AWP 2015, Minneapolis, MN

Confronting Our Fears: Turning Adversity into Art
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Introduction by Jo Scott-Coe
Renée E. D'Aoust
Renée E. D’Aoust is the author of Body of a Dancer (Etruscan Press), a Foreword Reviews "Book of the Year" finalist. She has received grants from the Idaho Arts Commission and the Puffin Foundation, three Pushcart nominations, and six “Notable” mentions in Best American Essays. Forthcoming and recent publications include Brevity, Essay Daily, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ragazine, Rain Taxi, Sweet: A Literary Confection, and Trestle Creek Review. D’Aoust lives in southern Switzerland and northern Idaho, and she teaches online at North Idaho College and Casper College. She is an Associated Writers Program “Writer to Writer” mentor and the Managing Editor of Assay. Please follow her @idahobuzzy and visit www.reneedaoust.com.
Michael Steinberg
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Richard Hoffman
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Jo Scott-Coe

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Meredith Hall

Renée E. D'Aoust
​A Bridge from Life to the Page

When confronting my fear of using the raw materials of gut-wrenching pain to make art, it has been important to remind myself that it is okay to write about certain events in my life when I am ready to write about them. I’m tired of feeling both the shame that often accompanies trauma or loss or heartbreak—and a writer’s shame of not being ready or strong enough or fierce enough to write the worst moments in my life.
 
When my brother ended his life, my ex-partner’s mother told me that I must write about my brother’s death, “to make Ian’s life mean something.” I recoiled. When my friend suggested that I “would have a much better relationship with my brother now that he was dead,” I recoiled. It seems to me a particularly American stance to call a tragedy, a blessing. Many call hardship an opportunity. I know hardship is what we make of it, but I’d rather have my brother alive than have the opportunity to write about his death. The making of art from trauma is far different from living through trauma. Nevertheless, I write because self-expression that includes creativity is an essential life force. I write not because I am already fearless, but because writing helps me to become fearless.
 
One builds the muscles to write what Jessica Handler calls “the deep stuff” by regularly showing up at the page. Here I will offer a few suggestions that have helped me gather critical distance. I call one exercise grievances and grace. The other I call parallel writing.
 
I’ve had a lot of parallel events in my life, and I often use one event to learn how to write about the other event. So, for example, I started writing about my dance colleague Liz’s suicide as a purposeful means to write, later, about my brother Ian’s suicide. My plan was always to write about both, but to start with the one that didn’t leave me drowning rather than writing.
 
At first, the question was how to treat my colleague Liz’s manner of death with respect. How might I write about her without using her death as an opportunistic narrative device? Through writing all the details of a duet that had been choreographed on the two of us, I explored these questions, and I changed my initial view of her death as a failure of life. What I admired about her unique dance abilities—her ability to go from standing to falling without a sound—was what I admired about her death.
 
The ability to release the self is also what I admired about my brother’s death. But I don’t think I would have seen this without spending time thinking about Liz and her choice to die. I call it parallel writing, but it is not parallel in the sense of happening at the same time, but in the sense of writing about the same topic. Thinking about one trauma, one that is not quite at one’s own personal, cellular level, prepares the writing muscles to think about the other. Writing memoir and personal essay is about seeing, listening, and perceiving. About touching all aspects of all things. I can be open to possibilities through questions, or I can close down creativity with convenient, clichéd answers.
 
Here’s the second exercise, which I call grievances and grace.
 
My brother Ian needed physician-assisted death, and that was not available. The goal with grievances and grace started as a means to write down as specifically as possible what people said to me about my brother’s death because many comments illuminated the superficiality in our ability to respond to death, particularly shocking, sudden death. I quickly realized that the loop-track tape in my writing, of those often well-intentioned but frequently thoughtless comments about my brother’s death, meant that I was stuck at a surface level of writing about my brother’s Multiple Sclerosis, his estrangement from our family of origin, and his choice to die. I was focusing on what had been said to me rather than the deeper work of remembering my brother.
 
As with parallel writing, I start further away from my brother, by investigating my response to the multitude of statements about him that so bothered me. The exercise is simple, but it helps me forage deeply.
 
I use this question: “Did you mean it when you said __________?” I write out the questions, and then I fill in the blank. It’s essentially a list poem, but I also write the narrative of when the comment was said—every detail. This part seems important; otherwise, I’m just reinforcing the loop-track tape.
 
Again, the exercise starts with the question: “Did you mean it when you said ________?”
 
“Did you mean it when you said: ‘Are you over your grief yet?’”
 
“Did you mean it when you said: ‘You’ll have a much better relationship with your brother now that he is dead’?”
 
“Did you mean it when you said: “But, Renée. Surely you of all people know there is no separation between life and death”?
 
You might notice that often these comments include the use of spiritual aphorisms to stitch together what cannot be mended.
 
Without changing the initial comment, and using the narrative below the comment, I edit and shape all of this into prose, which helps me transform and transmute the loop-tape in my mind. Sometimes the exercise remains a freewrite.
 
The point is to go more deeply into the experience by recording what was spoken, by investigating why it was said, and by interrogating why certain comments bother me so much. I thereby also imagine how communication could have been different, but not until I’ve recorded how it was. And sometimes rather than investigating, a memory is set down. Or sometimes I end up with a list, which is a strange relief. [One of these exercises led to a list-like piece called You Move Closer / You Move Away; if it is helpful to read that, you can find the pdf online at Trestle Creek Review (#27-2013).]
 
The last line of the grievance exercise invites grace: I see the way. Here’s a brief example:
“Did you mean it when you said: ‘Are you over your grief yet?’”
 
Before her right hand shriveled to a claw, Mom tilled soil around her son’s Paradise lily. Once my brother, then a flower. Mom carried on, weeding with her left. The year after my brother dies collapses into the year after my mother dies collapses into Paradise lilies and brave symmetry.
 
I tell my second cousin Sandy, “No. I’m not over my grief yet. I will encompass my grief forever.
 
I see the way. I see the way.
 
The exercise starts easily enough, even superficially, but the simple act of investigating why I cannot let go of certain statements—or even why I expected that friends would know what to say—has been a way for me to sort out my thinking in relation to others, almost without realizing it. I can sort out what I think of suicide, what I think of physician-assisted death, and most importantly, what all this means about me in the context of our society, so that my writing might be useful, necessary, and of service.
 
My challenges with writing about suicide, particularly, have been that the rug was pulled out from everything I believed and the ground dissolved under me. I felt a great burden of responsibility because many people told me that my brother’s life would not matter unless I wrote about him, and my fear of not getting Ian’s life right, yet alone conveying my thoughts, crippled my writing process. I wanted people to say, “Your brother’s death mattered because he lived. Full stop.” But I’m now honestly grateful, if just a little bit, for the impulse of my ex-partner’s mother to encourage me, however awkwardly, to write. While writing won’t bring Ian back to life, turning toward the page is a means of turning toward him.
 
I can articulate before. I can articulate after. Notice the “art” in that word—articulate. After my brother died, I said that our family had been thrust to the other side of a ravine with no way back. It has taken me time to articulate the bridge between then and now, because I have to write the bridge into existence.

Confronting Our Fears, Continued.

Jo Scott-Coe
Confronting Our Fears
Meredith Hall
​Trust The Camera: The Importance of Scene Making in Writing Literary Memoirs
Richard Hoffman
Turning Adversity into Art
Michael Steinberg
​Confronting Demons, Staring Down Fears: Transforming Our Deepest Misfortunes into in Literary Works
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