Criminal Minds

 

Childhood trauma seems to inform a lot of literary novels. Do you pull from any fears, anxiety or trauma from your early life into your work?

I grew up in the inner city of Cleveland, Ohio, where traumatic experiences happen so often to children, that they don’t even recognize it as trauma, just a way of life. Gun violence, loss, fear and grief was often more prevalent than joy in my childhood. I lost my first friend to violence at the age of fourteen. My first phobia was born at the age of ten courtesy of a little movie called the Birds, the 1963 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and loosely based on a short story written by Daphne du Maurier. I don’t know what bird did what to her to inspire this truly horrific story, but if the author’s objective was to write a story that would establish a lifelong terror of birds in the reader, or watcher, depending on how you like to take your terror, mission accomplished.

In reality, I’ve not heard of a time when birds banded together with their beady little eyes, sharp talons, and deadly beaks, to attack humanity. But thanks to Alfred Hitchcock, I know every which way that they can. And that’s enough for me. Does this mean that Daphane du Maurier hates, or is terrified of those vicious little killing machines? I don’t know, but I do know the idea of taking something so ordinary in all of our lives and using it as a vehicle for terror was brilliant. And I believe we, each and every one of us writers, all do the exact same thing. It’s nice to be able to have that emotion to pull from. It is nice to know that trauma does give back, instead of just take.

When I was a little girl, I used to walk home from school alone. It wasn’t very far, maybe a quarter of a mile. There was this one house that I had to pass everyday that had dogs in the front yard. Not nice little puffs of fur that you could carry around in your pocket. This house had big, mean, scary dogs, that would bark, growl, and drool at me as they raced back and forth behind an old decrepit fence that I was sure couldn’t keep them inside, it they really wanted to get out. Turns out, I was right about that one.

One day, as I walked by, heart hammering against my chest, the dogs burst out of the gate and chased me down the street. I ended up climbing onto the hood of a neighbor’s van, screaming my head off until the lady of the house came out, and rescued me. I remember her holding my hand as she walked me the rest of the way home, me sobbing uncontrollably the whole way. Thus, ending any chance of me becoming a dog person. And making my first deposit into my trauma bank.

A trauma bank may sound sad, or maybe disturbing to some, but for us writers, those experiences don’t just add up to a new boat for your psychiatrist. They are a valuable unique source for us to draw from to make our work sing. There are plenty of people who have been chased by dogs in their lifetimes. Some even get caught, God bless them. But I’m guessing that if you asked a room full of people to describe their experience, it would read different for each individual. But we would all recognize the honest to goodness fear or trauma of the writer.

All these years later, I can still feel my heart pick up its pace at the sight of a loose dog. I like to think that that traumatic event and all the others that I’ve accumulated in these many years, are as useful as a thesaurus in its way. Because, no emotion for the writer, equals no emotion for the reader.  And that will never do.