On Monday Nov. 10, Bowers Writers House held an afternoon craft talk and evening reading with memoirist and therapist Eli Hastings. Hastings discussed the craft of trauma writing and later gave a reading of his memoir “Clearly Now, the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Other Trips.” He identified himself as a writer, father and therapist, which, in a way, all relate to psychological trauma.
Hastings dated back to a time in February 2005, when he was about to begin a writer’s residency in Vermont. He lost his friend and lover 35 days before the residency started. Hastings promised her that if she died he would write a book about it. It was a dark chapter in his life; he described sitting at the plywood desk in his room and knowing what he needed to write. Hastings did not know where to start, he spent the first hour staring at the cursor blinking on the screen. Then, for the next 11 days, he wrote intensely, writing 385 pages within this time.
His book starts at the moment he learned about her death, then goes back and recounts his memories with her before returning to that moment. This style mirrors the idea of trauma-informed writing. Trauma is a complex subject, which can be overwhelming, terrifying and horrible, so much so that it becomes fragmented in one’s memory. The purpose of trauma-informed writing is to recover; the only way to do this is through narrative and storytelling. It lets the person put the memories in order by retelling, but this also contains the obstacle of reliving those memories.
Hastings’ craft talk focused on the analysis of two pieces of writing that revolve around trauma: Peggy Schumaker’s “Moving Water, Tuscon,” and Carolyn’s Forché’s “The Colonel.” Schumaker’s prose poem centers around the experience of her childhood memory of watching a teenager trying to ride the wave of a flash flood.
Hastings pointed out the idea of the Greek word thanatos, which refers to the death impulse, in relation to a certain moment within the poem. Schumaker writes concerning the teenager, that “For a moment, we all wanted to be him, to be part of something so wet, so fast, so powerful, so much bigger than ourselves. That kid rode the flash food inside us, the flash flood outside us.” Hastings compared the feeling to standing on top of a tall structure and wanting to jump off.
The craft talk focused on the idea that within trauma writing, there is a trend of listing vivid details. It follows the idea that trauma-informed writing allows one to recover by plotting out the memory through narrative.
The piece is also effective in the way it transmits the feelings of breathlessness by creating short sentences. The writing mimics the gradual build up of a wave by using commas to mimic the water’s accumulation. The piece also uses the repetition of the word “water,” as a central image.
In Forché’s piece “The Colonel” the piece tells of her experiencing a civil war brewing in El Salvador. Similar to “Moving Water, Tuscon,” it uses a long list of details to convey the scene of the trauma. However, the piece notably starts out with the sentence, “WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD IS TRUE.” It builds a sense of drama and suspense for the reader. As the piece debriefs its catalogue of details, there are moments that foreshadow the scene of trauma. These moments bring a sense of surrealism, which are things of dreamlike quality described in normal terms.
Ultimately, the narrative comes to its climactic moment, “The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled multiple human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass.” In the way that traumatic moments are fragmented in one’s memory, the scene fragments itself with surreal moments. She mentions how the ears “came alive,” and how the ears on the floor were “pressed to the ground,” as if listening for vibrations. In these works, trauma was an underlying theme in which creativity was used to narrative the events that were fragmented.
