Newtown author explains poetry’s power to heal in wake of trauma
Zoom fatigue has become a shared punchline in this era of COVID. I’ve grown as weary of Zoom, FaceTime and Google Meet as the next person. But there’s one regular virtual meeting I look forward to these days. Sponsored by the Westport Writers Workshop, the writing circle I lead for volunteers and clients of the Women’s Center of Danbury, has become, for me, my sandbar in the pandemic’s rough seas.
Each week when the flattened digital rectangle of my laptop screen offers up a grid of squared-off faces, it feels, paradoxically, as if I am part of a circle, a circle of creativity, support, strength and love. When I mention this counterintuitive geometric insight to Carol Ann Davis, director of Fairfield University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program, she isn’t at all surprised.
“Poetry is supposed to be a builder of community. We first shared our histories by reciting them to each other around the fire,” she says, “so there isn’t something more elementally human than to write poetry together.”
For six years following the Dec. 14, 2012, Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Davis, a poet and essayist, used writing workshops as a tool to help children and parents in her community forge beauty from the sediment of violence. In a recent interview, Davis called the creative treasures that emerge from such creative work “upwellings,” a way to access the “internal information my writing can offer me (about the world, about me).”
Last week Davis spoke to me about her Poetry in Communities curriculum, based on her work in Newtown and aimed at empowering those affected by sudden or systemic violence. For example, after the 2018 shooting in Parkland, Florida, she shared the curriculum with a creative writing instructor at Stoneman Douglas High School.
“When people find themselves in a situation where they are dealing with a constituency that has trauma, these poetry prompts work. They work because the design isn’t dependent on naming the trauma or even approaching it,” she says. “It’s about the voice of the writer, the self as an author. That is accessible to you even though you’ve suffered. Your voice is there. Who you are is there.”
“Sometimes you write poems and no trauma comes into it. Sometimes you’re writing a poem and there it is, it comes in. So, the poem can hold anything you bring to it. Realizing that is part of how you process the trauma,” she says. This realization empowers the writer, Davis notes, because they are then able recognize that, “‘I am a self and I can hold what has come my way.’”
In her essay, “The One I Get and Other Artifacts,” included in her most recent book, “The Nail in the Tree” (Tupelo Press, 2020), Davis credits her son with helping her understand she would need to grow “a light touch” to develop curriculum for traumatized communities. In the first few days after the 2012 tragedy her oldest son was resistant to her attempts to help him explore his feelings. “I’m not traumatized,” she recounts him saying in the essay. “Why are you trying to make me feel something I don’t feel?”
Her son also gave her latest collection its title, when he tried to explain to her that the Sandy Hook shooting was for him an indelible part of his childhood, like a nail hammered into a tree, leaving the tree no choice but to grow around the nail and come to recognize that nail as part of what constitutes the tree.
“The way that I relate to this pandemic is inseparable from my having lived here during the shooting,” she says.
For example, she points out that there are parallels between refusing to support common-sense gun control laws and refusing to wear a mask to curtail the spread of the COVID virus. She also balks at the use of the word “lockdown” to describe the social distancing and staged business shutdowns that can help halt upticks in COVID deaths. For Davis “lockdowns” refer to drills she sees as traumatizing experiences inflicted on children so that Second Amendment absolutists can escape any regulations that might affect their access to guns.
Like me, Davis is originally from the South. Much of my own gun-owning, formerly NRAaffiliated family has come around to Davis’s way of thinking in recent years. They are still gun owners, but they support stricter, even much stricter, gun ownership and manufacturing laws than currently prevail. Unfortunately not everyone in the town Davis and I now call home agrees, as evidenced by last week’s decision by Newtown’s Legislative Council to allow guns to be carried on
town property.
Despite such differences of opinion, Davis still feels a kinship with her community. Driving through Newtown in the early days of the pandemic Davis noted the courtesy of the drivers around her and felt “such compassion and love” for the inhabitants of her hometown.
“We as a town experienced something together. Now we are experiencing the isolation of the pandemic together,” she says.
Reading through her book of lyrical, image-rich essays, I note that the phrase “shared world” keeps appearing. It’s the same shared world the women in my own workshops offer back to me, the one we all need to work together to keep safe.