Thursday, October 21, 2020
5:30pm CT

The creative writing classroom is not explicitly a healing space—and yet writers bring their stories of trauma into workshops on a regular basis. What are our obligations to these students as instructors? What are the best practices for managing workshop discussions about difficult and potentially triggering material? Though a workshop session can only offer the briefest introduction to this complex topic, participants will begin exploring the intersection between trauma and writing. Overviewing how trauma works in the body, we’ll get a sense of how writing can heal us and when it can break us. We’ll touch into the limits of content warnings, the possibilities of syllabus disclaimers, and the importance of a facilitator’s own self-regulation. We’ll discuss shame as a form of trauma and toxic presence in the writing workshop, and identify craft issues common to trauma writing, thinking about how our feedback might land in an activated nervous system. Participants will leave the session with a greater confidence in their ability to support students writing about trauma in classroom settings.

The Examined Life Conference seeks to explore the intersections between the arts and medicine. How can they be of use to each other? How can they interact to make each more than they were without the other? During this conference, enjoy discussions and presentations on how the arts can be used in medical education and patient and provider care.

This class is available to purchase a la carte; you do not need to attend the rest of the conference to join.