The Tale of Two Bethanies: Trauma in the

Creative Writing Class

Vicki Lindner
The English Department, University of Wyoming, USA
The author, a Creative Writing teacher at a university in an underpopulated Western
state, reflects on the number of traumatised students in her nonfiction classes who
have come to the class to bear a healing testimony, as well as learn how to write.
Citing works by writing teachers and trauma therapists, she describes the similarities between Judith Lewis Hermans trauma narrative and the good writing a
writing teacher asks students to produce. Using two case histories from her own
teaching, she asserts that a writer can help students heal emotional scars and become
better writers, and offers advice and precautions.
Keywords: trauma narrative, creative writing as therapy, workshopping

Troubled students often sign up for my courses in creative non-fiction. In

Autobiographical Writing, Women and Writing, and Personal Essay, undergraduates have written stories about addiction, surviving homophobia,
divorce, illness, death and eating disorders. But the most poignant narratives
those that challenge me most as a teacher are by victims of trauma: physical
and sexual abuse, incest, violent crime, war and suicide.1
Few of these students have read popular memoirs about dysfunctional
childhoods. Most dont cherish fervent desires to create great literature or to
become published writers. Yet, citizens of a confessional age, they come to a
writing class with a sophisticated awareness that public testimony in the form
of art might restore damaged psyches. To wit, when I asked an Autobiographical Writing student, an honours science major, if hed had therapy for childhood beatings from a brutal stepfather, he rolled his eyes; Oh, tons...and I
thought writing about it might be a final step in the healing process. After a
political science major in the same class wrote a detailed narrative about a
date rape in a foreign country, she thrust her thick manuscript, vivid with
images, including Photo Shop illustrations, away from her and said, with
relief, Its in there now!
Psychological literature indicates that students like these, determined to write
about trauma, have probably embarked on a salutary path. Freud thought, and
his successors believed, that only a psychoanalyst, trained to witnesses the
unconscious, can help the traumatised achieve a talking cure. By contrast, some
modern researchers think that repressing bad memories, not digging them up,
is what enables trauma victims to cope.2 But others are convinced that writing,
a verbal expression quite different than talking, provides the best path to recovery. Suzette A. Henke, a literary scholar, argues in her book, Shattered Subjects:
Trauma and Testimony in Womens Life Writing (2000), that the process of articulating painful experiences in written form itself can prove therapeutic, and analyses
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Trauma in the Creative Writing Class

the narrative recoveries of Anais Nin, Sylvia Fraser, and other women writers.
Scientists claim that the therapeutic results of writing even writing that doesnt
purport to be art can actually be measured. In his book, Opening Up The
Healing Power of Expressing Emotions (1990), clinical psychologist James W. Pennebaker reported that students who wrote about the most traumatic experiences
of their lives in a laboratory environment experienced better physical health and
brain wave congruence than those who recorded their daily plans. Inhibition, Dr.
Pennebaker maintains, requires arduous physiological work, that, in turn, creates
biological stress a compromised immune system and higher blood pressure.
According to him, confronting a trauma in a language-based experience furthers
understanding and assimilation of the trauma. In writing I often came to a
new understanding of the emotional events themselves, he wrote. Problems that
had seemed overwhelming became more circumscribed and manageable after I
saw them on paperOnce the issues were resolved, I no longer thought about
them.
With Pennebakers theories in mind, it isnt surprising that the ill, the griefstricken, prisoners, and rape victims all sign up for writing groups as likely
to be facilitated by poets as therapists. Writing helps all. A 7-year study
revealed that prisoners who participated in arts and writing programmes had
75% fewer disciplinary problems3 The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that asthma and rheumatoid arthritis symptoms abated when
sufferers wrote for 20 minutes a day for 3 days in a row.4 No wonder that
writers reputed to invoke healing were engaged to lead workshops for victims
of the Oklahoma City bombing and the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Curing the sick and wounded, however, is not the traditional province of
university-level creative writing instruction. Although a Kansas State University study reports that students are suffering from increasingly complex and
severe emotional difficulties,5 we dont expect them to seek improved mental
health and college credit at the same time. Writers, who teach for a living,
often avow that they cant and dont want to be therapists. Some, confronted
with a trauma victims unsettling narrative, are apt to seek shelter behind the
pillar of craft. They may say to their students what Vivian Gornick (2001) says
in her book, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative: What
happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense
that the writer is able to make of what happened.
Gornick, who describes the process of shaping a professional memoir, teaches
in sophisticated MFA programmes. In undergraduate classes, however, shocking
experiences are more likely to emerge in naively constructed stories, unmediated
by advanced literary skills. Many teachers, feeling uneasy when they read, for
example, a beginning students childhood memoir about being coerced into practising oral sex on a sisters boyfriend, want to run from the clumsy, depressing
narrative, the truth in its missing details, and the suffering the student may have
come to class to dispel. To protect themselves, they maintain that the therapeutic
task transgresses the boundaries of the teaching profession, and steer the student
toward other subjects, or focus adamantly on technique. Although a traumatised
student may want to improve her writing, if she senses that her piece has made
the teacher feel squeamish, or if the storys power gets dismissed in the workshop
because its deficient in skill, she wont get what she signed up to pursue:

