LITMIR.BIZ

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writing things that didn’t feel very damn hopeful at all. And then, of course, I found I was writing this as much for myself as for others in need of words of encouragement: Know that this place you’re in right now will transform. No matter how many years I’ve been actively recovering, I still need reminding. One more time, I get to be tender to the still-aching parts of myself.

      •§•

      I initially met the word transformative in conjunction with writing when, in 2000, I read in Poets and Writers Magazine about Goddard College’s Transformative Language Arts (TLA) program. Transformative Language Arts is described as “the intentional use of the written, spoken and sung word for individual and community growth, development, celebration, and transformation,” and called to me when I was searching for a way to integrate anti-violence activist work and writing. I imagined developing a creative writing methodology to use with LGBTQ women who wanted to write about sex as a way to reclaim and recalibrate their relationship with desire.

      (Please note that I don’t mention initially envisioning work with trauma survivors—when I first began my studies, I wasn’t intending to work with survivors; that was a transformation in itself, the moment I allowed myself to understand that I was going to (have to) navigate my own survivor experience, that I would write with survivors. That particular understanding brought on big mourning and loss, as I’d somehow convinced myself that I could write about sex without writing about trauma. Denial works in powerful ways, doesn’t it?)

      While studying for my master’s degree in Transformative Language Arts, Ladelle McWhorter’s book Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization introduced me to the concept of “askesis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought.” McWhorter describes askesis (which she learned about through studying the philosophy of Michel Foucault) as “a self-transformative, self-overcoming practice, whose purpose is ‘to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently.’”

      When I speak of writing as transformative, I mean a practice in which the writer opens themselves to just this sort of in-depth exploration and metamorphosis.

      Of course, not everyone wants their writing to catapult them from caterpillar into the thing with wings. Sometimes you just want to jot down the notes of the day. I understand that. The thing is—sometimes the wings begin to emerge anyway, and it is useful to have a practice in place to help them unfurl fully, when you are ready to risk leaping into the air. Transformative writing practice has helped me—and many of those I’ve written with—not only excavate my wings out from under years of scar tissue, but also learn how to fly.

      Transformative writing is often risky, genre-defying, full of metaphors, stream of consciousness, deeply connected and unconsciously-driven. Over time, through the use of this practice, we are not only able to improve our writing, but we are also able to witness ourselves in the process of changing. This is writing that takes chances, is not censored by our inner editor. Sometimes the results of this kind of writing are linear, straightforward. Sometimes the results are an almost surreal conglomeration of verbs, nouns, and adjectives with no distinct structure, conjugation or form—often the resulting writing is somewhere between these extremes. Every time, every time, though, this practice of dropping onto the page and following the words wherever they seem to want us to go results in emotionally-resonant work. I have found the process of freewriting to be an erotic, embodied experience, after Audre Lorde’s definition of erotic: “I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way. And when I say living I mean it as that force which moves us toward what will accomplish real positive change.”

      When we write freely this way, over a period of time, we give ourselves the space to examine our inner curvature, the contours of our minds and experiences. We write ourselves into new ways of perceiving, new ways of knowing—profoundly intimate experiences, both, if we allow them to be, because they open the door to new ways of being in the world. Transformative practice in action: the slow and gorgeous effort of learning to communicate (with) all parts of our inside selves again.

      The music of transformation

      Locate and download a copy of Sweet Honey in the Rock singing “Ella’s Song” (buy it if you can—support your revolutionary artists!—or find a video of the song online). Play it once you are in your writing place, with your notebook ready, pen uncapped, coffee steaming next to you, whatever you need to help your words flow. Let the lyrics wash over you. Notice what images or feelings rise up in you as you listen. If a line or a phrase catches your attention, copy that down into your notebook. You might begin writing from any of these associations or words, or you can begin with the phrase, “We who believe in freedom…” Follow your writing wherever it seems to want you to go, even if you end up writing about something completely different from what you’d originally intended.

       the page has room for my incomprehensibility

      Today I don’t want words, I want the juice of this river, I want to play in the garden. I want to plant new seeds and then listen to the neighborhood birds until the seeds throw up shoots. Some days it’s all white butterflies and green tea. Somedays it’s all the dog and her orange ball and the kids screaming at the school a block away. Some days you’ve done enough healing, it’s been years enough, and you can set something down, remove the practice barrier, the training wheels, you can roll down the window and let the air in because you’ve done enough. You’ve done enough. There are more tears to come, yes, there will be more big ache in this lifetime, but you recognize now that that’s the human condition—not only about incest, not only about recovery, just the whole life fact of this existence. We don’t stop crying and there is laughter in our eyes, the puppy sprawls at my feet in the shade. I let the sun take my shoulders to a dark brown, bake this old, oldest, tension out of muscle and bone. (2014)

      The page has room for all of this, has room for my incomprehensibility, for what’s belabored, for the poetry that lives inside all my pretense. The page has room for the scars and scabs, the boll weevils, the torn leaves, the torn skin, the nonsense phrases, the bird calls, the butterfly with the wet and torn wing. The page has room for text messages and daydreams, the old fantasy and the hummingbird right now putting its green beak into the scarlet runner bean blossoms. The page has room for my wilted leaves, for the gangrenous selves, for the parts half clipped and dying, has room for what’s still to be resurrected and room for what he just could not figure out how to kill.

      The page has room for as much as you can give it, and only accepts it one way: a word at a time. You can give it whatever words you want, in whatever order they arrive, but you have to stroke them out letter by letter. You give the chaotic story a bottleneck to push through and it will frame itself into a kind of sense. Write it again and the frame, the sense, will be new again. You never write yourself the same way twice. The hummingbird flies overhead—you grab it out of the air, you press its luminescent feathers and rusted-hinge song to the page. You open your eyes wide, wider, to find more of yourself existing. You are how you see. That apple tree, how the breeze reshapes its flow around you, how you eavesdrop on the conversation between those two city birds. You are the dreams you lived and the dreams you left behind. You are everything that got you here and you are here.

      •§•

      How does transformation happen? Minute by minute, and word by word.

      As is true for so many of us, writing saved my life. I’d been trained out of the ability to be a friend, had been instructed to trust no one, did not open myself to even my most significant others. The person who knew me best in the world, during my adolescence and very young adulthood, was the man who sexually abused me, and even him I didn’t tell everything (despite his very thorough attempt to convince me that, since he could read my mind and already knew what I was thinking, it was simply a measure of my trustworthiness for me to reveal to him my every thought). The only safe place I could find was the page. I came to realize that he couldn’t get in there (nor, actually, could he get into my mind, but allowing myself to trust that fact took much longer). Finally, I had

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