TEACHING CREATIVE WRITING WITH TRAUMA SURVIVORS

By Martin Duffy

Martin Duffy is a disabled writer specializing in the psychological symptomology of PTSD. He has participated in more than two hundred international election and human rights assignments since beginning his UN career in Africa and Asia in the 1980s. He has served with a wide range of international organizations and has frequently been decorated for field service, among them UN (United Nations) Peacekeeping Citations and the Badge of Honour of the International Red Cross Movement. He has also held several academic positions in Ireland, UK, USA and elsewhere. He is a proponent of experiential learning. He holds awards from Dublin, Oxford, Harvard, and several other institutions including Diplomas in International Relations, Conflict Archaeology and Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge. He is a researcher at Cambridge University and can be contacted at mtd40@cam.ac.uk

Ultimately, all creative writing teaching is about “the why, the how and the reflection” and clarifying these objectives is particularly important when working with trauma survivors.  It is important that we always have in mind our audience and why we are addressing that particular audience. We then have to ponder how best to organize and deliver to that audience. Finally, we have to reflect on our work and perhaps evaluate. In some cases, this means the dread of marking- which is a difficult task and often this writer, in particular, prefers only to mark in broad bands. 

On grading, I suggest working on the basis that everyone who makes the effort should pass comfortably. For various reasons as elusive to me as the holy grail (and uncomfortably nebulous) I believed it should be possible for the tutor to evaluate reasonable, good, very good and outstanding work.  In your rubric, I suggest always erring on the side of generosity against all these bands. You never know what genius you might discourage if you don’t encourage writers!

Above all, we must look for the positive signs of expression and not to admonish students for minor shortfalls. Always be prepared to reward the authentic words of a students who are only beginning their creative writing journey.  Otherwise, we would never have heard of Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway or indeed Dylan Thomas. 

In this essay I will first say something about my goals in writing such a potentially all-encompassing piece. It enunciates my contextual and philosophical ground. I will extract and draw on the rich vein of creative writing on trauma from my UN project. This is documented (for example) in Duffy (1996), Duffy (2021) and in the trauma NGO, WAVE (2022.) Here space allows only a few words from students but I do provide some textual summary. The most used phrases in our creative writing are, “my personal trauma”, “family stress” , “escaping grief” and “mental health”. As space is short, I have added some references and content as hyperlinks.

Textual analysis of these creative pieces shows a preponderance of negative, stress-laden vocabulary, whether the participants are international or from Northern Ireland. This work fascinated me as a young lecturer in the 1990s, and became part of my UN portfolio. It is widely believed that creative writing on trauma may contribute significantly to “wellness” (Beschloss, 2022) and there is a growing body of research which supports such groupwork on relevant personal memoir (WAVE, 2023.) This is also supported by the work the author has contributed to and evaluated in the UN Digital Library.

I intend to set out my life experience in the context of future plans in teaching creative writing. All of what I have done before influences my current practice. In this essay I will reflect selectively on my own experiential learning. The common theme of my career is trauma and, in this essay, I want to show how my progress has encouraged me to use new methods and philosophies. In my bibliography, I give examples of my academic writing about epistemologies of teaching in divided societies. What follows is a much more personal piece about my development into creative writing. My current work is more about process than product, and for this reason you will find less emphasis on formal assignment while (like all tutors) we also evaluate teaching and learning.

My essay has three primary strands. The first will look at my current teaching innovation on trauma. There are many readings which have encouraged this. I have particularly drawn on Beck (2012), Leahy (2014), Morley (2007) Myers (2006) and Salesses (2021.) In my second strand, I address the relationships between “wellness” and trauma. Examples include Balan (2023), Glasson (2022) and Heartflo (2019.) My third strand explains how this work is infused by the workshopping, crafting, scaffolding and other techniques we use across creative writing. Apart from the aforementioned texts, I was especially encouraged by my previous studies at Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Wesleyan.  I am indebted to my tutors there and especially  to my fellow alums of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

I have found Saunders (2021) inspirational in initiating writing exercises. Here I focus on one problem common to the field but prescient in trauma- that of working with the reluctant writer. I have found Marguiles (2019) and Richard (2021) invaluable. Finally, in my conclusion, I will show how my project embodies lived and instructional knowledge in my philosophy of teaching. Like the opening of a pandoras’ box, creative writing on trauma does not generally result in a marking rubric, but outcomes are treasured as much as formal grades.

