Writing to Heal, Writing to Transform
Thinking about why I write, and the kind of writing I'm interested in helping people think about and do. Also, announcing an upcoming free writing circle!
First, I want to thank everyone who has subscribed or read so far! I am aiming for weekly-ish posts, although keeping up with that will mean working on my longwinded tendencies. I would love to hear if anything I say resonates, sparks thought, or illuminates something in your own life. Also, if you know someone who might be interested in what I'm talking about here, I invite you to share it!
Also, a quick announcement: I would like to invite you to a free online writing circle on Wednesday, June 25th at 5 PM PST/8 PM EST. I’ll send out the full invite next week, but you can join the Zoom meeting here! You don't need to consider yourself a writer, although if you do that's great! The writing circle will involve me talking briefly, a writing prompt, and some low-pressure shares. I would love to see you there!
I wanted to talk a bit more about my reasons for writing, and the kinds of writing I'm most interested in helping other people do. I attended an MFA program in creative writing because I wanted to be a writer ever since I was a little girl, and when I found out that graduate school for writers existed I knew, instantly, it was part of that dream for me. My road to the MFA program itself was a bit longer than that and I didn't go until my late twenties, after a brief career in marketing and communications. But writing had always been both the craft I felt compelled to practice as well as the skill I was most recognized for since I was very young, and it made sense to develop my writing in a rigorous academic program.
Getting into a well-funded, competitive MFA at all felt like the dream for so long that once I was in school, living out that dream, I felt disoriented. Despite the fact that I had been dreaming of time to dedicate myself to my art for years, writing on demand for a submission schedule to be critiqued by a classroom of equally talented peers was challenging, particularly while simultaneously learning to teach for the first time. I also realized that while writing had always been a huge part of my life, I had little opportunity or cause to slow down and examine my personal motivation for writing, beyond the fact that I was good at it. I wanted to be a novelist, but why, exactly? I already knew it wasn't for the money, particularly with the realities of modern publishing for literary fiction. As I churned out pages out writing and workshop notes and tried on different writing styles and personas and craft techniques, I felt myself grasping for this deeper exigence. I also sensed that my motivations for writing felt a bit different than other people in my program, or different than the objectives of the program itself. For example, I'm just not that interested in analyzing the mechanics of a short story, try as I might.
I have always naturally come to the page when I encounter a problem in my life that is unintelligible to me in some way, meaning that the reality of my daily life is at odds with some other part of me, often a hidden or submerged aspect of myself that defied or eluded language. I have written, most often, to make sense of the things I could not make sense of any other way. As a child, I escaped into a fantasy world and peopled it with friends, mentors, a community, when I felt lonely and misunderstood. As a young adult undergoing treatment for an eating disorder and suicidal depression, I wrote a novel about women trying to find reasons to live despite grief and adversity. The novel I planned to write in graduate school was about a military couple separated by deployment and the moral morass of modern counterinsurgency tactics. Many of the stories I wrote in graduate school wrestled with motherhood or the decision to become a mother, though I was not yet one. The first print story I had published was about a women whose mother was bed-bound and dying, which proved prescient when I read it at my father's bedside while he was on hospice for brain cancer. My thesis project was a fictionalized account of my paternal grandmother and asked questions about life and death and family legacy, the choices we make and the choices we inherit.
I had always considered myself a fiction writer, but when I finally switched to writing nonfiction in 2020, it was because the realities of my life—my father dying while I was pregnant days before Covid-19 was declared a pandemic—were too specific, too immediate, too stark to be written about even through the scrim of auto-fiction. Two years later when I was reeling from a life-threatening miscarriage, it was the agonizing specifics of my experience that I could not escape or make sense of except through writing about them. I also did not see my experience reflected in the narratives about miscarriage available to me at the time. I wrote about my miscarriage compulsively because I had the very real and urgent sense I was trying to write myself out of trauma.
My point here is that I have always written to heal the ruptures that threatened to shatter me, whether in my body, my relationships, my sense of self, my beliefs and ideologies, or the wider world. I have done this even when I didn't realize it, before I was able to give the process language. Now I know that writing to heal has a body of research supporting it, such as James Pennebaker's seminal research on healing and trauma, which links personal writing about trauma with improved physical health outcomes.1 In Pennebaker's original study conducted in the 1980s, individuals who wrote about traumatic personal experiences using an expressive, personal style for a brief period of time in several installments visited the campus health center about half as often as students in the control group, leading to a rise of interest in using narrative healing approaches for trauma. Other disciplines have sought to link medicine and the humanities, such as narrative medicine, which emphasizes empathy and cultural competence and applies literary textual analysis and creative writing skills to doctor or patient experiences.2 Narrative therapy is a modality that is interested in how people make meaning of their experiences, and what healing or growth is possible when we intentionally reshape those narratives.3 All of these disciplines are operating in this intersection of healing and writing, although I also see gaps and limitations, which is where my own scholarly interests lie.
