Introducing: The Understory Conversations
A new interview series on writing about trauma, and examining where the deep work grows
Welcome to Life after Trauma; I’m Clare Egan. I’m launching something new today: a series of intimate conversations about the emotional and practical work of writing about trauma. Make sure you're subscribed to get them in your inbox:
But, first a quick announcecment: our next Monthly Creative Gathering will take place on September 29th at 7pm Irish Time.
My goal with these virtual gatherings is to provide a space for folks to find community in their creativity. When I hosted The Artist’s Way earlier this year, community was what made the experience special. Many of us have been quietly toiling in our creative work for decades, hungry for a deeper sense of community and belonging. These monthly gatherings provide a space for the Life after Trauma community to chat about our stumbles, celebrate your wins and feel supported through every season of your creative life.
Let me know if you’d like to come along!
(The gathering is open to all paid subscribers. If you’d like to attend but can’t manage it financially right now, feel free to contact me and we’ll work something out!)
Last week, I spent many hours sorting through dozens of documents which each hold a sliver of my story. One of my goals for this year is to organise the many hundreds of thousands of words I’ve written towards my memoir, and to figure out a way to be able to dip in and out of this gargantuan project.
After days of laborious reading, sorting, copying and pasting, I pried myself away from my desk and took a walk in the park near my house.
I am so lucky to live near this park. It’s rich with dense vegetation, a particular treat in an urban setting. I know it’s pathways like the back of my hand. I know which trees were felled during which storms. I know which puddles the dogs most like to run through. I know how the light falls as the sun slips beneath the horizon at the end of another day.
Forests are magical places. As we worked our way through The Artist’s Way earlier this year, I often struggled with the book’s insistence that God should be part of our creative work. Religion hasn’t been a safe place for me. Bringing God into my creative world just felt ick. But when I replaced ‘God’ with Mother Nature, I felt things click into place. I am awed by nature. I believe in its magic and mystery. Nature is my spiritual practice. It’s my safe place. It’s a cauldron of continuous creativity that inspires me everyday.
In forests, most people look up. They are awed by the scale of the trees, the richness that teems within their branches. But that abundance distracts us from the epicentre of the forest’s creative force.
The understory is the rich, bountiful growth that exists around our feet.
It’s a shadowed space where small trees, shrubs, and seedlings persist. To survive, they have to adapt to low light and limited resources. It’s a place of quiet resilience and slow but steady transformation. It’s a place where life unfolds in relative obscurity. Visitors gaze up at the canopy, but the modest understory is where the little guys thrive.
I don’t want to labour the metaphor, but there are obvious parallels with writing about trauma. Our inner lives unfold in similarly shadowy places. The shade is necessary. It allows us to work with difficult truths before they’re ready to face the light. The deep unseen work of recovery happens in our quiet, private moments. Our bodies carry our traumas. They live in our muscle memories, our nervous systems and our subconscious thoughts.
In the understory, we get to explore the tangled roots and knotty contradictions that make our stories uniquely ours. The understory is dense. It can be hard to navigate. It requires patience, stillness, and a deep respect for the larger ecosystem of our lives. Only a fool would underestimate the scale of the work that’s unfolding on the forest floor. It’s never showy or grand. It’s easy to miss if you aren’t paying careful attention.
The understory is the foundation. It’s the essential private work that makes everything else possible.
What grows from the understory doesn’t remain there. With time, the fragile shoots get stronger and rise into the canopy where they become part of bigger, societal stories. Stories that change lives, and help readers feel less alone.
For a while, I’ve been wanting to bring more voices into the conversation. As our community grows and deepens, I want to share the platform with writers who have something important to teach us.
Today, I’m launching The Understory Conversations: a new interview series on writing about trauma, and examining where the deep work grows.
Guests will be invited to share the emotional and practical tools that make their work possible. I’m curious about:
The rituals that undergird their writing lives.
How they manage the triggers that arise when they write about trauma
How they decide what belongs on the page, and what isn’t ready to be shared quite yet
How sharing their work has impacted their lives. Has it changed how they relate to their traumatic experiences?
How reading impacts their writing life
And, what they wish readers understood about writing about trauma
I’ve already reached out to a few writers I admire to invite them to join this conversation. But today, I’d love to get your suggestions for writers you’d like to hear from. They can be active on Substack, or not. All kinds of writers are welcome: memoirists and screenwriters and poets and fiction writers and everything in between. Self-nominations are also welcome. If you write about trauma and would like to be part of this new series, please leave your details below. I would love to learn more about your work!
Conversations will take place in video format (through Substack Live), and in written questionnaires. Writing about trauma is never easy, and too many of us are navigating these murky topics alone. For that reason, The Understory Conversations will be free to read.
Deep and continued thanks to my paid subscribers who make this community possible. I am so grateful for your support. 🙏
💕 If this piece resonated with you, please tap the heart below to help spread the word.
💬 In the comments, I’d love to know what writers you’d like to hear from through The Understory Conversations. Self-nominations are very welcome so if you write about these topics and would like to be part of it, I’d love to hear from you!
I love your forest metaphor Clare - that feels like such a beautiful depiction of the work we do out of sight. I'm looking forward to this series of conversations. As you know, trauma work is my passion. I'd be curious to be involved if it felt like a fit, though I do tend to steer away from talking publicly about my own childhood trauma experiences, simply because it intersects so much with other people's stories that I do not have permission to speak about.
Over the last year of unsettledness and unemployment I have found forests to be one of my true friends when I found out lots of my real life friends were not as there for me as thought they were. I would to be part of this Clare and have lots to share about trauma recovery and writing practice on difficult topics. Happy to explore further to see what resonates.