Henriette Anne Klauser - With Pen In Hand: The Healing Power Of Writing

I was in Oklahoma City to give a presentation two weeks after Timothy McVeigh blew the Federal Building to smithereens, taking the lives of 168 people, 19 of them children. The Murrah Building wasnt the only thing McVeigh bombed; his cowardly act shattered the security of a nation for the first time, especially the ones most directly involved, the friends and relatives of those killed in the blast.

When I saw the sadness in the eyes of the audience in front of me, I threw away my prepared script and instead led 250 people through an exercise in writing about their misery. Later, they sent me tender letters describing the effect. One such said simply, Thank you for helping us put our hearts on paper, and in the process heal the broken parts.

My experience in Oklahoma is an example of healing writing at its best. This kind of writing is not about producing something polished and professional; its about the power of the written word to soothe our souls and ease the anguish.

The poet W. S. Merwin was commissioned by The New Yorker to write about the disaster of September 11th. He said, In moments of great grief or loss, we turn to words to say what cannot be said.

Four days after that attack, I was part of a therapeutic writing workshop. It was a chance, in a group, to sort through the horror and the confusion we all felt. We took our sadness and our rage and put it on the page where it could not harm us or anybody else. As we expressed our deepest feelings without reserve in poetry and prose, we felt the power of our words begin to draw out some of the pain from our hearts and replace it with hope.

With Pen in Hand: The Healing Power of Writing is a book that tells how to employ in times of great stress a simple tool available to all of us. It teaches this through a series of stories of people who were in trouble or in grief and needed help. They turned to writing as to a friend, to walk with them through the dark night.

With Pen in Hand deals with those times when you have to throw out the blueprint you had for your life and build from the ground up. Divorce. Death. Serious sickness. Abuse. Loss of job. Violence. Yes, even acts of terrorism. Lifes disappointments and numbing tragedies are curveballs that hit us right in the face. Now what do you do? How do you go on living when your world has collapsed? And what do you do about the ache in your chest?

These pages present the true tales of people in pain, with this connecting thread: All of them used writing as a way to pick up the pieces and make them whole again.

Writing goes right to the place that hurts, and writing heals.

Let me introduce myself and tell you some of my background so you will know how I came to write this book. I have a Ph.D. in English literature and have taught at universities in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Lethbridge, Canada, in Alberta. For the past 17 years, I have been giving workshops for corporations around the country and presentations at national associations. Internationally, I have conducted workshops in Greece, England, and Egypt. Perhaps you are familiar with my first book, Writing on Both Sides of the Brain: Breakthrough Techniques for People Who Write. It has been around for a long time. Writing on Both Sides of the Brain addresses the subject of writing anxiety. It is for people who have to write, and hate to write. It deals with procrastination and writers block, and teaches how to separate the writing from the editing. I didnt know it at the time I was writing it, but there is a lot in there that applies to writing and healing.

My books grow out of what my readers tell me they want. It was my readers who said, after Writing on Both Sides of the Brain, This isnt about writing; its about life.

Then they proceeded to tell me how they were using writing to build relationshipthe stories that led to my second book, Put Your Heart on Paper: Staying Connected in a Loose-ends World.

My third book, Write It Down, Make It Happen, started out as a single chapter in Put Your Heart on Paper and was expanded by the examples people sent me of dreams coming true.

Write It Down, Make It Happen is about goal setting, about events and successes outside of us. It tells how to pay attention to the signs and signals that you are on the right path and how to handle breakdown. The subtitle is Knowing What You Want, and Getting It.

All of my work centers around writing, that powerful tool to communicate that we learned in the first grade; now, to what nobler use could it be put than to heal a broken heart?

With Pen in Hand began with that workshop in Oklahoma, and was broadened by the mail I have received from all over the world sent to me from hurting people who have found solace in the salve of personal writing.

I see it over and over in the letters I get, from people who have read my books, and those I meet in the workshops I give. I am touched by the open way that people share their lives with me. The correspondence comes from all over the United States, from France and England, Scotland, Ireland, Romania, Turkey, Kuwait, Australia, New Zealand, Italy. Sometimes the English is halting, but no matter what the nationality, the courage and caring resound. Their letters are a testimonial to the difference writing makes.