In our Craft Capsule series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 229.

If the first step of drafting poems that engage with trauma is to determine whether I am ready to write this, then the second task is to pursue practices that make the process both less stressful and more productive. As I explain in my forthcoming craft book, The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma (University of New Mexico Press, 2025), there are dozens of lyric, narrative, and rhetorical strategies that a poet can employ when attempting to represent trauma. These include the use of lists and catalogs, the evocation of fugue states, delving into the archive, and exploring ekphrasis as well as experimenting not only with fixed forms but also with hybrid poetics. Doing research, reading widely and across disciplines, thinking actively about poetic craft—all can be invaluable when it comes to writing ethical, compelling poems of trauma. But it’s also helpful to develop a set of habits that support your emotional well-being.

Many writers like to use ritual to prepare for the act of writing, as a form of superstition or magical thinking, or simply because the ceremonial gesture comforts them. Anne Lamott advocates for ritual in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Pantheon, 1994), explaining that “Sometimes ritual quiets the racket…. Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in.” And in her craft book Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne, 2002) Gayle Brandeis observes: “We are surrounded by mystery. It is fun and often profound to create ritual that acknowledges and celebrates how much we do not know.” I encourage my students to develop a simple ritual that can function as a marker of time, helping to circumscribe the period during which they will work on a poem of trauma. I want them to set limits so that they won’t scribble themselves into intellectual and emotional exhaustion. Perhaps this means they write for the length of time it takes to drink a cup of green tea (steeped in a favorite mug). Perhaps the writing lasts only until a stick of incense has burned to a small mound of ash. Or maybe the ritual isn’t quite so dreamy, and the writing ends when an egg timer sounds its small, insistent ping.  

Another habit I recommend is to work on drafts away from the computer screen. I tell my students to take a walk and record their thoughts as voice memos. Or perform a repetitive action that allows the mind to disengage: Chop carrots in the kitchen, do a sequence of sun salutations, Windex all the windows until the glass glints clear again. Writing poems of trauma is jaw-clenching, tooth-grinding business. Often I find—even when I’m narrating one of my old, healed traumas—that my body tenses on the cream-colored couch in my quiet library. My shoulders lift toward my ears. I hold my breath. I love my workspace, how my dog Lola forms a spiral of gray fur on the cushion beside me. But sometimes difficult poems arrive more easily when I leave the laptop and wander the neighborhood. I stare up at a cluster of eastern bluebirds perched in the branches of a tree, and the poem begins to nudge at me, its delicate lines like a persistent breeze.   

Writing poems that engage with trauma can become an extremely insular, oppressive undertaking. This is particularly true when the poet focuses on crafting pieces that mirror the experience of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, poems of the flashback, dissociative poems, poems that mimic the mind’s inability to look away from a litany of repeating, catastrophic images. Poems that represent trauma as if the event were happening right now can feel terrifyingly immediate as well. So, it’s important to seek out opportunities to think beyond and outside the self. Field trips—including excursions that seem to have no direct relevance to the trauma you wish to represent—can spark poems in surprising ways. Go to a museum. Attend a concert. Watch a play. Encountering other art forms allows us to re-examine our own poems. We can learn how to read our writing as a curator in a museum might, or a conductor or a dramaturg.   

I suppose what I’m suggesting here are strategies for self-care. In the modern vernacular, “care” implies attention, concern, looking after. And self-care has come to mean: Get a massage, practice mindfulness, keep a gratitude journal. But it’s important to know that the etymology of “care” leads us to the word’s Proto-Germanic roots, which lie in grief and lamentation. Understood this way, self-care becomes the inward act of regarding the sorrow that’s lodged inside us. Self-care can be the poem, too—our mourning given sound and sense—and all the small steps we take to write it.  

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of three books of nonfiction and ten poetry collections, including most recently Civilians (Louisiana State University Press, 2025). A craft book, The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma, will be published by University of New Mexico Press in Fall 2025. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas.