David Chrisinger - Stories Are What Save Us: A Survivors Guide to Writing about Trauma

STORIES ARE WHAT SAVE US

A Survivors Guide to Writing about Trauma

DAVID CHRISINGER

Foreword by Brian Turner | Afterword by Angela Ricketts

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS | Baltimore

2021 David Chrisinger

All rights reserved. Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Johns Hopkins University Press

2715 North Charles Street

Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363

www.press.jhu.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Chrisinger, David, 1986 author.

Title: Stories are what save us : a survivors guide to writing about trauma / David Chrisinger ; foreword by Brian Turner ; afterword by Angela Ricketts.

Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020030798 | ISBN 9781421440804 (paperback) | ISBN 9781421440811 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Chrisinger, David, 1986Mental health. | Post-traumatic stress disorderTreatmentUnited States. | Psychic traumaUnited StatesBiography.

Classification: LCC RC552.P67 C475 2021 | DDC 616.85/21dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030798

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible.

Write. Find a way to keep alive and write. There is nothing else to say Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all: ENDURANCE.

James Baldwin

The Art of Fiction No. 78, interview by Jordan Elgrably, Paris Review

BRIAN TURNER

Author of My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir

I write this message to you as a novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has reached and sustained pandemic levels. The entire medical system in the United States is scrambling to effectively battle the disease. Unemployment lines are growing desperately long, and an eviction crisis appears to be right around the corner. Many Americans not deemed essential workers are sheltering in place. It is a time of lockdowns and partial lockdowns and attempts to reopen the country in a manner thats safe and sound. It is a time of masks and respirators, social distancing, separation, isolation.

And throughout it all, Ive been reading David Chrisingers phenomenal new book, Stories Are What Save Us. I use the singularbookbut it would be more accurate to say that the volume youre about to read contains several books woven into one. It is, overall, a book-length braided tutorial on the process of writing ones story so that it might be shared with another. Part writing guidebook, part memoir, part teaching handbookStories Are What Save Us manages to reveal and to share writing lessons and life lessons all in one very readable volume.

The relaxed and conversational approach that Chrisinger takes in this book removes the distance between author and student. But dont be fooled: This is a master class on writing done to a book-length scale. Its hands-on work, too, as Chrisinger rolls up his sleeves to dive into each sentence and paragraph in order to explore the inner architecture of the storytellers medium. In this sense, the book itself serves as a kind of portable classroomoffering a wide range of craft tools and structures to aid in the framing and unfolding of your story. Part of what makes this book especially helpful is that Chrisinger manages to interweave his own process as a writer in order to model the techniques and approaches that will help you as you tell your own story.

There is a profoundly moving and compelling memoir threaded throughout this book. Most writers would be (rightfully) satisfied with having created such a layered and rich memoirand theyd simply publish it on its own. As a stand-alone book, Chrisingers memoir would be praised, and he would receive warranted attention from his peers for having written a meaningful and nuanced book, one worthy of a good readers time. But Chrisinger is on a much larger, selfless mission here. With this book, he invites the reader to sit beside him as he writes his memoirso that he might share his reasons for the choices made in crafting the story. But it isnt just the story that hes after. Its something much larger. Hes done all of this so that we might begin to process the trauma and conflicts within ourselves by learning how to tell our own stories. In so doing, its possible that we might become more whole in the process.

While not overtly written as a handbook for educators, this book will surely aid teachers in a variety of ways. Its structure provides writing communities with a template for short-form intensive work, as well as a set of long-form modules spread over a semester or even an entire academic year, replete with supplemental appendix material.

As our country learns to adapt during this current pandemic, the issues involved in creating and nurturing deep and meaningful connections with one another have become more and more illuminated. Of course, these issues involved in connecting with one another are not new. For those who have experienced trauma and have struggled to articulate their complicated and layered experiencesall those messy and fragmented aspects of memory that come with being humanDavid Chrisinger has created this book for you. He knows that your story is important and that only you can tell it. Hes here to help you do just that.

The time has come for me to step out of the way so that you and David can get to work drafting that story. So fire up your laptop, get your notebook ready, and turn to .

Its time to start writing!

Brian Turner is the author of the memoir My Life as a Foreign Country and two collections of poetryHere, Bullet and Phantom Noise. His essays and poetry have been published in the New York Times, National Geographic, Poetry Daily, the Georgia Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and several other journals. He has received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poets Prize, and a fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He earned an MFA from the University of Oregon before serving for seven years in the US Army. For a year in Iraq, Brian served as an infantry team leader with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division.

In addition to being an infantryman, poet, and memoirist, Brian has worked as a machinist, a locksmiths assistant, a convenience store clerk, a pickler, a maker of circuit boards, a dishwasher, a teacher of English as a foreign language in South Korea, a low-voltage electrician, a radio DJ, a bass guitar instructor, and more. He also directs the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College and serves as a contributing editor for the