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING

Before I get to my three strands, I want to say something about that lived and instructional past which colours my approach. In this peer response, I have sought to reflect honestly on my thoughts about writing. In the WAVE archive our writers also describe personal trauma or tráma (Gaelic) such as bereavement. As a child, we had many exercises in writing poetry. I suspect our teachers found this to be a more epistemologically manageable exercise than prose.

With poetry one could be sufficiently oblique that the focus of one’s criticism or dissection could be explained away in the artistic licence of poetry. Prose was perceived as being much more contentious, especially non-fiction creative writing, where one might well say something controversial e.g., about the Irish conflict. In Irish we are wary of trauma- (the Irish phrase is bhain tráma di le linn a hóige.) Childhood poetry was (therefore) a safer form of creative writing experiment. My UN project seeks to challenge the inhibitions adults still have in writing creatively about experiential angst (Duffy, 2021.)

This is a protracted way of getting to the nub of my assignment (as the learner) seeking to address philosophy and context in the teaching of creative writing. This brought back memories of the class poem- a proverbial rite de passage. Most kids shamelessly borrow a few lines of inspiration from famous poets. So, the daffodils in Dublin are just like the beautiful “cloud” of any acclaimed poet’s lexicon (Duffy, 2021.)

I too was (originally) more comfortable writing poetry instead of writing prose about what was happening politically. So, amidst painful factoids of conflict, I realised why our teacher quickly switched us back to poetry about nature. This too has been good preparation for me as a tutor among survivors of extreme trauma. Above all, you always test the “comfort level”. It is rather like a nurse and hot bath-water. School took me into a world which allowed escape from political blackness. In most regions of conflict, trauma is a highly sensitive subject (Parr, 2018.) There are numerous Khmer, Arabic and Somali words for صدمةمدة ص or sandman meaning trauma (Duffy, 2021.)

So, in recent years when I’ve worked with school principals in Cambodia or Somalia or Rwanda or Gaza, I often start with something other than trauma. Confronting the trauma comes later. In short, I approach cautiously so it does not overwhelm the student. The best “wellness” or trauma writing will come naturally in gradual exposure not through political pornography. Happily, I have been able to reflect on the techniques learned from my own teachers. So, with that knowledge I feel much better prepared to avoid embarrassing moments or tiptoe around the difficult conversations which surround student reactions to writing (Ibid.)

STRAND ONE- CURRENT TEACHING INNOVATION

This is where I confront my first strand, how my experiential learning informs my innovation in trauma work. These circumspective encroachments on family and political violence- those explicit references to violence and death- they have all been accumulated in my practice as a teacher. I owe so much to my own teachers at every level of my education. I have happily absorbed their wisdom like a living encyclopaedia. Most instructors view their own learning through rose-tinted spectacles (as generally we are a tiny percentage who embody the success story of metamorphosing into the professorial mould). Personally, like many things in education, I suspect the true story lies somewhat in the middle. That is to say we have all met outstanding communicators and poor ones, and we forgive pedagogical weakness as long as the instructors were half decent human beings.