International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

a healing testimony. She may retreat into silence, or a darker space an innocuous
story that has no profound personal meaning for her. For the trauma victim, this
retreat can represent what psychiatrist Dori Laub calls, A defeata sanctuary
as well as a place of bondage.6
In fact, from one trauma therapists perspective, teaching writers literary
craft and helping them heal are not incompatible goals. In her book about
treating victims of violence, Trauma and Recovery (1992), Harvard psychiatrist
Judith Herman describes the creation of a trauma narrative as a necessary
component in a patients therapy. According to Herman, the construction of
this written narrative ideally begins once the patients post traumatic stress
symptoms (re-experiencing the traumatic event, avoiding stimuli associated
with the trauma, emotional numbness, and symptoms of arousal, like
sleeplessness) have been stabilised, and a safe atmosphere, including useful
boundary lines between analyst and patient, has been established. The analyst,
Herman adds, must define her own role as she avoids usurping the patients
ability to recapture power and mastery.
Ultimately, Herman implies, the narrative is more therapeutic if its written
well. As the patient is often dissociated from the traumatic experience, her
initial account is liable to be repetitive, emotionless, and incomplete, its images
buried, or not verbalised. Hermans description of the healing narrative that
must be constructed, then, resembles what a creative writing teacher would
identify as effective writing An organised, detailed, verbal account, oriented
in time and historical context. Evoking sensuous aspects of the experience,
like sounds, sights, and smells, is required in the therapists exercise, as in
those I give beginning workshop students. Revision, with the therapists help,
is also part of this restorative creative process. The resulting testimony, which
Herman describes as confessional, spiritual, political and judicial, offers a
new and larger dimension to the victims experience, enabling her to rejoin
society and form new relationships.7,8
Despite the documented link between effective writing and psychic healing,
it is easy to sympathise with professors who discourage scriptotherapy in
university classes. My students stories are often disquieting; they weigh on
my mind, poking their crude horror into my own writing time. Invoking them
makes my job more time-consuming and emotionally demanding. Whats
more, there are no guidelines to help a writing teacher engage in and yet
steer clear of a process resembling psychoanalysis. Wouldnt it be wiser to
refer troubled students to a counsellor, as Ann Landers did her letter writers?
Sometimes I do. But I also encourage them to write the story I have trained
myself to recognise they came to my class to tell, to confide its details, and
investigate its levels of meaning with me as a guide. I say what I suspect
these students already know: Writing is better than talking or repressing. To
transform a painful, life-threatening experience into art, an abiding, transcendent, public testimony, makes its significance available to others while
obliterating its power over you.
I know this because I, too, came to understand the connection between writing and healing when I began scribbling notes for a piece about finding myself
a crime victim in a Muslim countrys medical culture the hour I regained
consciousness in an Egyptian hospital. I also have confidence hubris, if you

