Resources & References for RMMLA Writing Trauma Survival Panel: “Practicing Writing Rituals to Preempt and Process Trauma: CAConrad’s Poetics”

Paper Text

I’d like to begin with a land acknowledgment. This is adapted from the Denver City Council and DU’s Morgridge College of Education: We’d like to honor and acknowledge the stolen land on which we conduct this conference, which is the traditional territory of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe Peoples. Over 40 Indigenous nations continue to reside on the lands currently called Colorado. Denver is home to many different citizens of Indigenous nations, and we recognize their enduring presence on this land by paying respect to them and to their elders, past, present, and future. Please take a moment to consider the legacies of violence, displacement, migration, and resettlement that bring us together today and please join us in uncovering such truths at all public events. Now is the time to reflect upon and personally and communally reconcile how the genocidal acts against Indigenous communities, and the violent theft of their lands, intersects with our learning, collaborating, and sharing of knowledge. 

I’d like us to take another moment just to be here, to be present, on the last day of this conference, in this very early morning session that you’ve all come to—thank you!—so please indulge me: close your eyes if you’re comfortable, put away your phones, calm your mind, roll your shoulders, and take a few deep breaths with me. Pay attention to your attention and intention, how your breath feels, how your body feels, how your mind feels. 5 deep breaths, in and out.

Welcome. I’m happy to be starting off this panel because this is how I start every day in the classroom with my scholars—a few deep breaths to bring us here, into the present moment.

A land acknowledgment dwells in the sorrow of traumatic events, but it also inhabits a space of survival and a space of hope. So too does our topic today. Like many of you, I’ve spent years in academia as a student, also as staff, and now as faculty. Writing about my own traumatic experiences (and also joys!) resulted in my forthcoming poetry collection FishWife (we’re in the presale period so I have to promote); now, as a professor encountering student writing in which they often feel compelled to reveal the darkest and hardest moments of their lives, processing trauma through writing and managing this trauma while writing, is at the forefront of my mind.

Let’s invoke the spirit of bell hooks! In “Teaching to Transgress,” hooks emphasizes the role of educator as liberator and as collaborator, as a fellow human being in a classroom of complex human beings, emphasizing a holistic approach to teaching that honors both students and teachers as whole humans on journeys towards self-actualization. The classroom is not a therapist’s office, but it is a place where educators must model the energy, engagement, trust, and sometimes confession that we ask of our students. 

Although I try to eschew binary thinking, I find myself engaging in it often when considering trauma and writing rituals. Writing rituals crafted to specifically engage with trauma are part sorrow and part joy. They are both personal and pedagogical praxis. They engage with personal trauma and collective trauma: personal trauma made worse by systemic racism, misogyny, violence; and the Anthropocene in which we all now, collectively, exist. 

I’m excited to share with you today my obsession: the creative and healing possibilities of writing rituals, specifically those modeled and theorized by the poet CAConrad. I have a reference and resource list for this paper on my website that I’m happy to share—there’s also a QR code you can scan on the accessibility copy. I also have copies of Conrad’s books if anyone wants to peruse them. 

CAConrad is a queer, nonbinary poet who uses they/them pronouns. Originally based in Philly, Conrad is a nomadic artist who holds writing workshops around the world. Conrad began creating writing rituals after they realized their poetic practice had become mechanical, it resembled a factory-assembly-line, and was in dire need of being grounded in the present. (Soma)tic is the word Conrad uses to refer to these rituals. (Soma)tics are, in their words, “ritualized structures where being anything but present [is] next to impossible. These rituals create…an “extreme present” where the many facets of what are around me, wherever I am, can come together through a sharper lens.”  

A little etymology: Soma is an Indo-Persian word meaning “the divine,” and somatic comes from the Greek, meaning “the tissue” or “nervous system.” The goal is “to coalesce soma and somatic while triangulating patterns of experience with the world around us.” Somatic writing rituals engage the divine, the mind, the spiritual, the unknown, and the body, the physical, the sensory, with frequency and with purpose.  

These “ritualized structures where being anything but present is next to impossible” can be very rich for both writing and mental wellbeing. Conrad believes that “unorthodox steps in the writing process can shift the poet’s perception of the quotidian, if only for a series of moments.” It’s an attempt to ground oneself in the present, Conrad’s extreme present, with an emphasis on process rather than product, decentering the productive quality of writing, moving away from the factory and moving more deeply into experience. Conrad acknowledges the writing and teaching methods of poets like Bernadette Mayer and Charles Olson among others in establishing their writing rituals. 

