Writing and Recovery

By Trish MacEnulty

Therapists have long known that writing can be a valuable tool for healing a variety of psychological wounds whether from traumatic events, loss, abuse, addictions or self-destructive actions. In this book, author Trish MacEnulty analyzes the healing properties of writing and then introduces techniques for transforming therapeutic work into writing of artistic merit, writing which connects and communicates at a deep level. Through lessons on craft and process and 42 short chapters with writing prompts, MacEnulty provides insight and guidance for deep, transformational writing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prism Light Press
• Release date: Aug 18, 2021

Book preview

The Power of Voice

Escape with Poetry

Finding Form in Chaos: Structures for Creative Nonfiction

Turning Fact into Fiction

Creating and Conveying Memorable Characters

Imagery and Symbol: Connecting to the Unconscious

Crafting the Scene

How to Write a Narrative - The Four Elements

A Writing Group of One's Own

PART THREE - The Care and Feeding of Your Writing

The Joy of Journaling

How Do You Get To Carnegie Hall?

Meditate On It

Write From Your Heart

In the Body

Inspiration

Get Your Rhythm On

Writing about What Is

This Material World

It was like.....

Specific City

Where Have You Been?

The Personal is the Political

What You See

Talent is a Fine Thing

Live a Little (or a Lot)

Do This, Don't Do That

Writing our Appetites

Sense & Sensibility

Muscled-up Verbs

Know the Shadow

What Art Can Do

What to do with Loss

The Things You Leave, The Things You Take

Daemons

The Beauty of Models

Steeped in Thought

A Writer's Library

Where is the Love?

Celebrating Transformation

Write Here, Right Now

Beginner's Mind

The Yoga of Writing

Shutting Down the Internal Editor

The Comfort of Books

Pain is a Woman Wearing a Yellow Dress

Fun in a Flash

Dreaming It Up

Mirror, Mirror

Memoir Matters

And Family, Too

Let the Real Work Begin

RESOURCES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Introduction

In 1995 I facilitated a writing workshop in a women’s prison. I was a Ph.D. candidate in the Florida State University Creative Writing Program, and I had been writing for many years. I believed in the precepts of the writing workshop, and I put a heavy emphasis on the craft of writing. Initially, I entered the prison thinking I would make better writers of the women there. I would teach them how to write. To my surprise, the women in that first workshop were the ones who taught me. For them the goal of writing was not to get a story published in The New Yorker or a poem published in Poetry Magazine. The purpose of writing for those women was to understand themselves, to connect with others, and to heal the past. What I had forgotten was that those were the same reasons I had begun writing.

At that point I began to teach writing differently. I started to focus on ways to help writers access their most authentic voices and tell their deepest stories. I adopted a non-critical approach that expanded the notion of meaningful writing. I discovered that the more we played with writing and the more freedom we gave ourselves in our writing, the better our writing became. We were no longer writing in hopes of achieving fame and fortune. We were exploring our hearts and giving voice to our souls. Writing in this context was never about competition. It was about honoring and nurturing each person’s unique expression. And for the writers, it was about healing from the traumas of addiction, abuse, and loss.

Over the years I developed exercises that helped to achieve these goals, and in the process, students and workshop participants not only experienced healing, they also developed their craft through these exercises and through interacting with other writers. Craft can be viewed as a tool for better, deeper, more meaningful connection. This is the approach I have taken in my own writing. Writing for healing can improve a writer’s technique, and as our technique improves, the healing comes easier.

Since those workshops on the prison compound in 1995, I have facilitated workshops in a variety of venues and situations. For several years I continued to work with incarcerated adults and at-risk youth. But I also branched out and began to give workshops in community settings, writers’ conferences, and writing retreats. As I worked with writers in these various settings, the idea evolved that the type of writing we are doing is both deep and transformative.

A few years ago, after I facilitated a workshop at a Sun Magazine writers conference, I heard a participant say that her heart had been cracked open, and I realized that this kind of writing -- deeply connective, and transformative -- can indeed crack open hearts. And that’s how the light gets in.

The purpose of this book

This book is an extension of my workshops. It begins with a rationale and discussion of the role of writing in recovery.

Part Two is a series of chapters focusing on the process and craft of writing. Each chapter in Part Two contains reflections for writing, reading, or discussion. The lessons on craft or technique in this book will help you transform your material into a more artistic, authentic expression whether you choose to write poetry, fiction or creative nonfiction. They will enable you to better connect with readers so that your writing can work its transformative magic on them as well.

