These Bodies Are Not Metaphors: On Writing Sexual Assault

            With the now seemingly consistent deluge of harassment, assault, and rape allegations dominating the news cycle, and the subsequent attention fleetingly paid to the tireless activists who have fought to bring awareness and solutions to these issues, it would be willfully foolish to deny the influence any given depiction of rape has in our cultural conversation: pop, personal, or political. Rape, assault and trauma are established pins of all that we consume: literature, art, television. The tropes du jour often use sexual violence as shorthand for the trial-by-fire background story necessary to convincingly build a Strong Character (we see this often in science fiction, fantasy, but it is equally pervasive, albeit quieter, in fiction of most genres). Of course, the most extreme version of this is the Rape/Revenge trope, a holdover from 1970s exploitation films, that has resurfaced in surprising, more complicated ways. Game of Thrones, Jessica Jones, and Mad Max: Fury Road, are successful examples, to name only a recent few.  Whether these depictions occasionally hit the mark of a realistic trauma survivor experience is decidedly beside the point: survivor characters’ rapes often become their entirety.

            When past experiences of sexual trauma are used as passive expository blurbs to fill a half-flat character’s background, they can read as insincere or gimmicky. To remedy this, pop culture has swung massively in an opposing direction that demands rape be depicted as both heinously violent, committed only by the criminally depraved, and that survivors be wrecked so essentially, to their very core, that they are oftentimes incapacitated by fear or infatuated with vengeance. These are, of course, the extreme examples, but they overshadow the thoughtful, nuanced depictions of fully rendered survivor characters in our zeitgeist.

            And, here is where the writer’s dilemma lies. Rape is real; it is pervasive, so this demands that portrayals of assault and harassment be purposeful, intentional. But, depicting it as an exhausting demon with the power to coerce a character’s every action, inflicted by soulless predators, does a disservice to both our characters and the cultural conversation at large. Rape is not a metaphor for other kinds of violence – not global warming, not thought policing, not genocide – it is a violence of its own. Rape is not the stand-in for an interesting background story, like a summer spent campaigning for a third-party candidate or being raised on a farm. So, when we mean to engage with sexual assault as a plot device or a character’s background, we are not simply adding texture to a form ‘victim’ or ‘survivor’ archetype. We are building a character that has a full life both before and after their assault. These bodies and places and conflicts might be creations all our own, but choosing to engage with sexual assault means that we must consider the real bodies, the people, that are implicated by our words. We owe them nuanced, researched depictions.

Caitlyn GD is a second year Fiction candidate at FAU. Her work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Voicemail Poems, and Potluck Magazine, among others. She currently lives in South Florida with her loving partner and two indifferent cats. She wants you to know that Die Hard 3 is the best Die Hard.

Revising with Optimism: A Week with Justin Torres

            Some things are easy to write. If a character is alone in a room, we know what that means. It is simple to hold in your mind’s eye like so many other easy musings. Of course there is the artful loneliness of melodrama, of which we also have a pretty deep bench of canned images: mascara running, no missed calls, rain on the window in black and white.

            What I struggle with writing is the feeling of effortless symbiosis, psychic synergy. If describing it is difficult, I am even less adept at provoking it: the sense that somehow, written words are just an extension from author to reader.

When I began my MFA I knew that I wanted my writing to become that. I wanted my words to be familiar like an old winter coat but unexpected like the twenty you find in its pocket. I had some pretty damn high demands. Unattainable! Or so I had thought, despite the many, many authors who had done just that for me. They were something special, something born not taught, something above my pay grade.

Justin Torres was the most recent of those authors.

            So, when Torres hosted a weeklong workshop for MFA students this past March, I was bright eyed, pen poised to capture every insight he shared. The greatest lesson I learned from his workshop was: write the fuck out of everything and decide fast how to salvage the good of it.

            He didn’t outright say that, but I’m pretty proud of my approximation.

He had the thirteen of us focus on the best of the writing – from our peers as well as our own. He was a very positive leader in this way, and without the messy insincerity of being too saccharine. Torres had no problem telling us things that needed to be said, but his decision to avoid the ‘tear-you-down-to-build-you-up’ approach of other workshops allowed us more time to focus on what opportunities we had earned but not yet explored.

Aside from his workshop structure, Torres was a brand new set of eyes on what had become to each of us, familiar territory. He was able to bring honest notes, without picking up on our recurring themes or ideations. Torres met us through our writing. We were all three-to-five pages of first draft fury to him. But, with his facilitation, we all salvaged the good of our fever dreams.

Torres’s approach of determined, quick revisions with a reserved optimism is certainly more difficult than it sounds but I truly believe it is the next step, at least for me, to writing that new familiar feeling.

Caitlyn Davidheiser is a first year MFA fiction student at FAU. Her work has previously appeared in Voicemail Poems, Spires, and Killing the Angel among others. She lives in South Florida with her loving husband and her indifferent cat.