酷我-北美枫

[ericcoliu]

Writing as a Way of Healing

Book Review of Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our stories Transforms Our Lives by Louise DeSalvo
Paperback: 226 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
Date: March 17, 2000

Louise DeSalvo, professor of English and Creative Writing at Hunter College in New York and Virginia Woolf scholar, brings twenty years of writing experience to her work entitled Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives, in which she recommends writing in spare moments, uncensored, and suggests that writing links feelings of pain, grief, and loss to an event and that it will speed up the healing process.

As an experienced lecturer in the field of creative writing, Louise DeSalvo asks her students to write five pages per week and to write every detail as a reporter to move beyond a trauma. She suggests that writing about difficulties enables one to discover the wholeness of things, the connectedness of human experience. What she emphasizes is the need to make a constant connection between feelings and events for a healing process to take place. Expressing oneself through writing can establish one's connection with others and with the world.

Throughout her book, the most frequently used metaphor for writing that she employs is a “fixer”. As DeSalvo claims,

"I use my writing as a way of fixing things, of making them better, of healing myself. As a compasslike way of taking a “fix” on my life -- to see where I am, where I've been, and where I'm going. ... After twenty minutes of writing, though I was still sad, my feelings had undergone a subtle but real transformation. A baker friend of mine calls it feeling “yeasty” -- alive and growing and changing. That's what I often feel after I write. Yeasty."

Using her own writing experiences and those of the students she has taught for twenty years, DeSalvo has empirically tested Dr. Pennebaker’s research about how writing benefits a writer’s health, and she has taken his suggestions one step further, arguing that when writing about past traumatic events, the writer must connect them to the feelings of the past and of the present, and that through the linking of writing and feeling the writer can bring about effective progress toward writing and healing. She also puts a special emphasis on alternative purposes for writing:

"We write not to create works of art, but to build character, develop integrity, discipline, judgment, balance, order, restraint, and other valued inner attributes. Through writing, we develop self-mastery, which contributes to our emotional and spiritual growth. Writing, then, becomes the teacher."

DeSalvo's concept of "writing as a way of healing” requires a “healing narrative”, demanding the truthful description of traumatic or distressing events in detail and of how one felt about those events then and feels about them now. For her, the healing narrative is a balanced narrative containing negative and positive words and, crucially, a richness of detail. This is analogous to Sigmund Freud's conclusion that the vivid dreams of the victims of shell shock in the First World War represented an unconscious attempt at healing through revisiting the torturous experiences in all their complexity.

Putting healing narratives aside, DeSalvo also places emphasis on sharing one's writing. She contends that having empathic listeners is critical to healing and that they can help reflect what the writer has said, where there might be gaps in the narrative, areas where they would like to hear more, and may even uncover patterns in the narrative that the writer hasn’t seen. Through writing and sharing, writing about past traumatic events not only can heal the writer, but also can help the reader and the culture; it becomes far more than an individual writer’s need, but it creates a ripple-effect within society, resulting in a rejection of traumas and violence committed against its members. Therefore, the writing itself and making it public become a political act, which will speed up social progress.

According to DeSalvo’s conception of writing as a way of healing, in the act of expressing yourself, there is a healing power, a power to heal the wounded soul. For in the work of art you create, though you come to know despair -- that the dark night of the soul through which you have to pass -- you find that by giving it expression you can be healed and know the joy of recovery and creation. As these linked experiences of pain, recovery, and creation are added one to another, layer upon layer, not only is your work enriched but others share its benefits.

To write about a painful issue is to revisit the tormenting experience, the darkest tunnel of memory. It requires not only courage and determination but also faith -- faith that there will be light at the other end of the tunnel. The hope of healing is such a light, and the hope of being read is another; the two are inextricably linked.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

Writing as a Way of Healing

Book Review of Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our stories Transforms Our Lives by Louise DeSalvo
Paperback: 226 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
Date: March 17, 2000

Louise DeSalvo, professor of English and Creative Writing at Hunter College in New York and Virginia Woolf scholar, brings twenty years of writing experience to her work entitled Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives, in which she recommends writing in spare moments, uncensored, and suggests that writing links feelings of pain, grief, and loss to an event and that it will speed up the healing process.