Compared with today, when most college instructors undertake training, there were few such courses in the Higher Education setting when I started work in the late 1980. My best learning experience was in the teacher training part of my primary degree, where I was lucky enough to have the legendary Malcolm Skilbeck (2022) who became a guru at the Australian Ministry of Education. He had an uncanny ability to package knowledge, to identify its core concepts, and whose use of the backward design, (described in this hyperlink) in particular, produced a genuinely reflective, engaging teaching. Here I have also been inspired by educational visionaries such as Box (2019.) Skilbeck and Box encouraged me to explore the origins of our knowledge so that we can create our own bespoke pedagogy in the context of writing about and through trauma (I was a 1st year in Skilbeck’s last year in Ulster). These two educationalists are about creative pedagogy encouraging a natural instinct for teaching. 

For almost all instructors- it necessitates planning and conceptualization. In my teaching innovation each lesson plan is a summation of the diverse components around my own learning and how I might explain its origins to my students. However, to fully activate or weaponize this knowledge so that it empowers students to embrace change, we need to structure our content so it becomes more than the relatively modest sum of its parts. It is the documentary of a journey towards becoming a more effective teacher. More significantly still, it is a roadmap of how one might become a dedicated educator. Personally, I believe it is otiose, and much less easily measurable, (whether quantitively or qualitatively) to talk of “good teachers”. 

Transformational teaching activities nurture resilience for the creative writing classroom. There is insufficient space to consider the definition and monitoring of teaching standards, but it will be apparent from this narrative that I favour an inclusive approach to the classroom. That process requires absorbing the feed-back of students, peers and inspectorial processes. It is our capacity to reflect and transform our practice which will ultimately dictate the quality of our instruction. These might include lesson planning/execution so (as discussed by Skilbeck and Box) so that the teaching and learning goals are clear.

Conceptualizing the backward design (a writing technique which encourages clarity of expression) helps us find the origin of our learning

Careful reflection is a key part of experiential learning, so we must encourage our students to be learning thinkers. It is a truism that doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different or better outcome contains a fatal flaw- educationalists should surely innovate with professional reflection? A willingness to regard feedback from whatever source as valuable- I have gained a less defensive approach to evaluation and I encourage this in my students

Instead of being “disciplinary-warriors” defending “knowledge-silos”, in creative writing we might generate new ideas in teaching, regardless as to what discipline they originate from (Duffy, 2021.)

Epistemologically, I am far more interested in providing my students with a skills-set for their professional lives than in trading a hackneyed bundle of “subject-specific” knowledge. We may close the gaps between our teaching goals and how we deliver them in the field. Thinking of our practice as a kind of reflective portfolio of personal learning may be one way of improving our practice and realizing these goals. Being a reflective practitioner is more than just learning from, but also anticipating, errors and averting them (Ibid.) 

My personal teaching philosophy was never conceived by design, but by happy accident. There is a large element of serendipity as to how I approach my teaching. I have shown a willingness to adapt and to pursue other specialities in the UN and at the same time I have felt emotionally attached to teaching – a natural pull. This rather makes me think that my teaching philosophy is something which comes very organically from my thinking. Wiggins and McTighe (2005) inspired me in the trench warfare of diverse environments.

STRAND TWO: RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN WELLNESS & TRAUMA

Now I turn to my second strand, why wellness and trauma? A thoughtful meta-biography tells the untold story of the children killed in the Northern Ireland conflict (Duffy & McClements. 2000.) This chillingly carnal vignette of senseless barbarity, haunts my childhood recollections. In my adult life I came to understand that bullets travel not just geographically, but temporally. As Jack Kenny, father of child-victim, James Kennedy says, “some of these bullets never stop travelling!“ (Ibid.) In wellness and trauma work we find pain calcified in survivor’s minds, that, even now, decades later, stubbornly cannot de-compose.

When I teach, I recall flashes of my own intimate childhood in painful retrospection- hearing the clump of the grisly Claudy bombings (a truly “cross-community” massacre of the innocents) or the horrendous scream of the massive statute of Londonderry’s Governor Walker, being unceremoniously toppled from above Derry’s Catholic Bogside. Walker had towered for centuries, aloft like some gargantuan gargoyle, sternly resisting the nationalists consigned to live ignominiously beneath. After the Siege of 1689, Catholics were forbidden to live within the city limits.