Part Three contains 42 short writing lessons, each with prompts for your writing practice. They contain personal stories and examples that put the theoretical discussions in the Parts One and Two to practical use. The prompts may help you delve into aspects of your experience that you most need to heal. They can also be used as seedlings for longer, more developed work. You may want to use Part Three with a writing group to develop and maintain a writing practice. The beauty of the practice prompts is that they can be used over and over again, and each time you will write something different. These prompts will help you dig into the raw material of life to find the stories that you are uniquely qualified to tell.

I have included sample responses to the exercises and practice prompts in some of the chapters. Most of them were written in ten-minute sessions and have not been revised or significantly edited. I include them because writing is a process, and it can be useful to see all stages of the process. Even though many of these pieces are still in first draft form, I find them surprisingly moving.

This book is about finding your authentic voice. Sometimes writers compare themselves to other writers. Let me put it bluntly: you will never be Virginia Woolf or William Shakespeare. But along with that, no one else will ever be you. Do you see what I mean? A writer once told me he was the next Thomas Wolfe. Really? Why be the next Thomas Wolfe when you can be the first you? You are the only one who can tell the stories you have been chosen to tell. And I do believe that our stories choose us. Write what is before you. It is not for you to decide whether or not the material is worthy. Just do your job and write it. You never know who will be transformed by it.

Principles of Transformational Writing

The ideas I discuss in the following chapters and the exercises and prompts that you will find in Part Three are all based on these seven principles. The exercises in this book will help you understand and incorporate these principles into your writing.

1. Write Honestly -- Honest writing is writing that connects and transforms.

2. Find the Voice -- Once you find the right voice or voices, it (or they) will carry the story on its back like a good, hardworking mule.

3. Write From the Body -- Let the body tell the story that confounds the head.

4. Look for the Universal -- What is the link between your story and my story and his story and her story?

5. Create a Sense of Here and Now -- No matter how long ago it happened, remember to create a sense of immediacy and urgency.

6. Trust the Process -- Sometimes the process is slow. Let it be. You don’t keep digging up a seed. You water it, and it grows.

7. Share Your Work with Others -- Whether you share your work in a writing group, publish it in a blog, or publish a bestseller, your reader or listener completes the creative and transformative process.

Part One - Recovery through Writing

"You were engaged, as a writer should be, in transforming yourself. When I read your collected stories I was moved to see the transformation taking place on the printed page. There's nothing that counts really except this transforming action of the soul."

-- Saul Bellow in a letter to John Cheever

The Healing Power of Story

The need to tell stories has been with us for as long as we have been human. The cave paintings of our Neolithic ancestors were probably expressions of the stories they told about their world. In Africa the oral tradition kept history alive and explained how things came to be. Among the Hebrews, Midrashic interpretation was a means of interpreting biblical stories by embellishing and expanding those stories, sometimes adding in the personal reflections and inner struggles of the reader. This enabled them to recreate the Torah as a living text with practical uses. Today we are immersed in story from sitting around campfires as children telling ghost tales to sharing the exploits of our latest TV anti-hero on social media.

When I use the word story, I mean any form of narrative, including poetry, short stories, essays, plays and movies, blogs, and so on. To me, they are all story. The story connects us, it enthralls us, it delights us, it informs us, and yes, it heals us.

As scholars such as James Pennebaker and others have noted, storytelling as a healing tool is a part of the human experience. You’ll find people who wouldn’t be caught dead in a literature class, but what do they do when they’re sitting together, sharing a few beers and pretzels? They’re telling stories. Stories belong to poor people as well as wealthy people. The convict has a great story. The sorority girl has a story, too. I have been drawn to people whose values I do not share and yet whose lives have been connected to mine simply through their stories. I will stop what I am doing whenever someone has a story to tell. I will listen, and when someone wants to know who I am, I tell them a story. That way we transform each other, and we connect with each other in a deep, meaningful way.

Years ago, when I facilitated arts programs at a women’s prison in Florida, the women probed the events of their own lives and turned them into stories. It’s so risky, they said, as they opened their lives like new books and allowed us to peer inside. How stunned they were when something I can only describe as love bloomed all over their histories. It was alchemy.

My belief in the saving power of story started when I was very young. I found that when something bad happened in my life, I had the ability to pull myself out of the situation and observe what was happening. Inside my head, there was a voice that would explain events to me, describe them and create a story. The first time I remember it actually happening I was seven years old. I was sleeping in my bed when I heard my mother screaming from another room. But I didn’t want to wake up. I was in a deep sleep. Why is she screaming, I wondered in my semi-conscious state. Then I heard the words, Fire! Fire!

