In Praise of Alliteration: Scriptotherapy and the Pandemic

You may be thinking, Alliteration? Really??? During a pandemic laced with murderous racism and police violence against the press?

Let me explain.

First of all, I started this post before George Floyd was murdered. And even before the pandemic, I felt like I was playing catch up—my writing unable to keep up with my thoughts, my thoughts unable to keep pace with the world’s changes. (This topic is a post for another day, something I tell myself all too often, a seeming mantra that is both heartening and disheartening.)

Second, even before Floyd’s murder, I was inspired to temporarily shift gears. In my last post, “In Praise of Mixed Feelings,” I had hatched a plan to write about literary texts that help me embrace emotional complexity. In other words, texts that are helping me through the pandemic. I was poised to draft a post about a John Denham poem.

But near the end of Mount Mercy’s spring semester, my colleague Chris DeVault assigned me to senior Maddie Orton’s thesis defense, and I had the great pleasure of reading her thought-provoking essay about Alison Bechdel and scriptotherapy (writing as therapy). Maddie, who graduated with a BA in English and Communication, ended her essay with a beautiful tribute to scriptotherapy as a resource available to everyone. She quoted scholar Shoshana Magnet:

We all remain hungry for strategies that might help us to minimize our suffering, to become more compassionate and less critical, and to figure out how to live meaningful, socially just lives in the midst of an impossible and deeply traumatized world.

Well, I thought, couldn’t I use a bit of scriptotherapy right about now? Couldn’t we all?

I started thinking about how writing has helped me process other painful times—not what I would call traumas, but emotionally complex challenges. (Bear with me. I’m getting to alliteration, I promise.)

Preamble

Unlike Bechdel and many writers, I do not keep a regular journal. Still, the most obvious examples of my own scriptotherapy (undertaken before I’d encountered the word) are the journals I’ve kept during difficult transitions: back in the early nineties, when I was finishing my dissertation, getting divorced, and coming out as a lesbian (yes, all at once!); in the late nineties, when my dad was dying; and in the early part of this century, when my partner, Ben, started coming out as transgender.

An even more obvious example is the dual memoir that Ben and I wrote together about his gender transition and its impact on our marriage. Over the years, as we drafted and revised that manuscript, our process brought us closer and taught us a lot. (Shameless self-promotion: we’re seeking a publisher!)

Less obvious examples of my scriptotherapy also abound. Take, for instance, my mystery novels. It’s not just that they enabled me to grapple with social justice issues; it’s also that the conventions of the genre reassure me and fill me with hope.

In a recent interview with The Mark Literary Review, I told its editor, Jessica Purgett (MMU ’20), that “I love the many comforting fantasies the [mystery] genre offers: a world where you can count on the truth being discovered, order being restored, and good triumphing over evil—and not because of magic or superpowers, but because of curiosity, smarts, and persistence.”

Escape? Wishful thinking? Denial? Maybe. But with a purpose: self-care. Writing (and reading) mysteries allows me to self-soothe and to envision a better world so that I can work toward making that world a reality.

But truth be told, for me, all writing is therapeutic.

Whatever the topic or purpose, the act of writing itself—the process, the activity—is a tonic. I’m not saying that all my writing helps me resolve or understand fraught emotions or events; I’m saying that the act of writing always brings me calm and comfort.

Writing centers me. It usually fosters my creativity, and it always affords me a sense of control and closure.

Take the humble to-do list. It enables me to impose order on my time and to offload tasks from my mind. Take the dreaded assessment report or the email to a student complaining about their grade. These writing tasks are challenges that offer not only closure (thus, dear student, you’ve earned a B-), but also opportunities to clarify and connect.  

Clarity, creativity, connection, control, closure, comfort, calm.

We’ve reached alliteration. What does it have to do with scriptotherapy and coping with the pandemic?

One last story, and we are there.

