Alyssa try not to bring up Edi Giunta or memoir in your blog challenge: failed.
I promise this week’s blog will be shorter, if only because I have some supplemental reading I am providing you all with. I apologize in advance.
The idea of this reading—that writing can be a tool for healing for the body and the soul—is something I am intimately familiar with. Writing has always been an outlet for me. I think you can pick any writer off the street, and nine times out of ten, they would tell you that the writing process is healing for them, too. I love seeing all the way healing comes out of writing, and I love reading Pennebaker and Chung’s explanations as to why it works.
In line with last week’s theme of looking back at our old work and admiring our fluidity, inspired by this week’s theme of writing as healing, I decided to look back at my process essay that I wrote after finishing my memoir for class. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I thought I would share a revised excerpt with you all here:
I did not know where writing this memoir would lead me. I started with a vague idea of what I wanted to write, but I did not know how I would do it. I did not know why I would write it. However, after these four months, I found a common thread between my pieces: these are all moments I know happened. I could tell you what happened, give you a timeline, describe the events on their surface level. I could not tell you what effects these moments had on me, until now.
I write to process. I create, erase, and reshape words until I am once again familiar with the face of my youth. I trace the outline of myself, guided by the writers before me. Louise DeSalvo. Margaux Fragoso. Melida Rodas. Emily Bernard. They hold my hand as I look into the mirror.
If I push too hard, the glass will shatter. I cannot be my younger self again; I cannot fix her problems. I cannot tell her it will be okay. All I can do is look at her through the mirror of memoir, and answer her questions for myself. Who are you? I hope she is fine.
In writing “A Rosary Held So Tight It Leaves Marks”, I see myself through the hundreds of eyes in the mirror. I see myself from the Ikea bookshelf in my childhood room. I see myself from the St. Clare’s bathroom mirror. I see myself in glass, in mugs and phone screens. Memoir surrounds me; I have become comfortable with it.
I would also like to leave you all with another piece of writing that has stuck with me for a long time—the book Writing as a Way of Healing by Louise DeSalvo. DeSalvo, mentioned in my process essay, was a fellow writer of memoir, and recognized the power of writing. I’ve thought a lot about her recently during our class discussions, but I haven’t figured out how to bring her up until now. Quite literally the perfect book for this week! I find that the part of her work that is most relevant to our class discussions so far is her section on the writing process, where she argues that writing must be done in different stages to be effective for healing. She writes, “I’ve come to understand that the most healing way of approaching the writing process is to focus upon the potential and possibilities for growth rather than upon its problems and pitfalls. Knowing what each stage of the process affords us and making explicit our intention for using the process as a healing experience assure us that we will pass through each stage in the most enriching way possible” (DeSalvo, 1999). I am attaching to this blog post a PDF of this chapter for your enjoyment.
Very short blog post this week, but I just thought that sharing is caring—so, enjoy! (Also, no annotations because I was not printing out 40 pages. Sorry!)