Trauma in the Creative Writing Class

will in my ability to trespass into mental healths territory. Shortly before I

was hired by the University of Wyoming in 1988, I co-authored a book about
womens psychological relationship to money with a New York psychotherapist, Annette Lieberman. By the end of the two-and-a-half year collaboration,
I had helped conduct clinical interviews, lead money therapy groups, and
acquired a rudimentary knowledge of feminist psychoanalytic theory and the
mechanisms of therapeutic relationships. I must also confess that my dialogues with traumatised students prove more interesting to me than the nuts
and bolts of writing instruction inscribing the equivalent of show dont tell
in hundreds of undergraduate margins.
For all of these reasons I do facilitate the creative writing version of a
trauma narrative, whether or not the writer is skilled. To supply some information about how I do this and the donts my mistakes have taught me I
will describe two case histories. As both women students shared the same first
name, I will call them Bethany Number One and Bethany Number Two.
Bethany Number One was a student in my Women and Writing class, a
workshop and literature seminar cross-listed with the Womens Studies
Program. The writers began the term by reading Carolyn Heilbruns Writing
a Womans Life and identifying subjects that women have not addressed in
autobiography. Bethany, like the others, submitted a list of Uncomfortable
Subjects thematic areas she intended to avoid in her work. Ironically, this
strategy encourages students to write about themselves, (including the taboos
theyve named), in memoir or fiction.
I soon began worrying about Bethany One. She was dispirited, withdrawn,
and wore a heavy coat of make-up base, unusual in Wyoming. My quiz indicated that she hadnt read Colettes The Vagabond. Shed used up her one cut
by the third class. Worse, her seven-page weekly writing exercises were profoundly boring. A student, Ive learned, may signal that she is harbouring a
trauma story by appearing anxious, yet churning out dreary writing. So I
called Bethany One into my office.
There she told me that she was often ill with colds and allergies, why shed
cut class. Because I listened alertly, and, I hope, compassionately, and asked
questions, it didnt take long for the story to pour forth. Bethany, it turned
out, had been raped the year before by a fraternity boy who worked as a
hasher in her sorority. He had tempted her to swill a pint of Southern Comfort
(here she admitted to an alcohol problem) and told her he would shatter the
empty bottle on her head and f--k her unconscious if she fought back. The
same misfortune, she learned, had befallen several sorority sisters; but when
she told her new friends about her traumatic experience, none expressed
empathy. Although theyd seen her hanging around with the hasher, they
hadnt warned her; getting raped by him seemed to represent some warped
initiation rite. She had approached an authority with her story when the
hasher was nominated for student government office, but he was permitted
to run, and won the election. She also confessed that this was the second time
shed been raped: the first trauma occurred in high school. Judith Herman
reminds us that witnesses to violence often identify with and excuse the perpetrator. (The novelist, Charles Baxter, relating the same theme to fiction,
writes about our cultural reluctance to conceive of a true antagonist in his

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International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

essay, Dysfunctional Narratives, or: Mistakes were made .) Predictably,

then, when Bethany told her mother about her first bad experience, the
maternal response had been, You must have done something to deserve it.
As Bethany One spoke, juicy tears coursed down her cheeks, cutting trails
through her pasty mask of make-up. I said, No wonder youre sick walking
around with this burden of pain. In his essay, Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening, Dori Laub warns, The listener to trauma comes to be a
participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event: through his very listening,
he comes to partially experience trauma in himself. As Bethany Ones tears
dissolved the rust encrusting my Egyptian trauma, I, too, started to bawl. I
told her that I had also been a victim of violence. She hadnt seen a therapist,
and sniffling into a Kleenex, I encouraged her to contact one.
Then, partly to conceal my discomfort at sobbing in my place of business in
a power relationship in which I was supposed to be in emotional control, I said,
Listen, I believe you came to my class to write this story. (If not, I doubted she
would be revealing her rape history in my office.) You need to do it, I said.
Bethany One demurred. (Students from under-populated, rural Wyoming, often
called a town with long streets, fear, with some justification, that their fraught
story will turn into gossip, or that classmates may report back to the people
theyve written about.) Again I said that I thought she could and should write
this story; I described the themes, important to all women, that her tale would
unfurl. I then added firmly, In any case, you do have to read The Vagabond and
write a three-page paper about it. And here, my reading about trauma therapy
suggests, I may have done the right thing: I asserted my authority, re-establishing
the idea that I was a teacher, not a good mother, therapist, or fellow victim. I let
Bethany One know that we were telling these stories for a reason that had to do
with a creative writing class and her success as a student. (According to one
therapist I interviewed, students are more likely to impart difficult confidences
to teachers they view as strict.)
Bethany Number One did write about her sorority house trauma, and she
did read The Vagabond. (The 1910 novel contains an attempted date-rape scene
that most students miss.) When the class workshopped her piece, a valuable
auxiliary support system kicked in: Chavawn, a warm and empathetic leader,
took charge, insuring that Bethanys testimony inspired an outpouring of
sympathy from the other women. For the first time in this trauma victims
experience, the witnesses werent sympathising with the perpetrator. Thanks
to the other writers, and to her creative courage, Bethany One emerged from
her pained withdrawal. She cut no more classes. She became a good student,
if not a great author.
Bethany Two, a greater challenge, arrived 20 minutes late for her first Autobiographical Writing class. The other new students were silent, concentrating
on a writing exercise. She sashayed in, wearing a floppy brown hat, adorned
with a pink cabbage rose, and, making loud excuses, dumped a pile of books
on the seminar table with a thunderous crash. I have a temper and right then
I lost it: You will never be late for this class again, I said. At the end of the
session she apologised, adding, I know you are going to be my mentor and
help me write my book about my mother, the Tijuana Dance Hall Queen
I realised this was the student a colleague had sent me with warnings: Bethany

