The End of Trauma?

Agents say they’re done with “trauma books.” But trauma isn’t done with us, What if beauty is the way through? Ready to move from confession to transformation? Join me on Thursday 10/30 to learn how

I’m teaching a 3-hour workshop on Zoom this Thursday, October 30, from 1-4 PM Central on the topic of Telling Hard Truths by Writing Hot Cold.

(Full description here, or sign up immediately here.)

Why am I teaching this workshop?

First and most, it falls squarely within my wheelhouse: I have always taught writers how to tell their hardest stories, because learning to tell mine not only saved my life but drastically changed it for the better.

But it was not easy.

Why was it not easy? Because my hardest story, the story I had to write, was about being sexually abused throughout my childhood by my stepfather. The abuse started when I was three or four and ended when I was ten. Writing about childhood sexual abuse is hard for myriad reasons, not the least of which is that it’s a topic many people just don’t want to read about. I get it. I didn’t want to live through it, either!

It’s also a topic that many agents simply aren’t looking for. You surely don’t see it on agent wish lists! In fact, the opposite is true—it often turns up on lists of topics that agents don’t want pitched to them. They’d rather not touch it with a ten-foot pole.

But, again, it was the story I had to write. Therefore I had to learn to write it beautifully, because to tell it was not enough. I had already told it and told it and told it from the time I was thirteen years old and first figured out, with the help of a junior high health teacher, what had happened to me. Telling it wasn’t that hard anymore, but nor had telling it done the work of transforming it, and that transformation was what I wanted. Alchemy was what I wanted—a kind of transmutation that would allow me to take the painful and ugly thing my stepfather inflicted upon me and weave from it a thing of beauty. Harsh beauty, certainly, but beauty nonetheless. Nothing short of beauty was okay with me. If I couldn’t make my story beautiful, if I couldn’t turn it into art, well, then I didn’t want to make a book out of it and splay my name across its cover.

The transmutation of my childhood pain became my memoir, The Part That Burns, which—although it was not ultimately represented by a literary agent—did get published in 2021 and did receive starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly, along with a lot of other critical praise that meant the whole world to me. Much of that praise focused on the memoir’s beauty. Which was exactly what I wanted—and can you imagine how healing that was? How healing it was to transform my painful experience into something others called beautiful? The truth is, by transforming my ugly past into something beautiful on the page, I also transformed myself.

And that is why I teach other writers how to do the same.

Hands down, the best writing workshop I’ve ever attended. And in three decades of writing, I’ve attended many. ~Amy Brown, about a recent WITD intensive

Apparently, now is a good time to learn these skills. Why? Well, it seems we may be entering a phase (everything comes and goes in phases) where agents and editors are done with trauma. This is what I heard recently from a respected literary agent, who heard it from other agents and editors at a professional gathering. No more trauma, they said. Too many trauma titles already on their lists or in their pipelines, they said. Please don’t send anymore, they said.

So where does this leave writers whose stories are … traumatic?

Well, I can’t speak for the agents, the editors, the publishers, or the industry at large, but I can say this reported tide shift makes it all the more important for writers to learn how to go beyond telling their stories and learn, instead, to transform them.

And that is the focus of my Thursday intensive, where we will experiment with concrete, elastic, and endlessly repeatable techniques— such as:

• Writing hot cold

• Flat writing

• Constrained writing

• Container writing

• Archetypal writing

• And more

You can read the full description here, or sign up right now to learn these techniques let you you enter the fire without getting consumed, then step back into the cool air of craft.

We’ll look at the Tony Earley scale for emotion in writing and embodied, grounded techniques that empower you to let the story live in carefully chosen details that hold the weight of meaning and relieve the writer and the reader from the burden of explanation. Together, we’ll examine extraordinary published passages that demonstrate these techniques at the highest level.

You’ll leave with new tools for handling your most challenging material, and with a deeper sense of how to transform raw truth into art that resonates.

Because when you learn to write hot cold, you don’t just write better—you live better. You trust yourself more. You discover that you can face the hardest truths and make something luminous from them.

I hope to write with you this way, because your truth matters, your voice matters, and your story can be told beautifully, no matter how hard it was to live through.

These are skills that will serve writers not only now, but always. Because learning to tell a story in an embodied, emotionally restrained, concrete specific way will always make it more alive and beautiful, regardless of whether the story is traumatic. And if the story is traumatic, these methods will help it reach readers who might otherwise have looked away—not necessarily because they don’t care, but perhaps because they care too much. The nervous system learns to protect itself. It draws curtains. It keeps the door half-closed. For some readers, especially those with painful histories of their own, encountering another person’s wounds can feel like tearing open their own stitches. Art can be catharsis, yes. But it can also be rupture. Not every heart is ready for that.

There is also the fear of consumption—of turning suffering into spectacle, of treating someone’s deepest grief as entertainment, of participating in a kind of rubber-necking. Some readers feel an ethical resistance to narratives of trauma because they worry: Am I taking more than I can give? They don’t want to make literature a place where pain is mined for story, where devastation becomes currency.

Others simply wish to protect the part of themselves that is still tender and hopeful. In a world filled with grim headlines and relentless news, a book might feel like the last refuge—a place to remember that humans are capable of joy and repair. Choosing not to engage with trauma narratives can be an act of boundary-setting, of preserving the self so that empathy doesn’t burn out into numbness.

And yet, literature that explores trauma can restore dignity to the hurt places. It can witness. It can name what has been denied or silenced. It can tether us to each other in ways that joy alone cannot.

Learning how to transform trauma into art is where that dignity, witnessing, and tethering begins.

Join me on Thursday—register (and get the full workshop description) here. Zoom link will be emailed to all registered participants on Wednesday. Come ready to roll up your sleeves, try some new things, experiment, and get playful (yes, there is definitely some playfulness involved in transforming hard stories into art). I can’t wait to write with you. And we’re almost there, so sign up today!

Love,

Jeannine

Good Stuff Coming Up At WITD!

We’ve got tons of good things coming up at WITD, including the November Write-Ins; watch this calendar page for new stuff (we’ll be adding the winter open-mic salons soon!).

Plus, our November session of WITD: The WORKSHOP is full, but the January session will open this week for registration, and the new new year-long program is right on its heels. You can join the waitlists for early notice of registration here:

Six-Week Workshop Waitlist

Year-Long Program Waitlist

It’s fine to join both waitlists—there is no commitment, it just means you receive notice of registration a couple of days early (these offerings, especially the six-week workshop which is limited to 20, fill very quickly—the six-week often in a single day). Here’s what one writer said about it:

I am growing as a writer here as never before. I salute especially our wonderful teacher, Jeannine! Thank you, thank you! ~current WITD workshop member

And yes—some of you are asking—you can absolutely participate in both programs, which are highly distinct from one another. You’ll see that more clearly when the year-long program’s website goes live very soon (we are excited!).

Also, the Telling Hard Truths by Writing Hot Cold intensive on October 30 is open for registration for two more days. This three-hour generative intensive is a mix of hands-on instruction and real-time writing exercises meant to provide you with the craft tools you need to enter and tell your hardest stories in ways that are safe, beautiful, and transformative for you and your readers. You can register here.

Finally, we’re starting in with The Infinite Small | A Mirco-flash Revolution on November 5 to December 10. It’s the perfect antidote to the woes of the world, winter, and the overwhelm of the holidays.

This intensive is for all paid members; you don’t need to register or do anything at all to participate other than watch for those Wednesday emails! Read more about The Infinite Small here in my micro essay, “How to Fall,” then upgrade your subscription if you haven’t already, and write with us!