I’d like to share a writing ritual of lore from Charles Olson; Conrad describes hearing this from a student of Olson’s (Johnathan Williams) and how it inspired them towards writing rituals as a poetic practice (A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon 67). 

Like Olson, Conard’s writing rituals often involve some element of nature—whether studying tenacious weeds in sidewalk cracks or being completely immersed in the woods, far from other humans, ecopoetics are at the heart of Conrad’s rituals. This individual act of ritual can be made collective when engaging with ecopoetics; ecopoetics forces a recognition of and reckoning with the interconnectedness of all living things. It forces our focus from the inward, out. 

Conrad writes a lot about their personal traumatic experiences, how they design rituals specifically to help process trauma, and how they’ve found avenues in these rituals to heal the self. Here’s another binary: writing rituals for both processing trauma and preempting trauma. Traumatic events sharpen our focus. We, and by we I mean me but also many other writers I encounter, often find ourselves thinking that we do our best writing in, or gather our best creative material from, traumatic experiences. But really it’s that focus, that hyper-focus and hypersensitivity to the present that we have during these times of trauma or of recalling trauma that compels us to feel this way—that writing mined from trauma is the best writing. When unexpected and devastating events happen, superficial things fall away, even time falls away, and our attention is totally attuned to the present. So we can practice writing rituals that make us grounded in the present to develop this sharpness of focus in the quotidian, so it’s not always a result of or associated with trauma. In that way, writing rituals can be preemptively healing, in addition to serving as throughways to processing trauma. 

An example: in an interview, CAConrad describes a moment they heard a song from their childhood floating out the window of a passing car and, rather than being transported back into nostalgia, they were able to listen to the words as if for the very first time—to experience the song in a new way, in the present. They say this wouldn’t have been possible if they hadn’t been practicing writing rituals—that experience of the extreme present was carried with them throughout the day. This brings to mind triggers—those unexpected things we encounter which transport us into the past, that remind us of previous experiences, whether traumatic or joyful, and take us out of the present moment. Conrad’s argument here is that practicing writing rituals and developing that sharpness of focus can keep us more firmly rooted in the present when triggers happen. Similarly, in one ritual, Conrad incorporated an object which used to ruin their day every time they came across it because it reminded them of a beloved who had died of AIDS. Conrad repurposed this object, gave it new life, took away its power to redirect their energy and attention, by making it part of a writing ritual. By reinventing it, in a way. 

The hyperawareness that trauma engenders is part of what I think compels us to go back to it often, but we can tire of mining our trauma for our art. And here I think of binaries of sorrow and joy; poet Ross Gay created a writing ritual in which he wrote an essay every day for a year on something that brought him joy. The result was his Book of Delights. These joys often led Gay to meditations on dead loved ones and encounters with racism but joy, joy was always at the core of the essay. Indeed, joy and sorrow are not binaries but entwined in our human experience. We can work to develop a hyperawareness of joy that can’t erase but can perhaps establish an equilibrium with trauma. 

I’d like to conclude by sharing one of Conrad’s writing rituals with you. Before I do, I’d like to encourage you to consider writing rituals for your own personal practice and for incorporation into pedagogical spaces. Conrad’s work is very didactic; their writing rituals are instructive, and actively engage students in the classroom because they’re entertaining, personal, and endlessly customizable as a student practice. For students in particular, being in the extreme present means turning off that self-editor in the mind when taking part in a writing ritual. Conrad’s rituals always include the instruction to “take notes for a poem. Don’t pay attention to anyone who might be watching you while you’re doing this ritual that makes you look a little weird—take notes, take notes for a poem!” This following of one’s impulses and not editing along the way can teach students a lot about writing, revision, and editing. It also frames creative practice as intentional and consistent, rather than waiting for inspiration to strike or waiting until the last minute to complete an assignment. There are benefits genre-wise as well—the ritual is written in prose and the students then generate material from that ritual for a poem or another mode of artistic expression. Again, a focus on process rather than product, but with the flexibility of the end-product to be whatever truly has inspired the student. 

Many of Conrad’s rituals and the resulting poems are very funny, silly, irreverent; this one is not, but I think the angle from which it approaches the idea of writing about and through trauma is an interesting one. Restoration Fiber Song (Ecodeviance 102). 

Recommended Reading:

CAConrad. A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon. Wave Books, 2012.

CAConrad. Amanda Paradise. Wave Books, 2021.

CAConrad. Ecodeviance. Wave Books, 2014.

CAConrad. While Standing in Line for Death. Wave Books, 2017.