Trauma in the Creative Writing Class

11

had insisted on writing about her mother, instead of the meaning of landscape,
in his nature-writing class.
It didnt take long for The Tijuana Dance Hall Queen to make her appearance in Autobiographical Writing. The trauma Bethany Two described was
an horrific one. Her mother, depressed, dying of cancer, committed suicide,
and arranged for Bethany, then 16, to discover her corpse. The suicide had
been a ritual self-murder; Bethany, following instructions in a note, found
her mothers body, wearing a purple Halloween wig, half slumped off a bed,
surrounded by pills, candles, and incense, in a vacant apartment. She read
this tragedy, summarised in eight pages, aloud to the class in a flat,
unemotional voice. Obviously she was dissociated from the experience, a sign
she suffered from post-traumatic stress.
The other students froze, hiding their reactions behind opaque expressions,
as Wyoming students do when embarrassed or flabbergasted. I, too, was horrified, then confused. How should I respond? I didnt want to diminish the
storys power by critiquing its craft, or dismiss it as art by focusing on its
tragic content. I also knew that Bethany Two might have underestimated the
pain that other writers would be capable of inflicting with negative comments;
it was up to me to control the workshop environment. I took a deep breath
and reminded the students that I did not want them to use subjective statements such as I love and I dont like when they discussed each others work.
Then I suggested a technique that would elicit useful information, neutral in
tone: Well, lets just ask Bethany some questionsWhat dont you know
about this terrible event? Just ask an honest question, I instructed. (To
accomplish the same goal, I could have asked workshop members to identify
obvious as well as subtle themes in the work.)
A few students managed to blurt out a question, and I filled in, suggesting
additional questions that would indicate to Bethany that she hadnt provided
enough imagistic information to make the suicide vivid to readers. In
Hermans terms, Bethany Two had not constructed an effective trauma narrative. From the creative writing teachers perspective, she had not created a
sufficiently rich or focused vision. At this point, I intuited that I was playing
with fire, although I didnt know why, and, at the same time, drawing an
effective boundary line, taking my student seriously as a writer, while sticking
to my role as a teacher of writing. But I would soon go too far.
Bethany Two responded well to my demands for discipline. She showed
up on time, she never cut class, and because I give weekly quizzes, she did
the reading for the first time, she revealed, in any of her university classes.
Perceptive and self-aware, she contributed important comments to workshop
discussions, often taking a gutsy feminist stance. We had many interesting
conferences. For her final assignment, a revision, we decided or perhaps I
decided and she agreed that Bethany Two would revise the first piece she
had read in class. She must, I instructed her, add sufficient detail to the events
preceding the corpse discovery scene to focus the climactic moment. I suggested that she grow her vision by adding another ten pages to the original
eight, more than doubling the length. To add all that detail, you will have to
go back there, see and feel your mothers suicide all over again. This may
prove painful, I warned her. (I had not yet read Trauma and Recovery, so had

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International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

no idea how truly I spoke.) I reminded Bethany Two about my strict deadline;
I told her I wouldnt accept the piece after that.
When deadline day arrived, Bethany cut class. She did not hand in the
project at all. A week later, we had a major emotional show-down in my office.
As it turned out, I had strayed too far from my professional role. Bethany had
indeed returned to the scene of her mothers suicide, and as a real therapist
could have predicted, had become re-traumatised. She had begun suffering
the post-traumatic stress syndrome symptoms known as hyperarousal: agitation, inability to sleep, or concentrate, and had sought emergency sessions
with a University counsellor. She was taking an anti-depressant in order to
finish her class work and graduate on time.
I knew I bore responsibility for what could have been a serious disaster. What
I thought I was doing was asking Bethany Two to construct an effective memoir.
Deceived by this feisty young womans readiness to reveal her mothers suicide,
her psychological acuity, and resilience, I believed she would be able to objectify
the pain she still felt as part of an artistic process, as I would myself. I didnt
realise that I was asking demanding, actually that Bethany Two create a
detailed trauma narrative without laying the necessary groundwork: years of
therapy with a trained therapist. Although my Drill Sergeant teaching tactics had
created a safe atmosphere, allowing this student to achieve self-control and mastery, they had not provided her with an easy way out. The result was that the
potentially therapeutic trauma narrative and the craft needed to improve Bethany
Twos writing had coincided too well. It was this coincidence that may have
provided her and me with a slim margin of safety.
The piece Bethany finally produced was all a teacher of a beginning nonfiction course could hope for: evocative, moving, and scary. Bethany prepared
to read it aloud or to bear her testimony at a public reading in the English
Department library. She stood up, her hair twisted into Medusa-like braids,
a style, she informed the audience, she had created in honor of her mother,
The Tijuana Dance Hall Queen, who had died, and would not see her graduate
on Saturday. Bethany read two sentences and began to weep, loudly, dramatically; she didnt blow her nose or sop up the tears. As she wailed, I saw the
cheeks of the woman beside me grow moist, and others fumbling for tissues.
Fearing a mass catharsis, I gathered my wits and told Bethany it was OK to
sit down. Although I was sorry that her emotional eruption had prevented
the audience from appreciating her excellent writing, I later thought that her
poignant testimony to her shocking loss indicated that she had experienced
some healing; this traumatised student now felt the grief that she had initially
expressed so numbly.
As Charles Baxter might say, mistakes were made. I shouldnt have pushed
Bethany One to write about her rape by expressing my personal stake in the
subject matter. If I could teach Bethany Two again, Id question her carefully
about her feelings about the detailed revision, perhaps encourage her to write
something else instead. Still, I continue to believe that it is part of my job to
acknowledge that some students come to a writing class to pursue a healing
testimony, and to help them identify the fluid boundaries between a trauma narrative and art.
To do this, I remain sensitive to signals that a student is troubled: missed

Trauma in the Creative Writing Class

13

classes, poor work habits, anxiety combined with careless, dull writing, suicidal
imagery. I invite those students in for conferences. If a student confides a personal
trauma, I assume she feels ready to write about it. I credit the power of the story,
but I dont gush with sympathy. I listen carefully, ask questions, and, at the
same time, offer craft-based suggestions. (I steer an uncomfortable student toward
corners of the traumatic experience: What happened afterwards? How did it affect
your brother?) If the story is painful, I try to hear it the way a wine taster tastes
wine swish it around in my brain to get the flavour without swallowing. Still,
like a Red Cross worker, prepared to duck gunshots to bring food to injured
civilians, I acknowledge that my own discomfort is a necessary risk. I mitigate
the peril, for myself and the student, by maintaining my professorial identity.
(Unless the trauma has just occurred, I never excuse her from class attendance
or assignments.) I also ask whether shes had therapy, and refer her to a specific
university counsellor if necessary. (I recognise that I cant handle suicidal ideation
or substance abuse myself.)
When I sense a student is writing a trauma story to avoid other material,
I treat this as a form of writers block. (For example, the student who wrote
a glib piece about having sex with her sisters boyfriend was not creating a
story with a trauma narratives urgency. When I confronted her with this, she
confessed that the events she described had lost their power over her, thanks
to years of therapy. Perhaps, I suggested, she had cleared the path for other
stories. Then, with trepidation, she confided a fascinating tale about being
brainwashed by a Christian cult.)
Once the student has signalled her intention to create a healing narrative,
however, I instruct her how to write it well. I increase the therapeutic, as well
as the literary, potential of the work by pointing out that the I in the narrative
is a constructed being, a character, who now exists on paper, a different entity
than the writer herself. Although the writer may need to revisit the trauma
in order to heal, I say, she must separate her real being from the I in the
story in order to shape an effective memoir.
Recently, I told Bethany Two about Judith Hermans requirements for a
trauma narrative; she agreed that my strategies had been dicey, damaging at
first. In the long run, however, she believed that her detailed memoir had
produced positive psychological effects. Now a successful journalist, who
covers city politics for a small town newspaper, she no longer tells people she
doesnt know well about the tragic circumstances of her mothers death. She
reminded me that she had taken my class in order to write about the suicide
I hadnt wrung the material out of her maybe the reason the exercise worked.
And Bethany One? A year after she wrote about her rape experience, I ran
into her at a local bar, dancing to a blues band, smiling happily, as energetic
as any college senior. She had lost weight, and the thick make-up mask had
vanished. Before she whirled away, she said pointedly, Thank you for helping
me, and we both knew she wasnt talking about writing. Yet that moment, I
confess, was a high point in my career as a writing teacher.
Correspondence
Any correspondence should be directed to Vicki Lindner, Department
of English, P.O. Box 3353, Laramie, Wyoming 82071-3353, USA
(vlindner@wyoming.com).

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Notes
1. The 1994 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines a traumatic
experience as follows: (1) the person experienced, witnessed, or was confronted with
an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a
threat to the personal integrity of self or others; and (2) the persons response
involved intense fear, helplessness, or horror. Note that a trauma can be caused by
witnessing a terrible event that happened to somebody else, which greatly extends
the meaning of the concept.
2. Slater, Lauren, Repress Yourself, in The New York Times Magazine (February 23,
2003): 4853. Slater cites the work of George Bonanno and Richard Gist, therapists
who believe that repressors are actually the normal ones who effectively cope with
the many tragedies life presents.
3. Pommy Vega, Janine, Poetry in Prisons, Poets &Writers Magazine (May/June 2001):
pp 5658.
4. Desalvo, Louise, How Telling our Stories Transforms our Lives, Poets & Writers
Magazine (May/June 2001): 4850.
5. Goode, Erica, More in College Seek Help for Psychological Problems, New York
Times (February 3, 2003): A11. Good reports that a study of students seeking psychological counselling at Kansas State University showed that the percentage of students treated for depression and suicidal students doubled from 1989 to 2001. Problems related to stress, anxiety, learning disabilities, family issues, grief and sexual
assault also rose. More than twice the percentage of students were taking some type
of psychiatric medication in 2001.
6. Laub, Dori, M.D., Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening, in Testimony:
Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, by Shoshana Felman
and Dori Laub (Routledge, 1992).
7. Herman, Judith Lewis, Reconstructing the Story, in Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, (Basic Books, 1997), 176181.
8. Dr. Mark Kline, a Laramie psychiatrist, commented, You argue that if the writing
is good, it is therapeutic to the writer. Intuitively, I suspect this idea is true. The
focus on the narrative and its qualia can probably be very helpful and organising
to a traumatised person an objectification with an interesting inverse relationship
with dissociation.

References
American Psychiatric Association (1994) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th edn). Washington, DC: APA.
Baxter, C. (1998) Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. St Paul: Graywolf Press.
Felman, S. and Laub, D. M.D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York and London: Routledge.
Goode, E. (2003) More in college seek help for psychological problems. The New York
Times, February 3, 2003.
Gornick, V. (2001) The Situation and The Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. New York:
Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux.
Heilbrun, C. (1989) Writing A Womans Life. New York: Ballantine.
Henke, S. (2000) Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Womens Life-Writing. New
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Herman, J. (1992) Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse
to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books.
Slater, L. (2003) Repress yourself. The New York Times Magazine, February 23.
Pennebaker, J.W. (1990) Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions. New
York and London: The Guilford Press.