Storytelling: Fictional Narratives, Imaginary People, and the Reader's Real Life

Rationale

The English/language arts curriculum and classroom experience are ideally suited to addressing in the school environment the effects of the tightly braided cause-and-effect relationships among traumatic experience, academic deficiency, and recidivism. "Evidence...suggests that the effects of disasters and violence on adolescents can produce long-term debilitating mental effects directly related to language use, literacy practices and cognition." ⁷ If classroom teachers can begin to address these problems and teach content specific objectives in the process, then certainly we should.

Works by MacCurdy and James Pennebaker make clear the connections between trauma and the writing process as a means of healing. Most memories that we accrue over the course of a day fit into an existing schema with cumulative, collective meaning. Many bits of data are released and even forgotten because they are not necessary for meaning. Traumatic memories are imagistic. We remember pictures and sensory experiences because they are too overwhelming to fit into the existing schema. These kinds of memories are called iconic, and while they do not fit into the existing schema of memory, they do attach to specific emotions that a victim experiences, even if he/she does not understand the cause or meaning. Adrenaline surges of a fight-or-flight response help to imprint these sensory images, ensuring that we'll remember the danger if we encounter it again in the future.

"Re-examining sensory details encoded during extreme life moments is at the core of trauma recovery." ⁸ Writing becomes the perfect tool for pulling the images together while re-inserting narrative to reconstruct meaning, the first step to healing. Edna Fox, a clinical psychologist, had female rape victims rewrite their narratives over and over in detail. Subsequent retellings showed increasingly reduced symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. ⁹ While sitting on the lawn at Yale during the National Institute, Deborah Alvarez, who has researched post-Katrina classrooms extensively, told me impassioned stories about how these post-hurricane classrooms saw alleviation of stresses and improved cognitive development after teachers implemented healing writing practices.