicide,and arranged for Bethany, then 16, to discover her corpse. The suicide hadbeen a ritual self-murder; Bethany, following instructions in a note, foundher mother’s body, wearing a purple Halloween wig, half slumped off a bed,surrounded by pills, candles, and incense, in a vacant apartment. She readthis tragedy, summarised in eight pages, aloud to the class in a flat,unemotional voice. Obviously she was dissociated from the experience, a signshe suffered from post-traumatic stress.

The other students froze, hiding their reactions behind opaque expressions,as Wyoming students do when embarrassed or flabbergasted. I, too, was horri-fied, then confused. How should I respond? I didn’t want to diminish thestory’s power by critiquing its craft, or dismiss it as art by focusing on itstragic content. I also knew that Bethany Two might have underestimated thepain that other writers would be capable of inflicting with negative comments;it was up to me to control the workshop environment. I took a deep breathand reminded the students that I did not want them to use subjective state-ments such as ‘I love’ and ‘I don’t like’ when they discussed each others’ work.Then I suggested a technique that would elicit useful information, neutral intone: ‘Well, let’s just ask Bethany some questions…What don’t you knowabout this terrible event? Just ask an honest question…’, I instructed. (Toaccomplish the same goal, I could have asked workshop members to identifyobvious as well as subtle themes in the work.)

A few students managed to blurt out a question, and I filled in, suggestingadditional questions that would indicate to Bethany that she hadn’t providedenough imagistic information to make the suicide vivid to readers. InHerman’s terms, Bethany Two had not constructed an effective trauma narra-tive. From the creative writing teacher’s perspective, she had not created asufficiently rich or focused vision. At this point, I intuited that I was playingwith fire, although I didn’t know why, and, at the same time, drawing aneffective boundary line, taking my student seriously as a writer, while stickingto my role as a teacher of writing. But I would soon go too far.

Bethany Two responded well to my demands for discipline. She showedup on time, she never cut class, and because I give weekly quizzes, she didthe reading – for the first time, she revealed, in any of her university classes.Perceptive and self-aware, she contributed important comments to workshopdiscussions, often taking a gutsy feminist stance. We had many interestingconferences. For her final assignment, a revision, we decided – or perhaps Idecided and she agreed – that Bethany Two would revise the first piece shehad read in class. She must, I instructed her, add sufficient detail to the eventspreceding the corpse discovery scene to focus the climactic moment. I sug-gested that she ‘grow her vision’ by adding another ten pages to the originaleight, more than doubling the length. ‘To add all that detail, you will have togo back there, see and feel your mother’s suicide all over again. This mayprove painful’, I warned her. (I had not yet read Trauma and Recovery, so had


no idea how truly I spoke.) I reminded Bethany Two about my strict deadline;I told her I wouldn’t accept the piece after that.

When deadline day arrived, Bethany cut class. She did not hand in theproject at all. A week later, we had a major emotional show-down in my office.As it turned out, I had strayed too far from my professional role. Bethany hadindeed returned to the scene of her mother’s suicide, and as a real therapistcould have predicted, had become re-traumatised. She had begun sufferingthe post-traumatic stress syndrome symptoms known as hyperarousal: agi-tation, inability to sleep, or concentrate, and had sought emergency sessionswith a University counsellor. She was taking an anti-depressant in order tofinish her class work and graduate on time.

I knew I bore responsibility for what could have been a serious disaster. WhatI thought I was doing was asking Bethany Two to construct an effective memoir.Deceived by this feisty young woman’s readiness to reveal her mother’s suicide,her psychological acuity, and resilience, I believed she would be able to objectifythe pain she still felt as part of an artistic process, as I would myself. I didn’trealise that I was asking – demanding, actually – that Bethany Two create adetailed trauma narrative without laying the necessary groundwork: years oftherapy with a trained therapist. Although my Drill Sergeant teaching tactics hadcreated a safe atmosphere, allowing this student to achieve self-control and mas-tery, they had not provided her with an easy way out. The result was that thepotentially therapeutic trauma narrative and the craft needed to improve BethanyTwo’s writing had coincided too well. It was this coincidence that may haveprovided her – and me – with a slim margin of safety.

The piece Bethany finally produced was all a teacher of a beginning nonfic-tion course could hope for: evocative, moving, and scary. Bethany preparedto read it aloud – or to bear her testimony – at a public reading in the EnglishDepartment library. She stood up, her hair twisted into Medusa-like braids,a style, she informed the audience, she had created in honor of her mother,The Tijuana Dance Hall Queen, who had died, and would not see her graduateon Saturday. Bethany read two sentences and began to weep, loudly, dramati-cally; she didn’t blow her nose or sop up the tears. As she wailed, I saw thecheeks of the woman beside me grow moist, and others fumbling for tissues.Fearing a mass catharsis, I gathered my wits and told Bethany it was OK tosit down. Although I was sorry that her emotional eruption had preventedthe audience from appreciating her excellent writing, I later thought that herpoignant testimony to her shocking loss indicated that she had experiencedsome healing; this traumatised student now felt the grief that she had initiallyexpressed so numbly.

As Charles Baxter might say, ‘mistakes were made’. I shouldn’t have pushedBethany One to write about her rape by expressing my personal stake in thesubject matter. If I could teach Bethany Two again, I’d question her carefullyabout her feelings about the detailed revision, perhaps encourage her to writesomething else instead. Still, I continue to believe that it is part of my job toacknowledge that some students come to a writing class to pursue a healingtestimony, and to help them identify the fluid boundaries between a trauma nar-rative and art.