Near the end of March—back when I believed that after another week or two of asynchronous online classes my students and I would joyfully return to campus—I read a Chronicle article titled “Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure.” It is by Aisha S. Ahmad, a political science professor at the University of Toronto, and it is aimed at academics. But it offers excellent advice and wisdom for everyone. When I encountered the phrase ‘productivity pressure,’ I thought of the many memes touting Shakespeare’s productivity during the plague.

I considered my own less ambitious hopes for quarantine. Support my students, colleagues, and friends from afar (possibly by mastering a thing called Zoom). Finish revising the submission materials that Ben and I had created for our memoir? Read more poetry? Finally sort the junk drawer? Plant some tomatoes. Maybe even get back to my novel?

Then I read Ahmad’s article.

She briefly describes the agendas of ambitious academics, and then she writes:

Yet as someone who has experience with crises around the world, what I see behind this scramble for productivity is a perilous assumption. The answer to the question everyone is asking — “When will this be over?” — is simple and obvious, yet terribly hard to accept. The answer is never.

What?! Never?! I almost closed the screen, but I kept reading, hoping for a twist or turn that never came. “Global catastrophes change the world,” Ahmad writes,

and this pandemic is very much akin to a major war. Even if we contain the Covid-19 crisis within a few months, the legacy of this pandemic will live with us for years, perhaps decades to come. It will change the way we move, build, learn, and connect. There is simply no way that our lives will resume as if this had never happened. And so, while it may feel good in the moment, it is foolish to dive into a frenzy of activity or obsess about your scholarly productivity right now. That is denial and delusion. The emotionally and spiritually sane response is to prepare to be forever changed.

Prepare to be forever changed. This directive is nearly as jolting as the pandemic itself. But I sensed that Ahmad was right. So how would I prepare? Would I redefine what it means for me to be productive?

Preparation and productivity. Were there other words that started with ‘PR’ that would help me through the pandemic?

(This question likely stemmed from my fondness for wordplay, my state of hyper-arousal, and Ahmad’s own penchant for alliteration: the “productivity pressure” of her title and the “denial and delusion” she disdains.)

At first I laughed at my alliterative urge. Surely a pandemic requires more than a tongue twister—a crisis demands more than consonant clusters. But priorities and prayer popped right into my head—followed by praise, principles, practice, process, and presence.

Maybe I was on to something. Summoning those words had been fun, had offered me a brief respite from pandemic anxiety. Why shouldn’t I use them to guide my response to COVID?  

Since I believe that literary texts can help me through a pandemic, why shouldn’t I have similar faith in a literary technique?

The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. Alliteration appeals to the human desire for symmetry and pattern. It boosts our memory. It gives us an interesting game to play (think Robert Frost’s thoughts on formal verse, his desire to play tennis with the net up). Alliteration limits the words we can choose—limits our choices—and thus makes communication less overwhelming and a lot more joyful.

What follows is the start of my quirky scriptotherapy: the ‘PR’ words that I hope will help me through the pandemic. This list is a preliminary proffering. I’ll likely say more about some of these guiding words in later posts, and thus will I merge bibliotherapy and scriptotherapy, reading and writing my way through the pandemic!

Preliminary Proffering

First things first, right?

In the midst of the pandemic—in the midst of protests and extreme racial injustice—what are my priorities? Who and what will I put first? What principles will guide my actions?

Ahmad suggests that we start with security: with “food, family, friends, and maybe fitness.” In another article she published a couple weeks later, she added, “Protect your mental health and emotional resilience.”

In other words, health and people. Your own well-being and the well-being of those you love.

Prioritize what is most precious.

This should always be our guiding principle, but during “normal” times, we (or I at least) can easily lose sight of it. Now is an opportunity to develop habits that will allow our priorities to remain priorities.

Easier said than done. But saying it is a start.

So too with protecting and promoting your own emotional and spiritual health. That’s a topic for the sages and ages. But maybe it starts with winnowing. Consider carefully what you can prepare for and what you can’t. What you can predict and what you can’t. What you can prevent and what you can’t.

