I Am A Writer From…

What physical place are you writing from right now? What emotional or psychological place? Where is your home – physically or spiritually?

As I explained in Writing Our Way Into The Journey, this fall I am crafting a series of writing invitations that I will share both with my first year writing students and the Just Write virtual writing group. My challenge is crafting an invitation that can help all of us to use writing as a way to write our way out of this hurricane. Each successive Jam Session makes it more clear to me that our current moment is not really a hurricane at all. Instead it is a never-ending hurricane season where we are simultaneously cleaning up from a hurricane, living in the eye of the storm, and dreading the arrival of the next. And of course, many of us are also living with the trauma of actual rather than metaphorical hurricanes. As I told one of my students this week, it is a lot of weight for all of us to carry. Every one of us is living with a lot of trauma right now and we need to acknowledge that trauma and accept that we are traumatized even when we know there are others with greater burdens than ours. Trauma is not an Olympic event and no one will win a medal. All we can do it help others to persevere when we can and fight our way out when we are not able to help others. I continue to believe in the power of writing to help us with this fight to survive this hurricane season.

The first invitation I gave everyone during the first week of our writing marathon was a line I learned from Richard Louth via the New Orleans Writing Marathon: I am a writer from… My invitation was part of a journey I hoped my students would take as they explored their feelings about writing and the baggage/scars they carried into my class from previous writing classes. But now, after three weeks of Jam Sessions, I have found how powerful a writing prompt that simple sentence can be. Now I invite writers to write down those words “I am a writer from…” and invite them to think about the “place” they want to write from as a physical place, a metaphorical place such as a state of mind, or an aspirational place they hope to manifest. While I typically give writers a range of options for sharing, I insist that I want to hear this line in full even if they share nothing else. Those lines are heavy and fraught and tell me so much about what my students are carrying, what we are all carrying, right now. Those lines might be the most truthful and important sentences my students have ever written in their lives.

I just wanted to share this writing invitation with you because it is a powerful and cathartic writing experience that I share with the writers in my care every week and each time we write our response to this challenge it is important and meaningful work for our fight to preserve our humanity. I hope you will join us and just write…I am a writer from…

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay.