Formal Experimentation in Trauma Writing with Grace Spulak

Formal Experimentation in Trauma Writing w/ Grace Spulak

Location: Autumn House Press: 5614 Elgin St. Pittsburgh 15206
Date & Time: October 24, 10am-12pm

Age Group: 18+
Skill Level: All Levels

Description: Trauma is a fraught subject for writing and writers. Write it badly and we run the risk of trauma porn, creating stories that focus on harm for the sake of harm. Or we run the risk of stories that reduce everything to a single traumatic event, narratives that eschew complexity and complication, that fall into the trap of Parul Sehgal’s lamented trauma plot. And there be social and political considerations to writing about trauma. Whose stories are all about trauma? Whose stories get reduced to trauma points?

But trauma and harm are realities for many writers, and to avoid trauma as a subject can feel like an erasure. And to write realistically about trauma, we may need to write stories that focus on its reductiveness, the way it can seem all consuming. Some of the most successful writing about trauma uses various hallmarks of traumatic experience—flashbacks, memory gaps, repetition, rumination—as narrative form. This class will explore how trauma features have been repurposed as formal experimentation by writers such as Gayl Jones, Maria Fernanda Ampuero, Monica Ojeda, and Marie-Helen Bertino. It will also contain a generative component and create nurturing space for participants to think about how formal experimentation might support their own writing about trauma.

By the end of this workshop, participants will have learned how trauma features have been repurposed as formal experimentation by a variety of successful writers. Participants will also have had the opportunity to generate writing in a nurturing space while focusing on formal experimentation in their own trauma writing.

The Facilitator:
This two-hour class is led by writer, Grace Spulak. Grace is the author of the story collection, Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think (April 2026), winner of the 2025 Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize. A writer and attorney based in her home state of New Mexico, she holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a JD from Harvard Law School. Her work was awarded Witness Magazine’s 2021 Literary Award in Fiction and has appeared in the Ploughshares blog, Nimrod International Journal, and Southwest Review, among others, and her work has received support from Trillium Arts, New Mexico Writers, and Poets & Writers.