Trauma

On Poetry and Healing

I don’t approach poems as therapy. I just come to them as myself.

Poems allow us to reclaim our stories, understand trauma and survival, realize that growth and healing are possible, lessen shame and embarrassment, and give us a sense of belonging.

The hippocampus, which situates our memories in time, doesn’t function properly under stress or during trauma. My poems are an external mechanism for placing traumatic events in time, which keeps them from feeling never-ending and ever-present. I think of it as a kind of assistive technology, like a keyboard for my dyslexia or glasses for my farsightedness.

Poets use the beauty intrinsic to poetry to shape their experiences and change the way they live in the mind and body. What’s made is more than noise. It’s a way of singing through pain or, as Orr says, allows us to order the disorder that’s in and around us, that’s intrinsic to the world we live in.

I see great value in dreams and writing about them, not only because dreams are where we do unfiltered processing of our experiences without the imposition of an artificial sense of time or an enforced rigid inner governance but also because we can more freely make leaps when talking about dreams, since that’s exactly what dreams do. Injecting a bit of the surreal into the poem can help us bring our dream wisdom into our waking lives—and therein lies not just surviving, but the ongoing work of healing.

Poetry’s concision and beauty allow me, as a writer and reader, to enter into myriad experiences—some like mine and some unlike mine—and to see common human impulses at work. A collective psyche emerges—a collective conscience and collective unconscious—as a backdrop to the individual experience. Poetry has taught me a great deal about my own psyche, my own mind, my own impulses, and my own needs. But it’s also contextualized all of that within a larger environment and larger swaths of time than a single human timespan. Poetry approaches the archetypal, the mythical, the things that lie deep in our ancestry: things we can’t, and shouldn’t, ignore if we’re going to survive on this planet and help this planet survive.

Stephan Torre says that, for him “… writing comes when it must, when it’s too hard to hold in the joy or grief without blurting it out.” I love that way of approaching poetry, but I personally don’t wait until the point of bursting. I try to do the work every day of cultivating making music out of noise, as Kim Addonizio writes in her poem “Therapy.”

Gregory Orr talks about something similar, which is that the act of writing a poem gives the poet more control than they had at the time of the traumatic event they’re writing about, which in itself is empowering and healing.

And then there’s all this beauty intrinsic to poetry, which the poet uses to shape the experience and move it into a different part of the mind and body. What’s made is more than noise. It’s a way of singing through pain or, as Orr says, allowing us to order the disorder that’s in and around us, that’s intrinsic to the world we live in.

Poems as Time-Stamps

During Saturday’s Utah Poetry Festival panel discussion on Poetry As Survival, if there’s time, I’d like to talk about why trauma is a wound of the present and how poetry (and other forms of art) can help with processing those wounds.

One of the reasons trauma from the past plays such a role in the present is because our brains don’t time-stamp traumatic events properly. The hippocampus, which is responsible for encoding and storing dates for our memories, can’t do so when levels of arousal or stress are too high. Instead, memories are recorded in great detail but without a time-stamp associated with them. That’s why there’s an always-ness to traumatic memories, an endlessness, a nowness.

The first way poetry addresses this issue is by allowing us to move time around as we write. As Gregory Orr says, this gives us more control over a situation we may have had little or no control over when it was happening, which in itself is empowering. The very act of writing about the experience is an act of survival. But the act of writing also gives us a past, a present, and a future—that is, the sense of time and its passing that’s missing in our encoded memories about what happened.

Even if we write about an experience in the present tense, the act of putting that experience in writing, moving it from the body to the page, from feeling to language, helps us do the time-stamping necessary to process what we’ve lived through. That’s what I believe anyway, as a poet who lives with trauma but who’s not a psychologist or neuroscientist.

The second way I believe poetry is helpful is that it serves as a creative historical record that we can revisit anytime we want and reinforce what we’re learning as we heal. I realized this last fall when I was looking through my older poems. Together, they serve as a network of external time-stamps that reinforce an “I am here” as opposed to “I am still there” message. I can read my poems and situate them in time in a way that helps me make sense of my past and my life as a whole. This thing happened. Here is when it happened. Here is when I wrote about it. A year ago. A decade ago. A week ago. Not now.

And that’s the point of time-stamping: to know what was then and what is now, as well as what isn’t now.

I’ve had similar experiences when I look at photos I’ve taken, but the time-stamping isn’t as strong for me as it is with poetry, probably because I just point at things and click. I don’t put artful effort into my photos the way I do with my poems. I’m also not stepping into parts of my life or into the world itself in photos the way I do—or the way I hope to—when I write a poem.

I love language in ways I can’t properly articulate. I’m dyslexic and had extreme difficulty with reading and writing when I was young. It was poetry that allowed me to enter into language, not dull language but magical language that gave me access to worlds outside my family, my home, my town, and what happened there. I have a strong time-stamp associated with the first real poem I read. It was in a children’s book tucked on a shelf in what was once my sister’s room, but it wasn’t a nursery rhyme. I found it, and I loved it, and it was mine. I know where I stood when I read it, how the paper felt, what it did in six lines, and how I came alive reading it. Fully alive. Fully present. I had no idea at the time what a gift the poem would be or how it would shape my life and my healing.

