From Courtney Denelle’s interview in Roi Fainéant, published today.
Writing can be personal therapy. Some people say it can’t or shouldn’t be, and this assumption may come from “a workshop mentality of…peer call and response” that doesn’t want to see personal “journals.” The refusal to consider that good literature can also be therapeutic for the author is a “diminishment” of the work—both personal and artistic—that people do when they write about their trauma, “as if it’s not serious, or as if because it’s therapeutic, we’re somehow not cutting along the nerve, we’re somehow not doing the work.”
In reality:
“I was directly engaging with myself through the process of not only writing this in terms of generating the work, but brutally revising. I mean I could recite it to you at this point, I’ve gone over it so many times. So, if that’s not rigorous in a literary sense, I really don’t know what is.”
You’re never going to overcome your trauma in a binary, absolutist on-off sense. You can heal, you can change, you can move forward, but the past is always with you. Denelle explains:
“There’s never going to be a laurel crowning that is going to place her on the other side of all that has passed. The best we can do in terms—and when I say we, I mean me and her—is that we can learn to live alongside it. We can learn to live in the world and, kind of, solve the problem of living. And when you’ve lived with a fatal urge, even when that urge is not activated, it casts a long shadow. So, you know, feeling in a sustainable capacity, at least in my experience, requires me to perpetually recalibrate and try to understand, or at least move towards understanding, in order to bear the weight of my own reality.”
Courtney Denelle, interviewed by Lucy A. McLaren. “Courtney Denelle and the Impact of Trauma on Writing,” Roi Fainéant Press, 2 April 2023.
The writer’s website is courtneydenelle.com.