Tag: childhood trauma
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Journal Writing 2
The one thing about keeping a journal–your subconscious leaks onto the page. That is, if you let it, which you should. This means dealing with disturbing images, notions, thoughts that come and you don’t know why. Unwelcome thoughts, perhaps. But the one who is a committed journal writer will allow that to happen, will even…
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The Writer’s Life: Journal Writing
My first girlfriend, Nancy, gave me a journal when we were in high school. That was in 1977. Forty-one years later, I now have forty-five tomes on my shelves, over ten thousand pages that chronicle my life and the lives of those around me. They are a wealth of information. All my notes for my…
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Surviving Madness, Salvadoran-Style
Last week I wrote about my Uncle Paco, who had played a big role in me finding my Salvadoran roots. He helped me see that I was a guanaco (the nickname for Salvadorans), and in doing so–though he didn’t know this–he helped keep me alive. Three years after meeting him, Michelle and I, newly-married, moved…
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The Rules of Racism: You Can Only Speak One Language (and it damn well better be English)
In class, I teach how creative writing can rouse memory, strong emotions, sharp images, and that, if a student keeps writing, she will surprise herself with her words. Something will come out that she hadn’t planned, an insight, the true emotion over whatever it was she wrote down. She might cry. She might bang the…
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When Our Children Die
I don’t know if Martita is still alive. If so, she’s thirty. But I have my doubts. At the time, her hair, once Guatemalan-black, had turned a dry, dirty-straw color. It was starting to fall out. Her stomach, held in place by weakening muscles, had gotten more distended in the weeks following, crammed with worms,…