Writing About Trauma with Grace Spulak

Trauma is a fraught subject for writing and writers. Write it badly, and we run the risk of trauma porn, creating stories that focus on harm for the sake of harm. Or we run the risk of stories that reduce everything to a single traumatic event, narratives that eschew complexity and complication, that fall into the trap of Parul Sehgal’s lamented trauma plot. And there are social and political considerations to writing about trauma. Whose stories are all about trauma? Whose stories get reduced to trauma points? But trauma and harm are realities for many writers, myself included, and to avoid trauma as a subject can feel like an erasure. And to write realistically about trauma, we may need to write stories that focus on its reductiveness, the way it can seem all-consuming. Some of the most successful writing about trauma uses various hallmarks of traumatic experience—flashbacks, memory gaps, repetition, rumination—as narrative form. This class will explore how trauma features have been repurposed as formal experimentation by writers such as Gayl Jones, Maria Fernanda Ampuero, Monica Ojeda, and Marie-Helen Bertino. It will also contain a generative component and create a nurturing space for participants to think about how formal experimentation might support their own writing about trauma. This two-hour class is led by writer Grace Spulak. Grace is the author of the story collection, Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think (April 2026), winner of the 2025 Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize. A writer and attorney based in her home state of New Mexico, she holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a JD from Harvard Law School. Her work was awarded Witness Magazine’s 2021 Literary Award in Fiction and has appeared in the Ploughshares blog, Nimrod International Journal, and Southwest Review, among others; her work has received support from Trillium Arts, New Mexico Writers, and Poets & Writers.