“The Things They Carried”: Unpacking trauma scripts inside a community writing workshop

Abstract

In this article, I focus on the writing and successive revisions of the trauma narratives of two Vietnam veteran writers, in a Community Stories Writing Workshop offered over an approximately two-year period. I consider how the writers navigated from vague, scripted anecdotes loaded with stock phrases, to more complete personal narratives of meaningful stories that ask and pursue in-depth thematic questions, with attention paid to the literary sensibilities of quest, arc, persona, and voice. Specifically, I examined what happens when these writers revisited their rehearsed, anecdotal scripts of childhood trauma through literary lenses, and how “writing as craft” lent them alternative ways of seeing and making meaning of their trauma experiences.