Roxane Gay is a phenomenal writer, and I was thrilled to read this reflection on her experience writing about trauma. While this is not instructional, she has taught at Yale on this subject and has experience writing many successful books that discuss traumatic experiences of many kinds, much of which she has personally endured. Of course, sharing her troubles is not without criticism, which is another topic touched on in this short book. The writing is flawless, and I appreciated the insight into someone who has been able to write on difficult subjects in such moving ways.
Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the advance copy.

I finished this book wanting more. I'm not sure how Roxane Gay managed to do this, but she covered trauma, Trump, COVID, violence against Black people, and so much more. I ended up listening to this on Scribd.

This essay summarizes Dr. Roxane Gay's experiences of trauma and explains how writing and even more so teaching has helped her process that. It touches upon Trump's presidency, the police murders of innocent black people and school shootings as examples of personal and collective trauma that writers have a duty to document.

Overall though the piece fell flat for me. The form was too short to be able to delve into these topics and explore them more in detail. As a result, it read more like a speech or something you may hear on a podcast.

Nevertheless I'm happy to have read this - thanks Netgalley and Scribd for providing this free copy.

Another insightful essay by Roxane Gay.. She expands on trauma, identity, and using writing as a way to connect with yourself and an audience. Brilliantly written and I especially enjoyed the author narration.

This was kind of a strange essay. It didn’t have much to say, but it was still worth it to read. It mainly focuses on what Roxane Gay after she published Hunger and how she began her teaching career. It also talked about the collective trauma the Trump Administration and violence against Black bodies. To be honest, it was a little disjoined. I think this would have worked better as an essay collection (kind of like Mindy Kailing’s Nothing Like I Imagined (Except for Sometimes) series). Everything was surface level that could have been expounded upon.

3.5 rounded up

Writing into the Wound is a 30-something page essay on the writing workshop Roxane Gay recently ran at Yale, her alma mater (albeit a school she states that she dropped out of in her junior year, with her return bringing back some less than fond memories of New Haven). This workshop of 15 students - whittled down from 150 applicants - was on the topic of writing about trauma. Gay shares examples of books she set as texts for the course (including Heart Berries, Disgrace and The Chronology of Water) and talks about how she has learnt to process and share her trauma through her writing, including how this has sometimes been used against her - notably a particularly awful example from when she was on tour in Australia).

This didn’t really SAY anything. Or at least not enough to warrant much of a review. If this wasn’t written by Roxane Gay it wouldn’t have been published. It’s essentially an essay that touches on her experiences after publishing Hunger, the start of her teaching career, and the collective trauma of 2020. I was left wondering what the overall point was and what the audience is supposed to take from it, other than “writing about trauma is hard and personal,” which is kind of a given.

It was...fine. Just fine. You can knock it out in an hour so at least there’s that.

Several months ago on Twitter, Gay mentioned working on a project that focused on writing about trauma, and ever since then, I've been waiting for an update. Now that I've been able to read it, I am thrilled. She shares many helpful tips about how a person can write about their most painful moments without doing themselves more harm or scaring their audience away. For such a short contribution, it's packed with a lot of meat. *Advance copy provided by the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

Roxane Gay has another bestseller on her hands. She address the topic of trauma, focuses on how to face it, address it how you want and ignoring the societal negative impact. She’s a rockstar.

“The world as we knew it has broken wide open. There is a before and an after, and the world will never again be what it once was. That sounds terrifying, but it is an opportunity.”

Bestselling author and cultural critic, Dr Roxane Gay wrote her latest essay after returning to Yale to teach a workshop on writing trauma. Her book, “Hunger”, and much of her other work deals with trauma — not only personal trauma, but collective trauma. Might it be interesting to explore how we write about trauma, and how to do it well?

Never before has the United States experienced such psychic and physical wounds. Gay considers the resulting trauma of living through a pandemic and wonders how long we will live the way we live now. She writes about her dismay at Donald Trump’s election, then the rising unemployment, police brutality, political violence at the Capitol, and the indifference with which Trump and his administration responded towards the American people when faced with Covid-19 and the country’s rising death rate.

When writing about trauma, Dr Gay’s primary advice is to make sure you have a clear sense of purpose and that you have a reason for writing about trauma that’s more than catharsis, that’s more than writing about it because it happened to you. She advises looking outward as much as looking inward, finding ways of connecting personal trauma to the world that we’re living in and the experiences people are having.

“There is no pleasure in writing about trauma. It requires opening a wound, looking into the bloody gape of it and cleaning it out one word at a time. And only then might it be possible for that wound to heal.”

“Writing into the Wound” is succinct, accessible, interesting and informative.

A huge thank you to @NetGalley and @Scribd, who provided me with an advanced copy of “Writing into the Wound” in exchange for an honest review.

Review posted on Instagram, Goodreads and The Suitable Girl page on Facebook.

Writing into the Wound by Roxane Gay is a short book about one of the hardest topics tangential to Gay's work - writing about trauma. As she points out, writing about trauma is writing about your experiences as a human. At less than 50 pages, this book covers many experiences that Gay has had in the process of writing about the things that have hurt her without delving into the details of the trauma.

While this is not a step by step guide nor a full memoir, there is power in what she is writing here. There. is still much to be explored in the arena of writing about painful personal experiences and this draws back the curtain for us to see just a little of Gay's inner thoughts on the subject. As someone who strives to better contextualize and express the point of view I have because of my experiences, I found some of the ideas she explored and the questions she asked here to be helpful. I'd recommend this book to anyone who was grappling with those ideas themselves.

I am a fan of Roxanne Gay's writing and what she stands for. This book shows another side to her story of trauma and how the media only focuses on one thing.