For me, healing is a process and there will always be an ongoing-ness to it. But the poems I write are essential parts of my mind at this point, externalizations of what my hippocampus can’t do as readily as someone who hasn’t experienced trauma. I hope I also create beauty, at least sometimes, in and through my writing.

I’ll close by saying that I’m not talking about poetry as therapy. I approach poetry as an art, and I also recognize its healing powers, which for me are rooted in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and spirituality.

Poetry As Survival

During Saturday’s Utah Poetry Festival panel discussion on Poetry As Survival, if there’s time, I’d like to talk about why trauma is a wound of the present and how poetry (and other forms of art) can help with processing those wounds.

One of the reasons trauma from the past plays such a role in the present is because our brains don’t time-stamp traumatic events properly. The hippocampus, which is responsible for encoding and storing dates for our memories, can’t do so when levels of arousal or stress are too high. Instead, memories are recorded in great detail but without a time-stamp associated with them. That’s why there’s an always-ness to traumatic memories, an endlessness, a nowness.

The first way poetry addresses this issue is by allowing us to move time around as we write. As Gregory Orr says, this gives us more control over a situation we may have had little or no control over when it was happening, which in itself is empowering. The very act of writing about the experience is an act of survival. But the act of writing also gives us a past, a present, and a future—that is, the sense of time and its passing that’s missing in our encoded memories about what happened.

Even if we write about an experience in the present tense, the act of putting that experience in writing, moving it from the body to the page, from feeling to language, helps us do the time-stamping necessary to process what we’ve lived through. That’s what I believe anyway, as a poet who lives with trauma but who’s not a psychologist or neuroscientist.

The second way I believe poetry is helpful is that it serves as a creative historical record that we can revisit anytime we want and reinforce what we’re learning as we heal. I realized this last fall when I was looking through my older poems. Together, they serve as a network of external time-stamps that reinforce an I am here as opposed to I am still there message. I can read my poems and situate them in time in a way that helps me make sense of my past and my life as a whole. This thing happened. Here is when it happened. Here is when I wrote about it. A year ago. A decade ago. A week ago. Not now.

And that’s the point of time-stamping: to know what was then and what is now, as well as what isn’t now.

I’ve had similar experiences when I look at photos I’ve taken, but the time-stamping isn’t as strong for me as it is with poetry, probably because I just point at things and click. I don’t put artful effort into my photos the way I do with my poems. I’m also not stepping into parts of my life or into the world itself in photos the way I do—or the way I hope to—when I write a poem.

I love language in ways I can’t properly articulate. I’m dyslexic and had extreme difficulty with reading and writing when I was young. It was poetry that allowed me to enter into language, not dull language but magical language that gave me access to worlds outside my family, my home, my town, and what happened there. I have a strong time-stamp associated with the first real poem I read. It was in a children’s book tucked on a shelf in what was once my sister’s room, but it wasn’t a nursery rhyme. I found it, and I loved it, and it was mine. I know where I stood when I read it, how the paper felt, what it did in six lines, and how I came alive reading it. Fully alive. Fully present. I had no idea at the time what a gift the poem would be or how it would shape my life and my healing.

For me, healing is a process and there will always be an ongoing-ness to it. But the poems I write are essential parts of my mind at this point, externalizations of what my hippocampus can’t do as readily as someone who hasn’t experienced trauma. I hope I also create beauty, at least sometimes, in and through my writing.

I’ll close by saying that I’m not talking about poetry as therapy. I approach poetry as an art, and I also recognize its healing powers, which for me are rooted in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and spirituality.

Poetry and Internal Family Systems

I’ve been thinking about Internal Family Systems and how that model of the psyche, of the self, applies to healing in and through poetry. The IFS model draws on Carl Jung’s work, which drew on indigenous ways of knowing, so there’s a long tradition behind it about being conscious and being human. The focus in IFS is on the mind, but it’s also on the body because we are all embodied. No mind without body. No body without mind. Or minds, as Richard Schwartz, the creator of IFS, might say.

I’ve long understood that different voices were at work in my poetry, much more so than when I write a lyrical essay or, say, a feature story about health or medicine. In my earlier work, those voices were darker, for lack of a better word. Not that they were dark. They just lived in darkness. I couldn’t see them well outside my poems. I often thought I was channeling some experiences that were outside of me or that were part of the collective unconscious, which certainly can be the case.

I came to see, over a period of more than two decades, including the seven years I spent not writing poems, that what those voices were sharing was either what happened to them or their feelings about what happened to them. The “them” in question was me. Many of those things happened to me. My voices were what Schwartz calls parts, also known in other models as subpersonalities or ego states.

Poems gave me permission to write what I couldn’t face or completely understand or entirely integrate. I write poetry in a state that’s closer to meditation or sleep, so the door is at least somewhat open to parts of my experience and parts of my self that are otherwise sequestered.

I’m not talking about a pathology or a label like dissociative identity disorder. Schwartz says this having of and living with parts is the natural state of the mind and works well until trauma happens. Or traumas. Even then, no part is bad. They’re all trying to help. They all want to be heard, and they need to be heard. I keep typing heart instead of heard, as if parts of me know this going in, going toward them, is the heart of the matter.

I typically move fluidly with my parts now when I write poems. I think this is one reason I write so much. All the parts, well at least many of the parts, come to the table and follow my lead as I tell their stories. That’s my self, guiding these creative interactions, which makes the parts feel safe. Safety is exactly what they need.

We’re still working on how to be in the world, but we’ve got the poetry experience down. A couple of my parts are still in the shadows. They’re the most vulnerable ones and the ones I fear. There’s one I may feel disgust toward. We all have parts like that. The work is doing the work to talk to them and bring them closer to me, unshaming them and loving them.

I’m not sure Internal Family Systems has been written about in terms of trauma literary theory, but it should be. It’s another lens for understanding how and why poetry can help heal trauma. It rings true for me, like the bells I sometimes hear in downtown Toquerville that make their way across the creeks to find my body and set it to music.

What Happened

Sexual violations can take time to understand, to come into our consciousness. What is was. What it’s called. Knowing what happened, knowing the name of what happened, can lead to a whole other level of distress that needs attention and healing. Even though nothing about the experience changes, knowing what it is, what a violation it is, changes everything.

I grew up being so violated I didn’t have names for anything. It wasn’t until I was in my forties that I really started to understand. I was watching a news story that included the details of a woman’s rape by multiple classmates. I was like, That’s rape? I’d been in a nearly identical situation once with two older classmates, which meant I was raped. That’s the first time I realized what happened, what it was.

Then I went through a list of other incidents in my head and was like, Then what was this, and what was this, and what was this? It turns out it was a combination of rapes and sexual assaults. Also child sex abuse. Also, much later, in 2023, I realized I’d been trafficked. I’d just learned that there was a huge sex-trafficking ring in my hometown and in other parts of the state my father frequented with me. It’s one of the largest in the country. I don’t know that my father was formally part of that or if he just found his way into those spaces because he was drawn to them. But I do know he sexually abused me. And his best friend sexually abused me. And his best friend’s adult son was extremely inappropriate with me in a sexual/grooming way. And his work associate came around the house with his penis sticking out of his short shorts while I was told to sit on the ground in front of him, putting me at eye level with it, while my dad was there watching both of us. And I know that man was also sexually abusing his children. And my father’s former friend was sexually abusing his daughter. And I was in that house a lot, all the time, and it never felt safe there, and it wasn’t because he was hitting her or throwing her down the stairs. It was another kind of unsafe, one she wouldn’t be able to talk about until she was in her fifties.

And I know my father made me talk to truckers on the biggest sex-trafficking highway in Oklahoma. I know I had a CB radio handle. I know the truckers knew the handle. I know they would get on the CB radio and ask for my father by his handle, then ask if I was there and if they could talk to me. And I know I obliged. And I know I thought it was fun. I believe I was on my father’s lap some of the time, but that may just be how it felt emotionally—that closeness and tension. And I know my father stopped once, with me, to meet up with a man who saw me and looked scared and wanted to leave. That’s where what I know ends. I don’t remember the rest.

When I learned that there was a name for all of that and the name was child sex trafficking and abuse, it was too much of a shift, though nothing that happened had changed. What it was had changed. I spent parts of 2023 delusional and terrified. I felt like I’d come to understand something the human mind isn’t meant to understand and that I’d survived something the human body isn’t meant to survive.

So yeah. Maybe fuck [poet’s name redacted] or at least that comment she made and the similar ones other folks made in 2015. What happened with the poet who harmed me was nothing compared with what my own family and namely my father did to me and allowed to be done to me. But it was still sexual assault, and it was still fucking awful, especially because the poet made me talk about my child sexual abuse as he was assaulting me. It turned him on.

—

This post was initially a response to a comment on another post on my Facebook page.

Quiet, Dearies

Perhaps the stupid little twat coterie need to be sent to bed without their suppers? Quiet, dearies, adults are talking. Definitions have become so blurred and a no-accountability and unassailable victimhood is now the norm. According to today’s definitions of rape I have been raped hundreds of times. — [Poet’s Name Redacted]

—

This is one of the worst things that was said in 2015 in response to the public discussion about the poet who harmed me and, according to others, harmed them as well. There were hundreds and hundreds of comments like this over a period of weeks that stretched into months that felt like an eternity.

Look at the language [the poet] chooses to use. Look at the infantilization of victims. Look at the complete dismissal of any/all accounts regarding this poet’s behavior.

This comment has stuck with me for a decade. It is not acceptable. It was made publicly and loudly by a female minority poet whose work focuses on the way the self is divided by differing identities. That is, by someone insightful enough to have known better than to say something this heartless and atrocious.

This poet has served as a poet laureate, has numerous collections, has won awards, and has published in the top literary journals. She was never called out for making this statement. What this tells me is that these abuses are endemic in poetry. They are unavoidable. More than that, they are allowed. I can’t look away from the elephant in the room: It’s poets like this and the institutions and entities that support them.

Part of me wishes [this poet] the best and hopes she’s rethought this thought because it’s certainly not her best thought. But another part still feels the damage from this comment and others like it, all these years later. It feels like a grenade went off and I was on top of it. My guess is I’m not the only one who felt that way reading her words.

The Others

The last lines of Linda Gregg’s poem “The Girl I Call Alma” read:

              Tell me we are one
              and that it’s the others who scar me,
              not you.

But the first edition of the book, which I have, has a typo. Those lines read:

              Tell me we are one
              and that it’s the others who scare me,
              not you.