To do this, I remain sensitive to signals that a student is troubled: missed


classes, poor work habits, anxiety combined with careless, dull writing, suicidalimagery. I invite those students in for conferences. If a student confides a personaltrauma, I assume she feels ready to write about it. I credit the power of the story,but I don’t gush with sympathy. I listen carefully, ask questions, and, at thesame time, offer craft-based suggestions. (I steer an uncomfortable student towardcorners of the traumatic experience: What happened afterwards? How did it affectyour brother?) If the story is painful, I try to hear it the way a wine taster tasteswine – swish it around in my brain to get the flavour without swallowing. Still,like a Red Cross worker, prepared to duck gunshots to bring food to injuredcivilians, I acknowledge that my own discomfort is a necessary risk. I mitigatethe peril, for myself and the student, by maintaining my professorial identity.(Unless the trauma has just occurred, I never excuse her from class attendanceor assignments.) I also ask whether she’s had therapy, and refer her to a specificuniversity counsellor if necessary. (I recognise that I can’t handle suicidal ideationor substance abuse myself.)

When I sense a student is writing a trauma story to avoid other material,I treat this as a form of writer’s block. (For example, the student who wrotea glib piece about having sex with her sister’s boyfriend was not creating astory with a trauma narrative’s urgency. When I confronted her with this, sheconfessed that the events she described had lost their power over her, thanksto years of therapy. Perhaps, I suggested, she had cleared the path for otherstories. Then, with trepidation, she confided a fascinating tale about beingbrainwashed by a Christian cult.)

Once the student has signalled her intention to create a healing narrative,however, I instruct her how to write it well. I increase the therapeutic, as wellas the literary, potential of the work by pointing out that the ‘I’ in the narrativeis a constructed being, a character, who now exists on paper, a different entitythan the writer herself. Although the writer may need to revisit the traumain order to heal, I say, she must separate her real being from the ‘I’ in thestory in order to shape an effective memoir.

Recently, I told Bethany Two about Judith Herman’s requirements for atrauma narrative; she agreed that my strategies had been dicey, damaging atfirst. In the long run, however, she believed that her detailed memoir hadproduced positive psychological effects. Now a successful journalist, whocovers city politics for a small town newspaper, she no longer tells people shedoesn’t know well about the tragic circumstances of her mother’s death. Shereminded me that she had taken my class in order to write about the suicide –I hadn’t wrung the material out of her – maybe the reason the exercise worked.

And Bethany One? A year after she wrote about her rape experience, I raninto her at a local bar, dancing to a blues band, smiling happily, as energeticas any college senior. She had lost weight, and the thick make-up mask hadvanished. Before she whirled away, she said pointedly, ‘Thank you for helpingme’, and we both knew she wasn’t talking about writing. Yet that moment, Iconfess, was a high point in my career as a writing teacher.

CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to Vicki Lindner, Department

of English, P.O. Box 3353, Laramie, Wyoming 82071-3353, USA([email protected]).


Notes1. The 1994 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines a traumatic

experience as follows: (1) the person experienced, witnessed, or was confronted withan event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or athreat to the personal integrity of self or others; and (2) the person’s responseinvolved intense fear, helplessness, or horror. Note that a trauma can be caused by‘witnessing’ a terrible event that happened to somebody else, which greatly extendsthe meaning of the concept.

2. Slater, Lauren, ‘Repress Yourself’, in The New York Times Magazine (February 23,2003): 48–53. Slater cites the work of George Bonanno and Richard Gist, therapistswho believe that ‘repressors are actually the normal ones who effectively cope withthe many tragedies life presents’.

3. Pommy Vega, Janine, ‘Poetry in Prisons’, Poets &Writers Magazine (May/June 2001):pp 56–58.

4. Desalvo, Louise, ‘How Telling our Stories Transforms our Lives’, Poets & WritersMagazine (May/June 2001): 48–50.

5. Goode, Erica, ‘More in College Seek Help for Psychological Problems’, New YorkTimes (February 3, 2003): A11. Good reports that a study of students seeking psycho-logical counselling at Kansas State University showed that the percentage of stu-dents treated for depression and suicidal students doubled from 1989 to 2001. Prob-lems related to stress, anxiety, learning disabilities, family issues, grief and sexualassault also rose. More than twice the percentage of students were taking some typeof psychiatric medication in 2001.

6. Laub, Dori, M.D., ‘Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening’, in Testimony:Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, by Shoshana Felmanand Dori Laub (Routledge, 1992).

7. Herman, Judith Lewis, ‘Reconstructing the Story’, in Trauma and Recovery: The After-math of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror’, (Basic Books, 1997), 176–181.

8. Dr. Mark Kline, a Laramie psychiatrist, commented, ‘You argue that if the writingis good, it is therapeutic to the writer. Intuitively, I suspect this idea is true. Thefocus on the narrative and its qualia can probably be very helpful and organisingto a traumatised person – an ‘objectification’ with an interesting inverse relationshipwith dissociation’.

ReferencesAmerican Psychiatric Association (1994) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Dis-

orders (4th edn). Washington, DC: APA.Baxter, C. (1998) Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. St Paul: Graywolf Press.Felman, S. and Laub, D. M.D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psycho-

analysis, and History. New York and London: Routledge.Goode, E. (2003) More in college seek help for psychological problems. The New York

Times, February 3, 2003.Gornick, V. (2001) The Situation and The Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. New York:

Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux.Heilbrun, C. (1989) Writing A Woman’s Life. New York: Ballantine.Henke, S. (2000) Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing. New

York: St. Martin’s Press.Herman, J. (1992) Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse

to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books.Slater, L. (2003) Repress yourself. The New York Times Magazine, February 23.Pennebaker, J.W. (1990) Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions. New

York and London: The Guilford Press.

Documents

Trauma in Creative Writing Classroom