I am back in the classroom this semester, teaching a class called “Healing Through Writing and Storytelling” at Carlow University here in Pittsburgh. It’s an elective in Carlow’s Master’s of Arts in Psychology program. And I’m not literally back in the classroom because the course is online, but I am once again a professor and teaching a class that is heavy on fiction and drama. The obvious question here is, How does that feel? Well…great, actually. Over the years when I’ve worked as a nurse, many people, including many students, have asked me if I could ever again see myself as a classroom instructor teaching literature. I always said no, that my love was clinical work, that I did not aspire to be a teacher in that way anymore. All of that was true, but life often surprises us. Or in other words, never say never.
Here’s the truth about the class. My friend Sigrid teaches at Carlow in the English Department and she and I had chatted a bit about whether I might like to teach a class for them as an adjunct faculty member. I was interested, reached out to her last fall, and heard back asking if teaching a graduate class in the Psychology Department called “Healing Through Writing and Storytelling” appealed to me. It is not every day that I get an email where someone asks me if they can make a secret wish of mine come true. My first book contract felt that way, and so did Sigrid’s email about this class. Few people know this, but my dissertation (the one I wrote to get my PhD in English at the University of Chicago), was called “Storytelling and Trauma.” I described the act of storytelling as a way for marginalized groups to bear witness to injustice and also to create healing communities. It is not lost on me that my own writing could fit into that framework and I still haven’t fully made sense of that fact.
However, when a friend asked me to teach a class that would allow me to bring the intellectual threads of my doctoral work together with my present writing on health care it felt like a message from the Universe. I don’t ignore those messages the few times I get them, and I said yes to the class without hesitating. The semester began this January.
I had the students begin by thinking about different reasons why authors write. We read Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill,” Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” George Orwell’s “Why I Write,” and Stephen King’s “On Writing,” where he argues that writing is a form of telepathy: the author puts words on the page and the reader imagines what the words say. King also cautions against writerly “bullshit,” and Orwell says that all writers are vain and lazy—not what I expected from the author of 1984, a book that seems neither touched by vanity or a lack of dedication.
Our fiction began with “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. If you don’t know the story it’s worth a read, though it may haunt you. My students picked up right away on the narrator’s postpartum depression and the paternalism and sexism inherent in the “treatment” the narrator was compelled to adhere to by her physician-husband. (You can find a copy of “The Yellow Wallpaper” here.)
After “The Yellow Wallpaper” we read Sophocles’ play Philoctetes. Philoctetes was a Greek Prince who got bitten by a snake on his way to fight in the Trojan War. The wound that resulted from that bite smelled terrible and was so painful that Philoctetes moaned constantly. Because of the wound’s odor and Philoctetes’ moaning, the other Greeks abandoned Philoctetes on an uninhabited island and sailed to Troy without him. Ten years later they returned to the island because they needed Philoctetes, and his magic bow, to win the Trojan War. The play depicts what happens when the Greeks return, and is a powerful portrayal of the warping effect of pain, loneliness and abandonment.
The frame for the class is a research study on the ability of timed expressive writing to improve people’s quality of life. A now-seminal study by James Pennebaker compared two groups of college students, who were tasked with writing for 15 minutes a day for four days in a row. The first group was told to write about something “ordinary,” which might mean the room they were sitting in or a description of their dorm. The second group wrote about the most traumatic experience of their lives. Members of the trauma group found the writing difficult, but emotionally satisfying and relieving. They were also physically healthier than the “ordinary” group for the rest of the semester. Multiple studies based on Pennebaker’s ideas have similarly shown beneficial effects from expressive writing, including improved quality of life for breast cancer patients.
For their first assignment, I had my students write for eight days total, four days as a member of the control group and the other four days as part of the trauma group. They then had to produce a short paper that described what the expressive writing experience was like. All eight students found doing the expressive writing profound, as did I. Because I did the assignment, too, and chose to write about my breast cancer treatment, since in class we had already read a study showing that expressive writing emotionally benefited women with breast cancer.
As all of you know, I wrote an entire book, Healing, about being an oncology nurse who had breast cancer. I gave multiple talks about the book, recorded podcasts, was on NPR’s “Here And Now” and did some local TV where I talked about Healing and breast cancer. You would think that there is nothing I don’t already know about what having breast cancer felt like for me. And yet, my expressive writing on being a breast cancer patient opened up feelings that had not exactly been hidden, but felt different when I wrote about them with no worries about grammar, spelling, punctuation, or whether the writing would fit into a book intended for a general audience. Since no one was ever going to read what I wrote, I felt completely free while doing the writing, and the writing itself comforted me. The entire experience really surprised me. It was profound and…healing.
So, I suggest that any of you who are interested give timed expressive writing a try. The mind-body connection is more powerful and more subtle than we often realize. Research and my own experience confirm that writing and storytelling can make healing possible.
Stay warm everyone! And hugs,
Theresa
These are some lucky students, Theresa!
Sounds fantastic and I just printed out the story .
Wish I knew about the class I might have signed up .
Xox
Mimi