As an experienced lecturer in the field of creative writing, Louise DeSalvo asks her students to write five pages per week and to write every detail as a reporter to move beyond a trauma. She suggests that writing about difficulties enables one to discover the wholeness of things, the connectedness of human experience. What she emphasizes is the need to make a constant connection between feelings and events for a healing process to take place. Expressing oneself through writing can establish one's connection with others and with the world.

Throughout her book, the most frequently used metaphor for writing that she employs is a “fixer”. As DeSalvo claims,

"I use my writing as a way of fixing things, of making them better, of healing myself. As a compasslike way of taking a “fix” on my life -- to see where I am, where I've been, and where I'm going. ... After twenty minutes of writing, though I was still sad, my feelings had undergone a subtle but real transformation. A baker friend of mine calls it feeling “yeasty” -- alive and growing and changing. That's what I often feel after I write. Yeasty."

Using her own writing experiences and those of the students she has taught for twenty years, DeSalvo has empirically tested Dr. Pennebaker’s research about how writing benefits a writer’s health, and she has taken his suggestions one step further, arguing that when writing about past traumatic events, the writer must connect them to the feelings of the past and of the present, and that through the linking of writing and feeling the writer can bring about effective progress toward writing and healing. She also puts a special emphasis on alternative purposes for writing:

"We write not to create works of art, but to build character, develop integrity, discipline, judgment, balance, order, restraint, and other valued inner attributes. Through writing, we develop self-mastery, which contributes to our emotional and spiritual growth. Writing, then, becomes the teacher."

DeSalvo's concept of "writing as a way of healing” requires a “healing narrative”, demanding the truthful description of traumatic or distressing events in detail and of how one felt about those events then and feels about them now. For her, the healing narrative is a balanced narrative containing negative and positive words and, crucially, a richness of detail. This is analogous to Sigmund Freud's conclusion that the vivid dreams of the victims of shell shock in the First World War represented an unconscious attempt at healing through revisiting the torturous experiences in all their complexity.

Putting healing narratives aside, DeSalvo also places emphasis on sharing one's writing. She contends that having empathic listeners is critical to healing and that they can help reflect what the writer has said, where there might be gaps in the narrative, areas where they would like to hear more, and may even uncover patterns in the narrative that the writer hasn’t seen. Through writing and sharing, writing about past traumatic events not only can heal the writer, but also can help the reader and the culture; it becomes far more than an individual writer’s need, but it creates a ripple-effect within society, resulting in a rejection of traumas and violence committed against its members. Therefore, the writing itself and making it public become a political act, which will speed up social progress.

According to DeSalvo’s conception of writing as a way of healing, in the act of expressing yourself, there is a healing power, a power to heal the wounded soul. For in the work of art you create, though you come to know despair -- that the dark night of the soul through which you have to pass -- you find that by giving it expression you can be healed and know the joy of recovery and creation. As these linked experiences of pain, recovery, and creation are added one to another, layer upon layer, not only is your work enriched but others share its benefits.

To write about a painful issue is to revisit the tormenting experience, the darkest tunnel of memory. It requires not only courage and determination but also faith -- faith that there will be light at the other end of the tunnel. The hope of healing is such a light, and the hope of being read is another; the two are inextricably linked.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[Lake]

Will be back to finish the reading tomorrow.

[[Lake]]

Will be back to finish the reading tomorrow.

[Lake]

I can't agree more that writing is a way of healing.

[[Lake]]

I can't agree more that writing is a way of healing.

[anna]

good. Every one has his way...
_________________
---------------------

Anna Yin

《爱的灯塔-星子安娜双语诗选》
<Nightlights> <Seven Nights with the Chinese Zodiac> ...

http://annapoetry.com

[[星子安娜]]

good. Every one has his way...
_________________
---------------------

Anna Yin

《爱的灯塔-星子安娜双语诗选》
<Nightlights> <Seven Nights with the Chinese Zodiac> ...

http://annapoetry.com

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[Lake]

[[Lake]]

[ericcoliu]

Hi! Lake:

I still can't hear it. Does anyone else encounter this problem?

[[ericcoliu]]

Hi! Lake:

I still can't hear it. Does anyone else encounter this problem?

[Lake]

[[Lake]]

[ericcoliu]

Hi! Lake:

Thanks for your poem and your friend Dave's new version of the song with saxes. I like it very much.

[[ericcoliu]]

Hi! Lake:

Thanks for your poem and your friend Dave's new version of the song with saxes. I like it very much.