Chapter 7 - From Trauma to Writing

This chapter sort of took on the personal essay and it's use in writing in healing in the college classroom. I think Marian MacCurdy is smart to dissect the personal essay within this venue as it often is the first time the students are asked to include their personal and emotional experience in composition instruction. This allows for healing to enter the picture, and MacCurdy believes that the best writing comes from healing, and that student can achieve a more authentic voice through personal and emotional writing.

I wanted to focus on MacCurdy's theories on image and detail and the role they play in writing and healing. She says that when we write about our traumatic experiences we are forced to remember and retail them with great imagery and detail. Instead of labeling our experiences based on what trauma occurred, we must go and re-experience them in a way that makes it easy for us to communicate the story and appropriate feelings. I think this is probably the most primal part about personal essay, and something I've always enjoyed about this type of personal writing. Unfortunately, by coping with life and the things that happen to us, we tend to push these uncomfortable details far far back into our minds. This makes it difficult to access these feelings and con often make it hard to start writing about bad things that have happened to us. However, I think that because out traumatic memories are so accurately stored in our minds I think these moments have richer detail than just about anything you'll remember as a human. Because trauma forces us to confront life in grave detail we usually have extremely sensory and exciting memories of these events, despite how they make us feel. Furthermore, these feelings and sensory details are exactly what is going to make a personal essay relatable to other, which brings healing to the other end of the dialogue. It's sort of a double edged sword: we can barely stand to think about our traumatic experiences because we remember them so well, but that's exactly what gives them power when we decide we're ready to re-live them and translate them to the page.