I also regurgitate the sombre day of wailing ambulance siren sounds of Bloody Sunday, which saw fourteen innocent victims, peacefully civil rights marching, brutally murdered by state forces in Derry. Even more, my own personal witness in September 1978, of dear Brian Russell, guiltless, Protestant civilian searcher, murdered by the IRA (Duffy, 2022.) As I have served abroad, new horrors have filled my consciousness. 

For me education and creative writing in particular, is about “wellness”. I have extensively managed UN civic education with adult learners of mixed ability in community college settings. My students are primarily the internally displaced, traumatized, people experiencing forced migration or seeking refugee status. In our classrooms we are as flexible and caring as conceivable. I learned a long time ago (however) that even with the greatest enthusiasm, meeting all demands will only drive the enthusiastic tutor into work fatigue. Balance is essential. I like to use the term “class clinic” and we are always only a text away on the class WhatsApp group, and we deploy a bot which has been very well configured to answer rudimentary inquiries (Duffy, 2021.)

That focuses interaction. We are not clinicians but we emphasize in class that creative writing encourages ‘wellness’. The creative writing feeds into the wider specifically more therapeutic work we do elsewhere. We also empower all our local staff, even the caretakers, to assist with learning inquiries, so that our intervention can act as a referral point to specialist services like a psychologist. By this means we have a manageable load and ensure that we have a presence which is open to everyone when it is needed.

By reflecting and pressing the re-set button on our creative writing, we have the potential to make it more genuinely creative. Memoir and personal essay work as I have diarised in this narrative, can make an important contribution to “wellness”. Its cause and effect may be difficult to quantify but I see so many qualitive evidences that our students find this work beneficial. It truly speaks to the under-recognized power of memoir and personal essay as a way of articulating trauma.

There are now many projects across the world utilizing creative writing to promote wellness. Just as one local example, the Kyra Project in York uses writing to enhance emotional health and build resilience through the delivery of a therapeutic expressive writing group. Like many projects it is based on the solid research that developing a regular writing activity increases experiences of health and wellness (e.g., Field, 2006; Drew, 2011.) Another good example is Age-Exchange. Writing has been shown to strengthen our emotional wellbeing. Often such projects draw on a psychoeducational model that builds upon the knowledge, skills and self-awareness of group members (Kyra, 2023.)

STRAND THREE- INFUSION

This takes me into my third strand. There are key takeaways from life experience that I would like to incorporate into my own teaching of creative writing with adults in a community college setting. These include theories, strategies, specific practices, and broader goals, and they are inspired by numerous sources. These include how my growing comprehension of the context of creative writing informs (1) my goals as a teacher and draws on my own experiential learning (2) my experience of transactional writing with adults in a community college setting, (3) my consideration of the writing process exercise and finally (4) the techniques I have been developing to meet the challenges of working with reluctant writers (Duffy, 2021.)

In my creative writing teaching, I often set our mixed ability audiences certain assigned low-risks writing tasks such as descriptive summaries or snapshots of memoir. Here I will return to pedagogical themes which recur across my strands. These expectations are set modestly so as to allow for confidence building. The overwhelming epistemological objective of such inventive writing exercise is to develop the confidence and skills of the student in completing the first stages of focused invited writing. I might also introduce the concept of transactional writing. There has been an enormous proliferation in “how to“ manuals on this subject, so much so that the standard studies by Rosenwasser and Stephen (2005) and Bazerman (1997) have struggled to keep pace in their updated editions, with the prodigious output of writing academies on the internet. I also like to discuss the writing process.

