3 Questions with Ellen Murray
ELLEN MURRAY is an award-winning writer and multidisciplinary artist whose work has appeared in Hidden Compass and the Tūhura Otago Museum, and on Otago Access Radio. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Otago in Aotearoa New Zealand, where her practice research investigates how scenographic, embodied, and dramaturgical magic(al) realist techniques might stage underrepresented aspects of the traumatic experience. Her scholarly and creative practices engage speculative forms and narrative possibilities to reimagine interior, affective experiences, including trauma and grief. All her work is dedicated to Raisin Bran and Apricot, her bicontinental cats.
Associate Editor Madelynn Paz talks to Ellen Murray about her work in Issue 77
The essay explores some of the ethical questions of creative nonfiction, particularly when transforming oneself or family into characters for narrative. When meditating on doing so with your father in the essay you ask, “In writing, does the memory supplant the man?” How do you feel about this struggle towards truth now, after completing this piece? What advice would you give to other writers struggling towards their own truth, as they see it?
As I see it, the personal and creative struggles are interrelated because they revolve around the idea of replication and what is lost in that process. Personally, in that line—“does the memory supplant the man”—I am attempting to capture what is probably a common experience in grief, especially if you lose someone young: that you have a finite number of memories, and each time you revisit one, it’s irrevocably altered, and you’re forced to confront the impassible distance between you and someone you love. Similarly, what my brother said about the truth of what happened not mattering struck me as a very postmodern approach that forces you to recognize truth as relative. There is a fallacy in nonfiction that we’re creating something more truthful or real than fiction. I think it is much more compelling to see a writer struggle for truth than to see them uncritically claim it, because in that struggle, we learn so much more about the precarious nature of experience and memory. So I would tell writers to embrace the multiplicity of truth and reality and write from that position.
I greatly appreciated how the essay addresses that writing about trauma can be cathartic but can also be re-traumatizing or even harmful to the writer. How did you care for yourself (mentally and/or physically) when revisiting difficult memories and flashbacks?
Writing this specific essay was the most helpful, caring thing I could do for myself because for almost four years, I had all these different threads weaving around my subconscious, so when I could finally connect them, I felt I’d achieved some mastery over my narrative. It’s empowering to be able to tell this story on my terms, with the details and mix of exposition and scene that I want to include—to say: ok, here is an experience where I lacked agency, but now I’m regaining it, not just because of the passage of time but because of my ability to make meaning through writing. There are a lot of factors that determine whether someone who experiences a traumatic event develops PTSD, one of which is the meanings they assign to the event and whether they can incorporate it into their worldview and perception of themselves. In this essay, I mention other earlier essays I’ve written that I won’t revisit, and I think that is an act of self-care. I have stories on submission that, perhaps, from a craft level, could use a revision, but I’ve closed the door on them. They served a purpose for me, at a specific time in my life, but revisiting them would be like picking at a scab, so I let them be, and I hope there will be new stories for me to discover and write in the future.
Is there anything you’d like to share about “On Writing (Trauma) that we don’t know?
For my PhD research, I look at the difference between representing a traumatic event and the experience of trauma, which are distinct. This essay, I think, is much more about the latter. It doesn’t have a fully written flashback scene. Flashbacks, as a narrative device, are convenient because they collapse linear time and allow us a causal understanding between then and now, but they’re also problematic for the same reason. In collapsing time, they also collapse the kaleidoscopic nature of human experience and especially the nature of traumatic experiences. I use the term hermeneutic in the essay, which is a method of interpretation. In reading about how my dad died, especially if it's written in a hyperrealistic scene form, I don’t want people to think they understand me, as a human being, which sounds paradoxical because art is so often in the business of empathy, but what I mean is that I don’t want someone, in reading my experience, to believe they have now mastery of it, because that’s something only I can claim.