Ask yourself: To what extent do you want to dwell on precarity?

In the New Yorker, Masha Gessen quotes Cameron Wright, a twenty-two-year-old senior at Yale who wants to remind others of their own precarity: “One of the things the pandemic offers is the cruelest reminder that anything is possible. … Your whole life can be turned upside down, the people you have spent the past four years with can be torn away at a moment’s notice, and you can feel constant paranoia that you’ll get sick or make others sick.”

He’s not wrong.  

But most of us need to pretend he is. At least some of the time. The question is how much? How often and how fully do you acknowledge your own vulnerability and mortality? The world’s volatility (what Buddhists call impermanence)? Often enough to motivate you to make the most of “your one wild and precious life,” but not so much that you’re paralyzed. This difficult-to-discern sweet spot is a Midway topic for another day. (See what I mean about that topic-for-another-day thing?)

Of course, your ability to pretend—and therefore your ability to be productive, whatever that might mean—depends in part on your privilege. How will you manage and use your privilege? This is another question that should always be a priority, but the pandemic has made it more obvious that privilege can be a matter of life and death.

Wrestling with your privilege can nurture not only your own mental health but also your ability to promote the common good.

Ahmad aptly notes that “it is toxic to compare your situation to anyone else’s, particularly to those who you think are better off.” But I believe that those of us who are privileged also need to be careful about how we compare ourselves to those we deem worse off.

We who are privileged should not use the suffering of people with less privilege or misfortune merely as a means of ameliorating our own pain. Yes, we can gain much-needed perspective by acknowledging that there are many who have it worse than we do. But if we stop there and make no attempt to connect with them and help them, then we are part of the problem. Despite our good intentions, we foster a mindset that uses other people.  

We who are privileged should also guard against using our privilege to avoid our own difficult emotions. I’m often tempted to use other people’s suffering to discount my own losses. It is, after all, one-hundred percent true that many people are suffering losses that far exceed mine. Yet it does me no good—it does them no good—for me for me to use them to avoid my own grief, rage, and fear. If I don’t acknowledge and process my own emotions, how can I possibly help anyone else?

If I don’t make some peace with my privilege—if I don’t make the most of the time I have to process—how can I hope to use my privilege, talents, and skills to foster positive change?

(That felt preachy. But I was trying to give myself a pep talk.)

Besides managing whatever privilege we have, what else might we do during this time of multiple crises?

• think and observe with precision.
• engage in a practice (like writing!) that enables us to protest injustice and to promote equity, kindness, creativity and love
• pursue professional goals that align with our personal priorities.
• savor the present
• connect with the Presence and pray.

And last but not least, praise.

Ahmad recommends that every day you “find ten things you’re grateful for in the here and now.” This is wonderful advice, a way of staying present, an antidote to anxiety and excessive nostalgia.

Gratitude is great! But praise is also powerful, and there is a subtle, but important difference between the two.

My late father-in-law, Donald Thiel, who was a Presbyterian minister, once told me that gratitude focuses on the self while praise focuses on the other.

If you express gratitude to someone, you’re focusing on something they’ve done for you or given you. If you praise them, you’re focusing on them, who they are and what they’re like.

Praise forces you look outside yourself. At God (if you’re a believer) and at the person, place, creature, or thing you’re praising.

I praise Alex Haley for his motto: “Find the good and praise it.”

I try to live by those words, and I had the best role model in Sister Marie Brinkman. She was my English professor and mentor when I was an undergrad at Saint Mary College in Leavenworth, Kansas, and she remains my inspiration and friend.

Sister Marie has an exquisite gift for seeing the good in everyone—not with sentimentality, but with accuracy and awe.

She just turned 94, and she is very ill. Because of COVID, I will probably not see her again, but I will always try to see the world as she taught me to see it.

I praise Sister Marie for teaching me that words are living things with the power to shape other living things.

I praise Maddie for reminding me that the act of writing is restorative and sustaining.

I pray we all find the words we need to move through the pandemic and heal our world.