Thinking of Arthur W Frank
Arthur W. Frank, a scholar I so admire, once asked me this question. Frank specialises in dialogical narrative analysis and in narrative therapy, and told me this question had been in his mind for many years as he wrote and researched his “illness narratives” – At the will of the body, The wounded storyteller.
I’d written to tell him how much his work had inspired and helped me while writing a very difficult thesis about the death of my younger son.
I found his question hard to answer, in the same way that writing a poem is hard: the answer ran away at the edge of the page, refused to be pinned down in easy phrases. I had written my thesis without resort to cathartic writing (which I see as private journalling and not public writing in the sense that a thesis is public writing). That had been part of my ethics approval for my topic.
I found being asked the question – like writing a poem – soaringly liberating, and liberating to wrestle with.
An update: today, an answer came. A dear friend of mine told me she’d shared my poetry book, Ways to Say Goodbye, with a bereaved friend, who in turn had shared it with her mother. Her mother had been struggling to express her own grief even as tears, but when reading my work, tears were shed and they had been restoring and healing after a long period of repressed emotion.
As a writer this affirmed me in a special way no one would imagine: I’d been very downcast after being told my poetry was “too difficult” to read aloud for a poetry broadcast. When pressed, yes it was my subject matter. I’d felt rebuked and also, reproved for something I could not help doing: writing my kind of truth.
Thank you Arthur W Frank: writing does help: and it has the capacity to help others.