For years, I thought the poem with the typo was the correct version. It resonates with me because of my trauma history. Being scared. Being scared. And wanting the person who’s scaring me not to be the person who’s scaring me. Father, mother, like the parents in Sharon Olds’ poem “Satan Says.” Like that. And more. And others. And this always-fear like the fear Hannah Gadsby talks about, only it’s not just a fear of rooms full of men. It’s people. People do such harm. They are terrifying. Maybe Jon’s right. Maybe I shouldn’t write poetry because poetry puts me in the world, and that’s hard for him because it’s hard for me. And he doesn’t like it. And I’m not scared of him, at least there’s that. But I’d rather face my fears than hide from the world even if the latter makes him happier or “us” happier, as he says.

Scare. Scar. I’d rather be scared than scarred. Both work. Both versions of the poem work. I’m probably scared and scarred. At least I no longer think I’m a monster or the devil, both of which I was pretty certain of a couple of years ago. Because I am of my father. Of him. Of that. I was always his. And he was a monster, a devil.

The Closet

My teacher says the penis just finds its way into the vagina, knows where to go, doesn’t need any help getting up in there. She says it goes right in the way her husband’s does. She’s pregnant, so we’re pretty sure she’s telling us girls the truth. We’re fifth graders. This is our sex-education class in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1981 at McKinley Elementary School.

We are fifth-grade girls being told the penis just finds its way into the vagina while the boys are in the other classroom with the nice teacher being told who knows what. They will squirm a lot when they come back, the boys, which will be unsettling given what we are just now learning about their penises.

Most of us barely know what a vagina is or how it’s different from the part we pee out of or the vulva as a whole or that there’s a magical subcomponent to the vulva called the clitoris. She doesn’t tell us about the clitoris. She leans back onto one of the little desks at the front of the room, probably one of the reject left-handed ones like the one I beg to use since I’m left-handed but that’s always denied to me because our teacher, Ms. Malecki, is not the nice teacher. She’s no Mrs. Brown, that’s for sure.

Ms. Malecki once left me in the coat closet as a punishment for the entire day. I wasn’t allowed to come out to use the restroom or eat lunch or play on the Big Toy outside. She turned off the lights and left at the end of the school day with me still in the coat closet. I waited at least an hour before coming out. She’d threatened me several times in front of the whole class for occasionally whimpering from the closet. The paddle. I’ll tell your mother. I’ll tell the principal, all of that. The principal was related to James Garner, so of course I didn’t want him involved. It would make me uncool forever, and I was already well on my way to being uncool forever without celebrity-adjacent involvement.

I was understandably terrified of Ms. Malecki. Now, I was terrified of her husband’s penis and penises in general, things that seemed like they acted on their own and without authorization and without thought and without consequences the way DOGE will in a future I can’t imagine, one that’s completely out of alignment with the pledge of allegiance we all take every morning unless we’re one of the kids who have to wait out in the hall because their parents don’t want them saying the pledge or singing the national anthem. The scariest thing in my world thanks to Ms. Malecki was the fear that one or more penises would be up inside me all of a sudden while I was hyperventilating on the monkey bars or trying to grab an extra cookie in the lunch line.

Ms. Malecki’s still perched on the little reject desk, which makes her stomach tilt upward. Her exposed belly button gazes at the fluorescent lighting as we ask questions. How do you know if you’ve had an orgasm? You just know. What does the penis look like? You don’t want to know. Are penises going to get inside us as we walk around on the playground or sit in class next to boys? I hope not.

This is a story in which I don’t talk about the sexual abuse I was already experiencing without understanding what was happening. Because the penises stayed tethered for the most part. Because one of the men was a boy, an older boy who’d been held back in school, and I didn’t understand what child-on-child sexual abuse was, that it wasn’t play and wasn’t normal and shouldn’t have happened. (I mean, I knew it shouldn’t have been happening, and I begged for it to not happen, but I didn’t know what it was that was happening.) Because things didn’t get really bad until I hit puberty. Because that’s when the penises came out. But they didn’t just find their way into my vagina and mouth. They were forced in. They were forced entries. These were things nobody, not even Ms. Malecki, could have prepared me for or helped me understand. We failed to ask all the right questions. Will we be molested? Will we be raped? Will we be sexually assaulted? I imagine her answer would have been I hope not.

I lived in a closet for a long time. Too long. In so many ways, I lived in a closet not unlike the one in my fifth-grade classroom. Afraid to come out. Afraid to make a sound. Afraid that, even once the lights were turned off, the threat would still be there, waiting for me to make a move, to run.

Proof of Something

The dead have a way of killing the living, as do the living. That’s what I woke up thinking at 3:30 a.m. when my rodeo neighbors flew their helicopter over my house and the walls vibrated and the bed vibrated and I vibrated.

I’ve been dead and alive for months now, maybe years. Maybe since I learned about the sex trafficking in the communities my father moved in and moved me around in.

Maybe since I learned that [REDACTED]. They’re rotting aspens, my family, carved with graffiti and missing bark, their leaves falling dead to the ground. All dead. All hollowed long ago but still demanding their remaining branches reach the sky somehow. For what? A sun that heals? A sun like a dead god who will help them forget how they’ve lived, if you can call it living. What do you call all that fluttering in the air above rot?

Definitely since my brother-in-law began dying from early-onset colorectal cancer last fall. Definitely since then.