That idea pushed through the thick dark envelope of sleep and cracked me wide awake. Fire. I would have to get out—now. I can still remember the feel of my feet hitting the wood floor. I dashed out of my room and into the living room. There was no fire. Instead I saw a man with his arm wrapped around my mother’s neck as he was dragging her into the kitchen, towards the back door. The front door was wide open.

She twisted around, saw me, and screamed, Run. So I did. I ran across the weedy overgrown lawn, across the pine needle driveway and over the stepping stones to the white brick house next door. I banged on the door with its jalousie windows until finally Mrs. Robbins in her housecoat opened the door, saw me and then called to her husband, Johnny, you better go next door and find out what’s happened.

I don’t remember being afraid. I only remember the story—how I saved my mother’s life. Later, I realized that she could have easily saved her own life by running out the front door herself and leaving me. I learned that she was screaming fire to the telephone operator because she thought that would get a quicker response. So the story changed. But it was always a story. I saw it as a story. I heard it and felt it as story. When I told other people what happened, they saw me through the eyes of the story. We lived through it together; they worried for my mother, and feared for my safety as she had.

That event inspired the very first short story I wrote. I wrote it many times in many different ways. It finally wound up as short story called Somewhere to Live in my story collection, The Language of Sharks. By creating fictional characters who had a similar experience, I developed a deeper understanding of the experience’s impact in my own life, and ultimately I was able to release it. It was no longer my story. I had managed to transform it.

Writing as a Tool for Recovery

Recovery in the most basic sense means healing. In our culture today we generally associate the term with some sort of substance abuse or self-destructive behavior. But we also recover from divorce, from abandonment, from sexual abuse, from traumatic experiences such as war, from years of caregiving, and from the grief over the loss of a loved one.

Kathy, a friend of mine, related that when her husband of 29 years walked away from their marriage, she turned to journaling and writing poetry to make sense of what happened.

Writing brought me clarity and focus in a very confusing time, she said. Without it, I would be wallowing in self-pity instead of planning a future for my children, animals, and me!

When my friend Lauren suffered a break up, she wrote an award-winning comedic screenplay about it. The writing helped her come to terms with the painful break up. The award was the delicious chocolate frosting.

Much of my life and my writing has been devoted to the recovery process. For a number of years in my teens and early 20‘s, I abused drugs and alcohol. Writing about those experiences in my first novel brought me a sense of understanding and closure that enabled me to move on with my life. Later I had to recover from the pain of an abortion, from divorce after a long marriage, from the strain of taking care of my elderly mother, and from my grief at her death. Each time and in each circumstance, writing came to my rescue. Recovery is a state of being, it is a place of healing, and it is a method of self-examination and exploration.

There are many tools out there for people in recovery from 12-step programs to detox centers and private helplines. Recovery is often a group effort involving support groups, counselors, sponsors, ministers, and social workers. But it is also a journey that we take alone. The wonderful thing about writing as one of your recovery tools is that it can be done alone or with others. Yet even when we are in a group of people writing together, we are exploring our own psyches and engaging in deep conversation with ourselves.

Why do so many people in recovery turn to writing? For me, it was a way to understand what I had done and why I had done it. After six years of addiction to narcotics and a short stint in prison, I wanted to explore what I had been through. It baffled me. I had a compulsion to recall those experiences and to recreate them. I also wanted to create something that might touch others. What I didn’t know at the time was that reliving those events served as a sort of repurposing of them.

In 2014, Kate Burton, a doctoral student at Murdoch University in Australia, wrote a dissertation entitled, Topologies of Becoming: Emotional Landscapes in the Writing of Mary Gaitskill and Pat [Trish] MacEnulty. As I read Burton’s analysis of my work and hence my life, I sometimes felt tears welling up in my eyes. Burton’s thesis revolved around the idea that the addiction I had experienced as a young woman was in itself a survival mechanism for a traumatic childhood. And yet, she acknowledges that the writing, which she labels as scriptotherapeutic, allowed both Gaitskill and me to use fiction to explore and remap identity...forming new connections, territories, and becomings... Through writing about the traumas and the subsequent addictions and other self-destructive behaviors, we initiate psychological processes that allow us to evolve and become whole.

Good writing helps the writer heal even if that is not the