My students are of average ability (i.e., they often have experience of college but are not necessarily graduates, and many are pensioners.) I seek to include disability accommodation as a pre-designed feature. Generally, my assignment creates an activity that incorporates one of the four stages of the writing process: (prewriting, revising, reviewing or publishing.) Each student will have an opportunity to experience the four paradigms of Betty Flower’s (1981) vision of the writing process on a single, manageable subject which does not require original research. The teacher throughout the exercise will be a roving and engaged mentor in the group work, and to each student individually (Duffy, 2022.) This is a non-graded exercise but students will receive detailed oral and written feed-back.

My context is to encourage the reluctant writer. Many survivors of trauma aspire to write a family and personal memoir but experience an enormous confidence deficit about that forbidden, unexplored writing territory. I must first, like a fellow explorer, encourage them to confront embarrassment, nervousness and inhibitions about potentially intimate creative writing. I might commence a few elementary low-stakes writing exercises. I often draw hints from Elbow (1973.) I need to help students get equipped in skills for these field trips. In these preparations I found there was so much intellectual equipment that I was lacking too. We all badly needed to go to the creative writing “outdoors store”. We needed new skills and new kit. This is the joy and essence of the experiential.

Our interviews and our joint activities helped us loosen up emotionally and become more personally forthcoming. Like everybody among us, family and personal story seemed to inhabit its share of skeletons. In interview we exploited how our taboos and sacred cows are so very alike. We invariably laughed at Flowers (1981)and learned so much from her. Soon we were into daybooks and exchanging mentor texts. We experimented with little mini-lessons that we would like to teach, and techniques on asking a question. Barry Lane (2020) and “conjunctions” became our new best friends.

We soon became proficient in exploring “scaffolding” or ZPD and thinking about the zone of proximal development advanced by Vygotsky (Drew, 2011.) We sometimes had a good laugh about this theory but it began to grow on us. I observed my students learn and grow as creative writers- and alongside them, my own learning and skills as a creative writer flourished too. We first started with gentle, informal and very unscripted discussions about what students might want to discuss in the way of family and personal memoir. 

We explored whether there might be any extant books that could give inspiration and we dipped deeply into the wide range of literature offering tropes and which might help us approach a genre of writing that we might feel comfortable with. There were lots of suitable mentor texts and they liked some and hated others. The wellness is also about promoting personal transformation. Often students struggle to hold onto the “old me” by choosing mentor texts associated with former life e.g., as a bibliophile or writer of biographical thumbnails. We are in pursuit of the whale. 

Soon they are embracing William Dalrymple and Granta. We do practice writing lessons and freewriting. We explore the possibility of writing scaffolding as a way of getting characterization, plots and action better developed in the medium of family and personal memoir. Often students resist keeping a diary as they might find it egotistical and narcist. By the latter stages of our work, they often read the almost daily notes they collate about the writing journey. I assure them that one day they might feel like Samuel Pepys or another of the great historical diary writers (Duffy, 2022.) This is very much a part of ‘rebuilding the self’ in creative expression.

Not all of my exercises work well with all audiences. Some do not like the idea of scaffolding and are more receptive to mentor texts. Slowly the need for any kind of scaffolding may diminish. Some students find inspiration in a few less well known but magnificent books- not always the most obvious ones and rarely those that had been on the New York Times best-sellers list. Often my students, partly because they have to “make do” with limited library stock, lean towards the somewhat more obscure, cerebral writing which had won some of the less well-known specialist creative writing prizes, but would probably not be in the Oprah Winfrey club list.

If I was to describes in some detail the results of those strategies and practices. Most students commence steadfastly as reluctant writers. Not a page is divulged. There is no magic bullet. Most students argue the material they want to write about is intimate and personal and do not want to spill their emotional guts out in front of an audience of strangers like some kind of literary alcoholics anonymous meeting.

I tell them to think of it more as a gambler anonymous get together. We were all gambling on becoming better writers. To do that we needed first to better understand ourselves. They usually say they lacked the ego and the essential narcism to do that. I tell them, don’t worry, with confidence that will grow!

