Look Who's Talkin': The Healing Power of Putting Words on Paper

Art is the medium in which man and landscape,
Form and world, meet and find one another.
              —Rainer Maria Rilke

The Healing Power of Putting Words on Paper
My father was shy with words. He expressed himself on thick creamy paper with soft, black charcoal pencils, creating exquisitely fine, poetic images of the various environments in which we lived, such as old Panama City and the Canal Zone during World War II. Each drawing told a story, complete in itself, but also was part of a larger picture. His collected drawings were like chapters in a novel, or interrelated short stories. My mother and all of her family were accomplished oral storytellers and children in her family were encouraged to be heard as well as seen.

I have been telling stories in one form or another since I was a child and my family sat on a big front porch after meals, drawing pictures, scribbling, and telling stories to one another as their digestive. Like my father, I am shy when it comes to entertaining orally but, while I can draw and have a strong visual sensibility, I did not inherit my father’s genuine talent for telling stories with pictures. Like my mother, I am better with words than pictures but, like my father, my stories are best once on paper.

Becoming a scribbler at an early age allowed me to reconcile the fact that I am neither my father, nor my mother but a unique blend of the two.

After Hurricane Katrina hit, certain things jelled for me. My father, I remembered, would lose himself in frantic explosions of artistry just ahead of the time we were to abandon one environment he loved for a new experience. It dawned on me that he was grieving in advance of leaving and working out his grief by embracing details he adored, like a lover. The drawings would be packed carefully in tissue and, then, be awarded a place of honor in the new home. By then, his sorrow was in the past, he enthusiastically embraced his new life, intent on capturing its myriad details. I remembered, then, too, that many of the best stories told on that long ago front porch were about men and women who had recently passed away. The stories frequently were picaresque tales of men or women who had lived by their wits or humorous memories of times the tables were turned on these “heroes” or “heroines”. These were oral histories, some right on point, others artfully embellished as a sort of reward to the deceased for being forced to die and leave them behind. It was a fine method these southerners had for working their way through loss—this communal remembrance of loved ones.

My husband and I evacuated just hours ahead of the storm to my hometown, Charleston, SC. We were among the fortunate with a comfortable refuge. For the first week or so after Katrina, however, all I could do was watch CNN, becoming more and more horrified at what was happening to our brothers and sisters left in the clutches of disaster—left to suffer and die without food and water or medical care or the comfort of loved ones. I cried and cried and screamed about the unbelievable levels of uncaring incompetence, the foolish statements of the uncaring, the sight of the soul of a great city dying before our very eyes for want of competence and caring in the most powerful nation on earth. My rage was a form of grief, not for myself or my family, but for my New Orleans. After years of saying everything important to me by putting words on paper, however, I could not get in touch with myself until required to write a story. My best friend in Charleston, editor of the major newspaper, insisted that I do a piece on New Orleans for the paper. Writing this first essay, later editing and contributing to a collection of essays about our city, participating in a “poetry heals” workshop about Katrina, and blogging on the internet, I came to grips with my true feelings about New Orleans. I came to understand how deep is my hatred of America’s longstanding inability to provide enough good food, enough good housing, enough good education, enough of the good life for all of our good citizens. And I discovered just how much I love my New Orleans, warts and all. Admitting this love of place in words on paper is the beginning of my recovery from a period of mourning and subsequent deep and almost overwhelming depression.

Our children all should be encouraged to get in touch with their innermost feelings by creating word pictures on paper, signposts to direct them on their journeys through this strange land called life. Once they start, they won’t be able to stop. They’ll be addicted.

Putting words on paper, words which are true, engaging in the creative process, is better than swallowing or snorting or injecting oneself with drugs, prescribed or contraband, to combat depression. It’s a better high, any day.

—Rosemary James

Rosemary James is a former reporter for The New Orleans States-Item and WWL-TV; author of the non-fiction book, Plot or Politics?, and editor of My New Orleans: Ballads to the Big Easy by Her Sons, Daughters and Lovers. She has contributed stories and essays to a variety of newspapers, magazines, both local and national, as well as internet blog sites; and is supervising editor of the literary journal, The Double Dealer, published annually by an organization she co-founded, The Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society, Inc. Ms. James has a second career as a renovator and decorator of historic properties.