A large sign at the entrance of an ancient Egyptian gallery at the museum warns viewers of mummified human remains enclosed in a sarcophagus in the next room and suggests an alternate route to bypass the “triggering” mummy. It reminds me of trigger warnings; how quick they are to label a story before the reader has a chance to peek in. I actually wanted to see a delicate face wrapped tight in ancient linen, to bear witness to a past where someone was loved enough to be held for eternity.
Trigger warnings preface essays with statements like, “this piece mentions the topic of eating disorders/drug abuse/sexual assault/violence/suicide/self-harm” and so forth. These statements warn readers to proceed at their own risk. But what is at risk, exactly? Reading powerful creative nonfiction can hit you like a ton of bricks and writing it most definitely hurts. True stories transform pain into art. It should be uncomfortable if you want it to be any good.
Trigger warnings are spoilers. They label a story, forcing it in a box shaped by the broadest categorization of its contents. An essay may detail a particular trauma, but the narrator’s journey through that experience is the heart of the narrative and not the trauma itself. The heads up can spoil the plot and make a reader anxious ahead of time.
“Waiting on the Stair” by Jonathan Odell, in Memoir Magazine, is among my favorite essays to bring to class. The preceding trigger warning lists suicide among other labels. The narrator reflects on two pivotal moments from his college years where he let people down. He feels partially responsible for his friend’s death, but his friend’s suicide is not the point of the essay. Remorse is. Had there been no trigger warning, the revelation of the suicide half-way through would have been more impactful. The first time I read it, I cried. When I read it again, I still feel a lump in my throat, and that’s a sign of a compelling essay. It moves you. Every time. Don’t spoil the first time with a warning.
“I Hear You Man” by Emad Jabini, in Brevity, is about a man’s propensity to draw in strangers who want to pour out their life’s troubles. The narrator is a magnet for “emotional dumps”, like Uber drivers who start an unsolicited interaction while they hold you captive. Some students find this essay disturbing on account of all the gun violence, but I love that Brevity does not have a trigger warning on the piece.
Triggers turn you away when an essay begs to invite you in. In workshops over the years, we’ve read, roared with laughter, cried and sat in silence together. Sometimes people stepped outside the room when we read heavy pieces. They always returned, often holding a Kleenex tissue, dabbing their eyes and saying they are sorry for being sad. “Please don’t apologize for feeling,” I’d say and invite them back to sit beside me.
Trigger warnings hinder workshop, which is meant to be a sacred place for mutual support. There is no way to predict what stories people will bring. If you join a writing workshop, the expectation is that you are prepared to encounter uncomfortable topics.
I taught a class once when a writer mentioned her essay dealt with sexual assault as she began reading, and another student promptly gathered her things and walked out without saying a word. We were all flabbergasted. It tainted the atmosphere in the room, and I had to take a moment to recalibrate, make sure everyone was okay to move forward and reassure the reader we absolutely want to hear her story.
The student who walked out emailed me the next day saying any material mentioning violence against women, grief, and anything about loss were off the table. She asked me to send her warnings ahead of class so she wouldn’t attend those sessions. But everything could touch some kind of trauma. She dropped the class. The other student went on to write a fantastic piece.
All stories are about loss. If you’re reading this, you probably recognize Tolstoy’s famous opening line from Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In the realm of creative nonfiction, we are all writing about loss. When I said this in class once, a student took it as a challenge. She came back the following week having done her research and said, “I couldn’t find anything to prove you wrong.”
Every draft students bring to class is inevitably about grief: the aftermath of a breakup, the death of a loved one, the loss of innocence, home, security, a sense of self. Memoir is not a somber show-and-tell, but it’s almost always painted with melancholy.
Even the most exuberant essay, take Jenny Slate’s “Going to the Restaurant” from The New Yorker, is about loss. Slate’s imagination makes an ordinary solo dining experience extraordinary, but the narrator’s effort to dine in style comes at a cost. She earns a living “pretending to be other women.” She has to dress the part to go to the restaurant, hide her true self underneath the underwire bra and piles of makeup.
How can you examine the past without acknowledging its loss? Every decision we make closes the door on an alternate future, each one uniquely ours. That’s what creative nonfiction is all about. We meet ourselves in each other’s stories. It’s disturbing because it hurts and most likely always will. Trigger warnings are like crime scene tape cautioning you to look away, but you might find something incredibly moving behind it. There is no guarantee it won’t make you cry. But it just might make you feel, and empathize, and best of all, it can make you change your mind.
Olga Katsovskiy, writer/editor/educator, works in healthcare and is a writing instructor at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education and at Writers in Progress. She volunteers at several literary magazines and drinks a lot of coffee. Her essays have appeared in Atticus Review: The Attic, Barzakh Magazine, the Brevity Blog, Pithead Chapel, Short Reads, and elsewhere. Find her upcoming classes and reflections on books, writing, and the creative life at theweightofaletter.com and Instagram @theweightofaletter
2 responses to “CONTENT WARNING: Triggers in Creative Nonfiction | By Olga Katsovskiy”
Trigger warnings honor another person’s trauma. It meets them where they are at and gives a chance of choice for them to take care of themselves. Call it trigger warning or safe messaging – to me it equates kindness. In my memoir Discomfort in the Manic Mind I write about my own childhood SA trauma, loss of sibling, suicide ideation … and more. I live in the realm of trauma and journey with bipolar. I want any reader who has experienced childhood sexual trauma to know I tell detal of mind – I have no idea where they are at in their recovery. I would never expect it to be a thing a reader could get through without a set back in their mental health. A reader should be given honor to protect their current state of mental health by making a informed decision whether a book or movie for that matter is a good choice for their mental stability. I equate letting a reader know as kindness. Kindness to their state of mind, to their spirit to their soul. Safe messaging is important to convey in any genre of any form.
As a writer living with complex PTSD, I have a strong aversion to my work having a TW attached to it. It feels as if the potential trauma response of my readers is privileged over my own trauma response as a writer, a response that occurs when my work has a “red flag” on it, as if I’m writing something dirty or shameful. I’ve read articles arguing that TWs don’t even work, as they simply create anticipatory anxiety in the reader. My experience as a survivor of extreme abuse and a writer living with the realities of complex PTSD is that recognizing triggers and desensitizing myself to them was essential to my recovery from trauma, as was reading about the accounts of other victims. I worry that putting trigger warnings on writing will only reinforce the silence and shame around abuse because TWs reinforce that what is being written about is a topic that is normally kept hidden. I struggle with this so much because the prevailing norm is to put TWs on work that could potentially trigger some reader somewhere but ironically in doing this my own trauma is completely overlooked. The end result is that I end up not wanting to write about abuse.