But in general, the concept of writing to heal sounds dangerously close to journaling and it's not particularly fashionable in most MFA programs or workshop spaces. On one hand, this is understandable: English programs are typically small and chronically under-funded, and historically, the whole point of MFA programs was to establish creative writing as a serious academic discipline. Writing as healing sounds more appropriate in a psychology or medical department than liberal arts (hence the interdisciplinary efforts I've listed above) but those disciplines tend to have less of an emphasis on writing pedagogy or craft. While many therapy spaces use storytelling and personal narrative, most therapeutic uses of writing focus on the James Pennebaker-style of expressive writing rather than consciously employing craft techniques or community workshop models. The distinction isn't just semantic or about the boundaries between disciplines: if creative writing departments were to openly acknowledge writing as a healing art, then the facilitator's responsibility changes dramatically. The purpose of teaching writing changes, as do the techniques used and outcomes associated with it.
I also have a complicated relationship with the word "heal." Heal comes from the Old English haelan, meaning "to restore to sound health." Haelan is also connected to hal, or whole—as in, the state of being whole. To heal, then, means to become whole. In most people's conceptions of healing, a state of wholeness involves returning to who we were before, the version of ourselves that preceded illness, injury, loss, death, grief, heartbreak, rupture, etc. We fantasize about miraculous healing, Jesus telling the man to "get up and walk." This is particularly problematic for people whose bodies transgress the healing narrative, who have chronic or terminal diagnoses in which it is likely not possible to return to the previous state of health. But for those who have experienced trauma, grief, or loss, it can feel equally dissatisfying: for example, how can I ever be the version of myself who didn't almost die or spend years in and out of psychiatric treatment? What does healing from grief mean when death separates us from those we love? There have been times in my life when I believed I would always be a bit broken, times I believed I would never heal from the experiences that nearly destroyed me.
But what if healing is indeed a return to wholeness, just not the return to some previous version of ourselves we might fantasize about? What if the root of heal is inviting us to the kind of wholeness we entered this world with, the wholeness I believe we all hold within ourselves no matter our bodies or experiences? This is why transformation is, for me, a more potent word than healing. My objective, in my own work as well as the work I hope to help others do, is not just writing to heal but writing to transform—to become new versions of ourselves on the other side of collapse or rupture. I want to be clear that this is a process, and minimizing our grief and emotions—trying to skip to the good part, as the Instagram reel goes—is just another method of spiritual bypassing, another way we deny ourselves our full expression. But I also believe that we can get stuck in a loop when all we do is validate and acknowledge our feelings without pushing further, without holding up our experiences to be examined, without zooming in and out recursively over time with the support of relationships or community that help us hold the enormity of the experience while also gently encouraging us to look again, to look deeper—eventually, finding ways to alchemize it. That, I believe, is the real art. Writing isn't the only way to access it, but for me it has always been the best way.
This is why I’m less interested in discussing craft tools or how to “improve” writing than I am in who we become through the process of writing. I’m also disinterested in marketability, what journals or publishers are looking for, or other business-based aspects of writing. It’s not that don’t think those aspects are important—they are! I don’t want to write alone in a room forever!—but it’s just not what excites me and not what I see clearest about my own work or that of others. For me, the most compelling question is, “What did you learn (about yourself, others, the world) from writing this? How did you change? How did you push yourself to become a new person (maybe in some small way) through the process?” I think most writers I know would say this is a natural by-product of all good, rigorous writing, but for me it’s the primary outcome. I believe it also inherently makes the writing stronger and more interesting to other audiences, but again, adjudicating that doesn’t particularly excite me. I also don’t believe it’s exclusive to literary writing or creative nonfiction—we can transform through fiction writing, genre writing, or academic or scholarly writing.
For now, I’ll talk about how I think this works in creative nonfiction. For me, writing to transform is process-focused rather than outcome-focused, and involves not just writing about the experience, as one might during an expressive writing journaling session, but then tracing back over the narrative using craft tools to shape it and come to new insights or clarity. It means analyzing the experience using interpretive frameworks, archetypes, myths, stories, critical lenses, and more. But writing to transform does not stop there. Often, when confronting our own lived experience, we develop blind spots, get locked into binary or black and white thinking, want to position ourselves as victim and others or the world as perpetrator, get locked into old narratives. At times, writing can confirm these patterns, grooving us into them deeper. Writing to transform involves zooming out, looking for the binaries and then collapsing them, looking for the us/them thinking and seeking unity, third space, the third choice. We can do this on our own to some extent, but I believe we also need others to lovingly reflect our work back to us, writing in community to push ourselves to widen the aperture, expand our vision. Finally, writing to transform involves imagining a new story, a new self—which is really a return to wholeness. It involves writing a new world. This is the trickiest step, and perhaps the part that is most difficult to break down or explain because it happens through the heart rather than the mind—but it is also, I believe, the most vital.
I have some ideas about how and why I think this works as well as how best to do it, which I look forward to continuing to explore through this Substack. So again, thank you for being here! If you would like to practice this type of writing in community, mark your calendar for our free online writing circle on Wednesday, June 25th at 5 PM PST/8 PM EST!
Writing Prompts:
If you consider yourself a writer, why do you write? What most urgently brings you to the page?
What does the word “heal” bring up for you? What does the word “transform” bring up for you? Write a bit about your relationship to these words, or write about experiences that you consider healing or transformative. (If there’s some conflict or friction there for you, great! Lean into that!)
Narrative medicine was created and championed by Rita Charon, who held both an MD and English literature PhD, and deliberately chose the term “narrative medicine” to evoke a medical field (like nuclear medicine or internal medicine). You can learn more about Columbia University’s narrative medicine department here.
Narrative therapy is also sometimes called narrative psychology. You can learn more about narrative therapy here.