Writing Ourselves Whole. Jen Cross

work that the reader agrees to when she chooses to engage with a poem. Ryan said that the reader is part creator, part inventor, of the poem—without reception the poem has only done half its work. We need a listener/reader/witness to complete the process of storytelling or poem-making.

      Story. Voice. Witness.

      This process is so simple, and yet its impact is radical: Using a freewriting practice, we can take our creative transformation—and therefore our healing, our lives—into our own hands. We as communities have the ability to hold, welcome, and help reframe the difficult stories that keep individual community members feeling isolated and outside the fold. We don’t have to relegate one another to the isolation of the therapist’s office, and neither do we have to fix each other: we engage a healing practice when we language our true stories, when we share honestly with others who can hear us, and when we demonstrate that we are willing to listen and be present with one another.

      This is a book that has sexual trauma survivors at its heart, but this practice of story, voice, and witness has made a difference in many people’s lives, whether they identify as trauma survivors or not. I can’t think of a group of folks or a community who wouldn’t benefit from engaging together in this kind of generative, generous, shared creative community. Veterans, frontline crisis workers, PhD candidates, couples, sexual violence survivors, folks just coming out as gay or queer or trans*, survivors of genocide, teachers, coworkers, adoptees, refugees, foster kids, gender nonconformists, those folks of color who daily navigate white supremacy, religious communities, nurses, doctors, therapists, single parents … we all have stories we want to tell, stories we feel silent and isolated around. There are none of us who haven’t spent time living at the intersection of trauma and desire, and the stories at that intersection are stories that define us.

      Many books have been written about the power and use of writing for individuals who want to heal. This book joins that lineage—another invitation to you to write your story because your words are necessary magic. We need our mainstream narratives about rape, incest, as well as those we tell about the survivors of these violences, to be complicated, messy, and thereby made more real. We need all the stories if we as a society are to learn the truth about intimate violences, and if we are to undermine and transform the conditions necessary to allow those violences to continue to run rampant in homes around the world.

      This is not a how-to manual or a guide or a workbook. This is a love letter, a series of stories, an exhortation. Like author and memoirist Lidia Yuknavitch said when she spoke at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference (AWP) in 2015, I am here to recruit you. This book is a revelation and a hope. This is how I did it and how I think about things, one more piece of the conversation about what writing can do for us whose bodies and other parts of ourselves have been fragmented in various ways by intimate and/or sexual violences, offered in fragments, small essays, long rants, curiosities, listicles, and prayers. This is some of what I’ve learned and thought about after writing myself (more) whole these twenty-four years after escaping my stepfather’s violence, and after writing with hundreds of sexual violence survivors (and others) since the first queer women survivors erotic writing group I convened at the San Francisco LGBT Center in the summer of 2002.

      •§•

      I have structured this book as a collection of short essays: you can read the whole thing straight through if that’s your way, or you can drop in to different sections randomly, open the book and see what has chosen you today. Read to be inspired, read for prompts, read for ideas or possibilities, read for challenge or to argue. This book is meant to be consumed however you prefer. Go front to back, back to front, skip around, or begin in the middle, read to the end, and then go back and finish up with the beginning. There’s no wrong way to do it. Though a collection of writing prompts appears in the Appendix, I consider this whole book a spark for your writer’s imagination, and the beginning of a conversation. If you find yourself responding strongly to what you’re reading, I invite you to put the book down, pick up your notebook and pen, and write whatever is coming up for you, what you’re agreeing with or pissed off about, how you wish I’d said it differently or how you’re surprised by a particular phrasing or consideration. You’ll notice that I sometimes drop into poetry (as at the very beginning of this chapter)—much of this book was generated in freewrites, either in my journal, for the Writing Ourselves Whole blog, or in writing groups, and I include these more poetic pieces as examples of what can emerge when we let the pen go where it wants to go. First and foremost, I want to convey the power of writing for deep inner change, and, more than anything, want to encourage that small, quiet (or clamorous!), persistent part of you who just wants to drop everything else and write.

      My invitation is to let yourself write slow. Write your story in chunks, in stages, in fragments. Respond to writing prompts. Do this for a month or six months or three years, every day or most days. You certainly won’t (nor do you need to) write about trauma every time you pick up the pen (and any time I write, “Pick up the pen,” please add, “or place your fingers on the keyboard”). Your story is more than trauma—you are more than trauma. It’s good to give yourself permission to write anything. Turn your writer’s eyes away from the images at the back of your head and toward the flowers just blooming in your neighbor’s window box or the taste of a ripe peach or the daydream you had about the bike messenger you saw flying down Market Street on her fixie while you sat on MUNI waiting for the streetlight to change.

      •§•

      The essays in the book are gathered into five sections between this introduction and the conclusions: Initial Preparation, Story, Voice, Witness, and Self-Care. These sections aren’t strict confines; more like loose collectives, or affinity groups—you’ll see a lot of overlap in themes and ideas throughout.

      In Initial Preparation, we begin to lay the groundwork for our writing practice, what it means to write ourselves whole, and why we would ever want to try it.

      The Story essays tangle with the work involved in finding, finally, the language for the unlanguageable: the unspeakable, the unspoken, and the unheard. It has to do with deciding to find the words for the stuff we were told would never be believed. This is the part where hands are on the page or keyboard, the alone work part, the communion with self, finding words for embodied and disembodied experience, and dis-ordering what has been sanitized, made too neat and nice so that others listening will be comfortable.

      In Voice, we get into what it means to take our narrative back for ourselves, to say (in writing and out loud) what we were never supposed to say, and to allow our bodies, finally, to “speak” those stories that they have held for so long.

      The Witness section contains writing about creating and sustaining a peer-led sexual trauma survivor writing group: what happens when we write together, how to navigate some of the challenges that arise, how to sustain yourself and your group.

      In the Self-Care section, we think about both how to use writing as a self-care practice, and how and why to take care of ourselves as we write these beautiful and difficult stories of ourselves.

      The Conclusion essays aren’t terribly conclusive—more like launching pads, explicit invitations to begin now, and then begin again and again, to find words for your own stories: as poetry or prose, as fiction or testimony, in any form you wish, and write yourself complicatedly, messily, fragmentedly, gorgeously whole.

      •§•

      Please take care of yourself while you read, and while you write. There’s explicit language about sexual violence, and about living in the aftermath of trauma, in these pages. Please be easy with yourself as you read, stop when you’re uncomfortable, and write when you feel drawn to write. You have enough time; please don’t feel you need to rush yourself to get it All Done Now. Think about ways you can take care of yourself during or after your writing, and consider how to be kind and gentle with yourself during this time, how best to receive the support you’ll want, and make some mental plans for that.

      Some ideas for self-care: call a friend who can listen to you without trying to “fix” anything; talk to a therapist; go for a run; punch a pillow; journal at a café (maybe treat yourself to an almond croissant, too); call someone from your writing group; play with your dog or cat or