Starting February 8th, we kick off workshops at the NVWH with a powerful 8-week Healing through Writing workshop. In it, professor and essayist Kathleen Volk Miller takes students through the science and application of how writing mends emotional trauma. Here, Kathleen takes us through her journey toward the creation of this class. For details, please visit us at nickvirgiliohaiku.org/events.
My husband died when our children were 13, 11, and 5. This was not how I had written my life story.
I had wanted to be a writer since I had been bedridden for a period in fourth grade and had turned to books as my lifeblood. Up until this death, I would ruefully say that my childhood had been idyllic, my life simply too pleasant to give me fodder for writing. Now, I was too overwhelmed.
But fairly soon, I was able to start putting words---and feelings----to the page. I had always written short stories and I imagined novels in my future, but personal essay became the form I was most comfortable in. I wrote about my husband, my children, my sister’s alcoholism, and found that not only was I being published in well-established venues, I was purging, working things out, getting into clearer, rejuvenated head spaces about the topics I covered.
Four years ago, an essay I called “Choosing Happiness” was published in Oprah magazine. Almost immediately afterwards, I was asked to speak at a women’s conference on writing to heal. I knew what writing did for me, but I decided that I wanted to explore the science involved; I wanted to see if anyone knew how or why words on a page could help relieve a heart.
That exploration led me on an unexpected and amazing journey. Not only are hard-to-measure factors like stress and anxiety levels abated, concrete measures like actual wound healing have been recorded. Writing as healing has become so legitimized that it’s no longer used only in therapeutic settings, but in medical environments as well.
After the women’s conference, I taught a community class on writing to heal and when the six-week session was over, several members asked me to keep working with them, and a “self-help through memoir” class was born. I am still working with those members and two of them no longer see the need to have a therapist.
Since I began this work, I have done one-time workshops, one-on-one sessions, and group sessions. To call this work rewarding is a gross understatement=it’s been revelatory. One time, I watched a women in her 80’s continue to move her pen across the page as tears flowed down her face. I wanted to speak with her so badly, but it was a large group one-day session and I didn’t know if I’d get that chance. After the session, several people approached me to ask individual questions. As I spoke to them, I felt awful that I wouldn’t get the chance to speak to the crying woman. I spoke to each attendant that wanted a few words with me, and what do you know? She had stayed behind and gotten in line speak to me and was simply so tiny I hadn’t seen her.
She took my hand and smiled a beatific smile: “I wanted to write about my father, but while doing so, things came up about my sister. I thought we never got along, but we really did. We really did. Thank you for helping me remember.”