I often introduce my students to reading circles in the local public library on genres close to family history and personal diaries. This is often a success. This is all the more important in the process of retrieving the memories and achievements of conflict victims.  Often, they are survivors with lives stopped abruptly, with so much left never to be achieved. One then begins to fetishise about his pre-conflict achievements so that we can find and appreciate them.

Teaching creative writing, like writing itself, is a process, not a single subject. If I were to single out my overwhelming learning, it would be the transformative potential of narrative and memoir writing. UN projects often seek to provide a kind of supportive educational instruction which helps with adaptation and provides a certain “wellness” through education. A meaningful mistake often made is to follow the official line and consistently use the nouns “refugee” and “displaced person”.  My instinct from the outset is this is not appropriate. I have been able to reflect on this meaningful mistake and realise that whatever it may say in the teacher’s manual, it might be altogether better to forget about those nouns and just call people, “people”.

I have worked primarily with refugees, the displaced and with people experiencing the transition from territories in conflict. My work fits into a growing category of creative writing teaching which might loosely be described as “writing for wellness” although we must emphasize that this is an arts-based, creative, intentionally relaxing, not a clinical intervention. Trauma is neither homogenous nor necessarily visible, but can be addressed through this construct of wellness (Duffy, 2022.) There is a well-founded medical model for this kind of engagement, but it is also very important that the creative writing practitioners and the clinicians know their own roles, and where they complement, and where they do not.

We often set students a creative writing task as a way of grounding our study and writing flow, and sometimes also giving the writing button a “hard reset” when other classes have become a little stressful or epistemologically overwhelming. It is sometimes said that writing is like driving. However conscientious we may have been with our grammatical highway code when we were novices- the vehicular equivalent I guess are those early days with the driving instructor- we get into bad habits. We ignore the looming conjunctive just as soon as we get so confident with our writing, we ignore the literary stop signs! This work fulfils the aspirations of my experiential learning to embody a philosophy and context of creative writing teaching which is grounded in the promotion of “wellness”.

CONCLUSION: ADDRESSING TRAUMA & ENCOURAGING ‘WELLNESS’

In conclusion, my project seeks to pursue these goals of addressing trauma and encouraging “wellness” through creative writing. I seek to addressing trauma among reluctant writers and encouraging wellness. My two audiences at this stage are UN veterans and survivors of the conflict in Northern Ireland. This kind of memoir and personal essay works well with my mainly adult students.

We are mindful that some of their experiences can be emotionally overwhelming and we have both “in house” and referral services for specialist therapeutic support. When I encourage my students to engage in memoir and personal essay, we have an array of resources to support them, and to follow-up in the case of any psychological or other concerns.

I have described the benefits of writing for wellness. This is a growing field and I find that we are overwhelmed by the numbers of people applying to come and do these courses with us. I try to explain to these audiences that even something like creative writing can be a help but is no substitute for professional mental health support. Therefore, our package of support in the writing programme is always tied to additional professional clinical expertise, and referral to medical services.

To some extent we are just the first point of call for so many of these deserving people. I have worked in many trouble-spots (including Gaza) and was birthed in one of the long-running conflict zones (Ireland.) Creative writing does help explore and possibly even to personally reconcile the ghost or even the zeitgeist of primordial conflict (Duffy, 2022.)

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Martin Duffy is a disabled writer specializing in the psychological symptomology of PTSD. He has participated in more than two hundred international election and human rights assignments since beginning his UN career in Africa and Asia in the 1980s. He has served with a wide range of international organizations and has frequently been decorated for field service, among them UN (United Nations) Peacekeeping Citations and the Badge of Honour of the International Red Cross Movement. He has also held several academic positions in Ireland, UK, USA and elsewhere. He is a proponent of experiential learning. He holds awards from Dublin, Oxford, Harvard, and several other institutions including Diplomas in International Relations, Conflict Archaeology and Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge. He is a researcher at Cambridge University and can be contacted at mtd40@cam.ac.uk