Then there’s the call of the living who are dying or think they’re dying, the living I love, the call I will answer whenever it comes, even if it comes in the dead of night like a helicopter tangling the desert sage as it passes over. Or in the form of my husband. Or in my neighbor in Tucson, whose eyelashes are gone from chemo, and more, and more.

I’m tired. I’m sad. I’m scared. In Tucson and elsewhere, Indigenous people are being detained and told they aren’t citizens. And that’s just one atrocity that’s been happening over the past week. You can read about it in the news. I’m not the news and don’t want to be the news. I’m barely a person right now and am certainly in no shape to be reporting on anything.

Last week, I got the results of an extensive genetic test back. I’m not viable. That’s the bottom line. Yet here I am. I’m in the 99th percentile of fucked or fucked up on just about everything that matters. But genes aren’t everything. We know that. Whatever keeps me going isn’t my genetics. I’m in the 99th percentile for atherosclerosis, so yesterday I had the interventional cardiologist review the CCTA he ordered for me in 2022 when I was having heart issues. The test wasn’t done to determine how much soft or hard plaque I have in my arteries, but the cardiologist was able to pull it up and interpret the results. Jon and I stood in the exam room as he scrolled through the images from the test as if my interior was one of those flip books children make. Nothing. No plaque anywhere. My first thought was great. My second thought was why not me, why him. Him being my husband.

Risk doesn’t mean you have disease, the cardiologist says.

It’s good to know risk, but what we want to know is if you actually have disease or are on your way to having disease.

In this case, I’m high risk, no disease. Jon’s low risk, disease. Fuck risk factors. I mean, I don’t mean that. I don’t know what I mean. Just fuck maybe.

I had a dream two nights ago that took the form of a prose poem. Trump had dismantled the EPA and shut down all environmental cleanup sites, telling builders contamination won’t matter once the sites are developed.

It’ll be buried, Trump said. The waste will be buried. Just bury it. What’s buried can’t hurt anyone, almost as if he was talking about his own father, as if dead family can no longer do harm. I’m here to tell you they can. Look at my father in his grave, nothing now but bones caving in, obeying gravity like a falling apple only rotten all the way to the seed.

In the dream, I thought of Midvale, Utah, and the outrage locals felt in the 1990s when more than ten million cubic tons of toxic slag by the Jordan River were haphazardly covered in plastic with no lining underneath, vented, and later turned into commercial and residential developments. Folks in Utah wanted the EPA to do more, not less. They fought hard for more to be done but lost that battle. What would they fight for today? Less? Little? Nothing? Probably nothing. Just cover it up. Abolish the EPA. Who needs them. Who needs water and soil and air and viability for living beings.

In real life, not in the dream, we lived on that slagged land when we first moved to Utah, just down the street from Overstock, which was owned by the now-infamous Patrick Byrne, whose round concrete building with a peace sign on the roof was also on that land. Byrne got a deal on it, and he liked a deal. Jon worked for Overstock and for Byrne. This was right as he, Byrne, was transitioning from being a three-time cancer-surviving neuroatypical genius to whatever he is now. Maria Butina. Voting machines. Deep state. Trump as savior. Bars of gold and hunks of cheese stashed in Utah caves so he could feed and pay his employees in the event of an apocalypse. All of that. We’ve seen a man move from brilliance to chaos. We know what that looks like. We recognize it in others. I recognize the potential in myself. I certainly have the genes for it.

I’m afraid of myself. I feel like I’m full of slag, like my teeth and mind will loosen and fall out any day now. I don’t know how the Trump thing was a prose poem in my dream, but I know my mind was telling me to write. For me, writing is the way through, the only way through. Through to where, I don’t know. That’s the thing. What are we. Where do we start and where do we end. What is starting and ending, even? Some way to explain why we taper into fingers as slender as unlit candles that continually graze what is not us, or so we believe.

Almost as soon as the helicopter made the house rumble, it was quiet again. The house, I mean. Also the helicopter, which had landed on the neighbors’ helipad. But I was still quivering, my organs like china on a glass shelf in a display case nobody can open or illuminate other than a doctor who uses a mouse to drive through me one image at a time showing me how perfect I am, how goddamned perfect I am, despite everything. Proof of viability. Proof of life, at least for now. Proof of something.

You are also something. I can tell you that much. It’s all the news I can muster.

The Writing Life. Parting Words.

I wrote the essay below years ago for a literary organization that ran a series whose focus was on discussing poets whose behavior is inappropriate in an attempt to raise awareness and make poetry spaces safer. The series was also designed to encourage those who’d been harmed to tell their stories. The night before I was going to submit it, someone approached the editor who was handling my submission and told them the name of the poet I was talking about. When I agreed to submit the essay, it was on the condition that the subject not be named or identified. The divulgence made publishing the piece more complicated.

At about the same time, I was made aware of the letter that poet was circulating about me that made libelous statements, as detailed in a previous post. There were also feverish attacks coming from every direction on social media and in private online poetry spaces. One prominent female poet called sexual assault and rape as a whole into question, writing: Definitions have become so blurred and a no-accountability and unassailable victimhood is now the norm. According to today’s definitions of rape I have been raped hundreds of times.

That same poet also called anyone who’d been a victim or was advocating for victims part of a stupid little twat coterie, adding that they need to be sent to bed without their suppers. The fact that she writes for a major publication now brings me no comfort. Someone else used the phrase loathsome creatures to describe victims and advocates. Another called them evil. (That one got hundreds of likes from fellow poets.) Yet another said their efforts felt gratuitous, as if the women were taking pleasure in their pain.

I knew a lot of the poets who were making these kinds of statements. They were editors, publishers, friends, even some of my poetry heroes. Though I wasn’t talking publicly about what had happened to me, and I wasn’t part of the group or groups who were doing so, those attacks were on us all. Every one of us.

I couldn’t see how my essay would have helped at that point. I was unable to tell my story before the chance to do so evaporated. I don’t know what difference it will make now, but I want to share it so I can start to be freed from a horrific experience that began more than a decade ago and affects me to this day.

The last section, “Part 4: The Day You Are Reading This,” was designed for a publication date of more than a decade ago. But it’s still pretty spot on. There’s a timelessness to all of this: both to these kinds of abuses and how these kinds of abuses affect people.

—

The Writing Life: Parting Words

Part 1. Date Withheld

We are in the hotel where a writing conference is taking place, in a restaurant just inside the registration area. Hundreds of poets and writers flit back and forth like gnats. All dutifully wear their conference IDs on lanyards, all carry satchels, backpacks, and bags stuffed with books. They are on their way to and from panels, readings, the book fair, and the public restrooms, some of which have lines that extend all the way down one hall and into another.

He has chosen a seat in the most visible section of the restaurant, an open space near the intersection of two highly trafficked hallways, as opposed to a spot tucked deeper inside the venue. I feel he has selected this spot for a reason. For the entire event, he seems to have choreographed who he will be seen with—and when, where, and how he will be seen with those people. Being “seen” with him seems to be his way of introducing me, of making the statement that I am of some, however modest, worth.

He even orchestrates who he will walk to readings with. I learn this the hard way when, one night before a reading, it becomes apparent that my friend N and I are not allowed to walk with him the two or so blocks from the conference hotel to the reading venue. I realize this when trying to make eye contact with him over and over as he and a clutch of women stand at a small bar just inside the hotel’s entrance. I wave. I make more eye contact. But N and I are both ignored, my gestures shut down.

N and I walk within six feet of his group from the lobby to the reading, but it is clear we’re not walking with his party. Once we all get to the event, however, he makes a point of coming over to talk to me. He stands in front of me, his relative height a statement in a room full of seated poets. He touches me on the arms and shoulders. He asks for a hug. He leaves for a while then comes back, repeating the entire set of requests and gestures. This happens three times.

This is just a gesture, I think. It’s only a gesture. Maybe this is the way things work at this conference—new people make their way “in” based on how others seem to fawn over them. I’ve never attended this conference before, so I wouldn’t know its politics or social dynamics, though there do seem to be many of both in play, with overlap between the two.

At lunch, he tells me how much he loves my poetry and my thoughts about poetry. I go into detail about the panel N and I just came from, where the conversation turned to the notion of “doing violence” to a poem. One panelist’s points during that discussion are of particular interest to me, including his assertion that all acts of writing are violent, that language is intrinsically violent. Another panelist rejects this idea and feels more than uneasy with it. Why all this talk about violence, she asks the audience.

We have been in contact for several months, since I posted a note on Facebook saying I was looking for a poetry mentor. He works at a respected university and takes on many students to mentor, he tells me when he responds to my query.

The conversation pivots from how much he likes my poetry to how much he likes me. I really like you, Dana. I really, really like you.

He leans in and asks, Is N— in love with you, as he reaches out to hold my hand.

Part 2. Date Withheld

I am on my way to the first residency of my master of fine arts program. Because of the program’s check-in time, I had to fly down the night before. The poetry mentor I met through Facebook and with whom I have been interacting for months lives near where I am headed. He has offered to pick me up and drive me from the airport to the destination. He has also suggested we get two rooms at a hotel near the airport. That would give us some time to hang out and talk about poetry, he said. He could then drive me to the residency the next morning. He knew I had anxiety about traveling and being separated from my husband. He said he wanted to support me so I could focus on the residency without having to worry about the logistics of getting there.

His gesture seemed genuine. I talked it over with my husband and agreed to take the mentor up on his offer. He made the arrangements with the hotel and insisted on putting the rooms on his card, saying his school would reimburse him because he would be making an appearance at the residency, which is a form of promotion for his school’s program.

As my mentor and I stand at the hotel’s registration desk the night before the residency, the attendant only hands us key cards for one room, not two. Because of a flight delay, we are checking in several hours later than expected. It’s too late to get another room; they have all been booked for the night.

I’ve already taken one milligram of Ativan to sleep, and it’s starting to kick in. I am confused as we make our way down the long hall to the room. We had talked after the writing conference. I had explicitly stated that I was not interested in any kind of sexual relationship with him. He assured me that he didn’t mean his comment about “really, really” liking me the way it had come across. He was just trying to express how much he liked me as a person and as a friend.

In the following months, he gained my trust as a mentor. He presented himself as looking out for my best interests as a poet. The fact that he was a poetry editor and taught alongside esteemed poets in a creative writing program—as well as his assertion that he was especially interested in supporting the work of women poets because we face so many hurdles within the literary community—further deepened my trust in him.

He also earned my trust on a personal level. Once, when we were discussing my poetry, he said he saw evidence of sexual abuse in the subject matter. He shared that he, too, had been abused. That divulgence, coupled with the concern he showed surrounding my abuse, solidified my trust in him. I was speaking with a fellow survivor, after all, someone who was expressing a depth of concern for my suffering that few have shown. There was no way he would take advantage of my trust. What fellow abuse survivor would even consider doing such a thing?

The fact that he is an abuse survivor informs my thinking as we make our way to the room. I am trying to see the situation from his perspective, as a fellow survivor who feels he’s bonded with me in a way that makes sharing a room with two beds acceptable, like a slumber party between girlfriends. He has a very asexual, childish way about him, and there is a playful energy between us. Nothing in his behavior indicates he has a sexual interest in me. Over the past few months, I have wondered if he had a sexual interest in women at all. I don’t want to jump to conclusions that might be unfounded. I both trust him and want to trust him.

I tell myself, He’s not doing this. He’s not doing this. He’s my mentor. He’s my friend. I must be misreading this. Could he really be doing this?

I am still picking up on zero sexual energy as we settle into the room. He places all his belongings on his own bed, not the one I will be sleeping in. I am continuing to get more of a slumber party vibe than anything, which is in keeping with his overall childlike energy. I try to write the situation off as his having confusion over the boundaries of our friendship more than anything else. At the same time, my body is telling me a different story. Panic is setting in because I have so many sexual violations in my past. Bedroom spaces are particularly anxiety-provoking. It is difficult for me to sleep in anyone else’s presence, even those I trust.

I step out of the room and call my husband, explaining that it is one room, not two. He is shocked. I tell him that I think it is all OK, that I don’t believe there is anything underhanded going on, and that it feels more like a sleepover than him intentionally overstepping his bounds. My husband asks if I feel safe. I say that I do. I get off the phone and go back into the room, thinking, It’s just one night. Just get through this. You can do it. Everything is fine.

I take another milligram of Ativan, both for my nerves and because I need to make sure I get as much rest as possible to be ready for the next day’s residency. I make sure he knows I have taken two doses of the medicine and that is for sleep. Still not fully aware of the danger I am in—still both trusting him and wanting to trust him—my logic is that he definitely won’t try anything if he knows I am incapacitated. And I am. Two milligrams of Ativan is a sedating dose. The medicine suppresses the central nervous system so anxiety can be overridden and sleep can be induced.

I lie down on my bed. The sedating effects from the first and second doses of the medicine are underway. He asks me questions about my physical and sexual abuse. This seems like a strange topic to bring up at this time, when I am stressed and tired and have said repeatedly that I just want to sleep. Why would I want to explore this territory after I’ve had a very hard and long trip, when I have taken a sedative, and when I need to get some rest for the upcoming residency?

I can’t remember what all he asked and what all I said. My memories of conversations are usually quite clear, but the medicine was functioning as a kind of blur filter. I know he was asking for details about what was done to me and how it made me feel. I know the line of inquiry was invasive. He was asking for too many specifics, almost like he wanted to trigger me into reliving the experiences of abuse. The timing and context felt off. Something else was starting to feel very, very off—not about his questions but about him as a person, his intentions. I was beginning to realize the potential danger I was in.

He asks if he can rub my feet. OK, I say, afraid to say otherwise. At this point, I am trying to think clearly, trying to not pass out despite the sedative in my system, trying to imagine how I am going to get out of this unscathed, and—still—trying to tell myself this can’t really be happening. My “OK” is designed to buy me the time needed to figure out, through the haze, what is going on and how to deal with it. (And to be clear, because of my incapacitation, my “OK” was not effective consent. It also did not justify what he did next or the deception and breach of trust that got me into that room in the first place.)

Everything is getting hazier. I think, There’s no way he’s making some kind of move on me—especially not while he’s asking me to tell him about my sexual abuse. That would be really, really twisted.

He continues to ask about my abuse as he starts making his way up my legs. With a jolt, I suddenly know beyond a doubt what he’s doing. I am scared, terrified. I am paralyzed—both physically because of the medicine and mentally/emotionally. The fear associated with my previous sexual abuse kicks in. When I was molested, I did the same thing: I froze. When I was sexually assaulted as a child by an older child: I froze. When I was raped in high school: I froze. Freezing is related to the fight-or-flight response. It is a third form of automatic response the body can have during a traumatic experience. Because of my previous experiences, because I am isolated in a strange town and in a strange room with this man, and because I am incapacitated by the sedative I have taken, freezing is all my body can do, so that’s what it does.

He keeps moving his hands higher. He is touching my inner thigh. It becomes clear with a shock what he’s doing as his hand grazes my vulva through the long underwear I had put on in an attempt to sleep fully covered up. Overriding the sedative, adrenaline rushes through my body. I am still scared to confront him directly, to call him on what he’s up to. I tell him to stop.

I need to sleep, I need to sleep. I bat him away.

Do you need someone to hold you, he asks.

No, I say.

Are you sure, he says.

Yes, I say.

Where do you want me to sleep, he asks in his cloying, childlike tone.

Over there, I say.

Not here, he asks.

No, I say.

He pushes: Are you sure you don’t need someone to cuddle with.

No, I don’t I insist.

He gets up reluctantly. As he moves to get into his bed, I can see through his clothing that he has an erection. I think he was rubbing my legs with it at one point instead of using his hands.

I lie there stunned. I can’t fall asleep even with the medicine in my system, and I don’t want to. If I do, who knows what might happen. I lie awake, running on adrenaline and resisting the medicine’s effects, until I hear him snoring. As quietly as I can, I get up and attempt to pull pants on over my long underwear so I can sneak out of the room. I stumble, nearly fall. This wakes him up. I tell him I am going to stay in the lobby or that I’ll find another hotel (not that I have a way to get there). I say that I am not comfortable and can’t sleep with him in the same room. He apologizes and says he’ll go sleep in his car. I tell him not to come back. He says he won’t. He leaves the room. I pass out in my bed.

I feel safe, finally. I don’t yet have words for what I have just experienced and won’t for a long time. Phrases like “nonconsensual sexual touching” and “effective consent” are not running through my head that night. What is running through my head is a single thought: At least he didn’t rape me. That is the kind of logic many survivors of rape and child sexual abuse employ when someone revictimizes them in ways that fall short of outright rape. At least he only did x and not y is our way of creating a sense of empowerment and protection in the moment and not allowing the person who has hurt us to strip us of who we are. We feel that as long as it could have been worse, we can still move forward. We can become whole again, or at least we can live with the hope of becoming whole.

About four hours later, I wake up to my alarm. He is back in the room, asleep in his bed. I didn’t hear him come in. I have no idea how long he’s been there. I have no idea what he might have done while I was passed out. My sense—or at least my hope—is that he did nothing. But in reality, I know he’s already done something, even if he did “nothing” when he violated yet another boundary by returning to the room despite my insisting he not do so.

He takes me to my residency the next day. I am still in shock and still processing what has happened as he visits with other poets, lingering for hours before finally leaving the campus. He shakes their hands. He talks to them at length. I am too scared to say anything to any of them and wouldn’t know what to say anyway. They have a relationship with him. They don’t have a relationship with me. He is somebody in poetry. I am nobody. I continue to operate in survival mode, counting down the minutes until he will leave me alone at the residency, all without letting on to anyone that something is amiss.

Part 3. Date Withheld

The day after the mentor drops me off at my residency, he sends me an email. I really, really like you, he writes. He asks if we can take our relationship in a different direction, into the area of physical exploration and play.

Later, I will look at a book he signed for me the day before. In the inscription, he will say that I no longer need a mentor. It appears he’s decided that I do need a lover, and that he should be that lover, no matter what my feelings happen to be on the matter.

It will be months before I tell anyone what happened in that hotel room.

Part 4. The Date You Are Reading This

This poet’s actions had numerous short- and long-term consequences. First, they derailed my poetry studies. I had to take sedatives the entire time I was at that residency and bawled through half my time there, especially after problems cropped up in the program around issues related to racism, sexism, homophobia, and transgender discrimination. I barely made it through the first semester both because my mentor in the program was good friends with the poet and because the program’s director lowered my grade for the residency, stating that I did not “demonstrate a passionate commitment to writing.” At the residency, the director privately scolded me for arriving at the program with the poet, purportedly in order to flaunt him in front of my fellow classmates. That statement could not have been more damaging to me, or further from the truth.

Second, the poet’s actions hindered my ability to promote my own work. I was limited in terms of who I could approach and who I could trust. I was also afraid to reach out only to have another poet take advantage of me. I sent my work out infrequently. I didn’t pursue prizes and awards in case he knew or was connected to the judges. The list of ways I turned inward and did not actively and consistently promote my work goes on and on.

Third, the poet’s actions limited my participation in the broader poetry community. What he did—and the way I felt obligated to hide what he did out of fear, shame, and the belief that my concerns would be written off or, worse, that I would be told I was lying—has haunted me for years. I’ve passed the half decade mark at this point, and I still have trouble finding a way to move forward in poetry. I have met several poets who are deeply entwined with this man. I have been triggered in my community when he’s come to town to read. I have been invited to take part in safe, empowering groups of women poets, only to hear them mention this man as if he really is selflessly and genuinely promoting the work of women poets. I have tried to share space with him on social media, even though doing so never felt safe. (At one point, when I unblocked him recently, I saw that he was connected to more than a quarter of my connections on Facebook.) When my work is published in a literary journal, I check the table of contents first thing to make sure his name isn’t listed alongside mine.

In short, there is a hole blown through me, one only I can see. I carry that hole everywhere. It is impossible to be whole in the presence of that hole.

I’ve heard too many stories like mine to remain silent, including additional stories about this particular poet. I am still trying to find a path that will allow me to move forward in poetry. I am listening to the voices that have gone before me. I am being more careful than ever about who I associate with and who I trust. I am putting words to my experience and, regardless of the consequences, I am saying, This happened. This is wrong. It has to stop happening. This is about me, but it isn’t just about me. The issues in play in my story—power, manipulation, deceit, transgression, and the sexual assault that rose out of those issues—are central to other victims’ stories. My hope is to join the voices that are already calling for an end to the systematic subjugation, objectification, exploitation, and manipulation of women who want to be part of poetry. My hope is for stories like mine to be a thing of the past, not par for the course. I want all of this to end.