How to Write About Trauma, with Author Jessica DuLong

Jessica DuLong is a Brooklyn, New York-based author, editor, book collaborator, and writing coach. Her recent book, Saved at the Seawall: Stories from the September 11 Boat Lift, is the definitive history of the largest ever waterborne evacuation. Her first book, My River Chronicles: Rediscovering the Work that Built America, won the 2010 American Society of Journalists and Authors Outstanding Book Award for memoir. A United States coast guard licensed marine engineer, DuLong served aboard retired 1930, New York City fireboat, John J. Harvey for two decades, 11 years as chief. She knows how to write about trauma, having served in New York waters during the September 11 rescues in 2001. Listen in and read along as we talk. 

Jessica: Thank you so much for having me.

Marion: I’m delighted you’re here, and I love your work, and your books are so inspiring. So let’s set this up for people so that they understand who you are. It was only in early 2001 that you had moved to New York City. You were what? Six months into a hands on apprenticeship as a marine engineer on September 11. So where were you that day, what were you doing, and what were you doing in the days that followed?

Jessica: That morning I was doing what a lot of people were doing as soon as we realized what was going on, which was wandering around wondering how we could help. I was in Brooklyn, and I remember wandering around my neighborhood just desperate to find any way to contribute. I tried to donate blood, but they were already completely overwhelmed, and I remember this very painful conversation with this police officer. I said, “I want to help. I want to do something to help. Is there anything I can do?”

He looked at me and he just had this look of exhaustion and numbness in his eyes, and he just said, “They don’t know what to do with me.” That just put me in my place, and made me realize that I was not going to be able to be useful. It’s because I was only six months into this new life as a mariner that it didn’t even occur to me until the next morning what was fireboat John J. Harvey doing? I had really just started on the boat, I had just started to get to know this crew, and I called, first thing that morning, the 12th, and I said, “Where are you?”

And my crew mate who answered the phone said, “Where do you think we are?” And I said, “How do I get there?” Which is very different from many of the mariners who I interviewed for my book Saved at the Seawall, because the identity of being a mariner was so ingrained that they knew exactly, in a split second, what they could do to help, what was the specific skillset, or equipment, or all of the above that they had that other people didn’t have in that moment.

So the pilot on fireboat John J. Harvey, so this is the person who is an FDNY firefighter who served aboard the boat, and they’re called pilots on a fireboat because there is a captain, which is a fire captain, so it’s a separate sort of hierarchy. The pilot is the one who steers the boat. He had worked with this boat for decades, and the boat was retired, and he retired, and then they were rejoined in their retirement. And he came out when this boat was now a preservation project. Old vessel, 1931.

Actually, yesterday was fireboat John J. Harvey’s 90th birthday we just celebrated. She’s quite a dignified old lady. So Bob Lenny had just made it to the World Trade Center site, and so he was able to tell me how to get there. I was able to get to the Navy yard because, as people will remember, the bridges and tunnels were shut down. There was no way to get into Manhattan. I was in the wrong borough.

So merchant mariners ended up taking me over by boat, and people who were here may recall that on the 11th and actually the 12th, the way that the wind was blowing was basically pulling the column of horrendous smoke toward Brooklyn. And so that was what I was headed through on my way around the tip of Manhattan. Just arriving there, and every part of me bracing myself for what was to come. The thing that happened that was an odd both and was that I rounded the corner of the tip of Manhattan, and I saw this array of work boats that were lined up along the seawall, and I saw fireboat John J. Harvey in that mix boats.

I could see that the boat was pumping water. It was actively doing the work for which she had been built. And so at the same time as I’m tense and bracing myself, I had just had this swell of love for this boat, and swell of love for this opportunity to do something, anything to help, and that’s where I ended up on the 12th.

Marion: It’s just an extraordinary concept, that coming around the bend of Lower Manhattan. You published your first book. I just want to make sure everyone understands that first you wrote My River Chronicles, which is rediscovering the work that built America. And it’s a memoir written as a deeply personal tale that reveals the history of hands on work in America. And you also take on the 400 year history of the mighty Hudson river.

But you write from this very specific place. So obviously, you’ve got this astonishing thing which is September 11th that’s happened, but you start in your book writing to write this first book. And I think what fascinates me most about the order, and the decision, and the place you write from is, my audience is writers, and I think it’s very helpful for them to hear how you write about our own acts of service without being self-serving.

Doctors, firefighters, everyday people running from a place of civic duty to absolute heroism run the risk of putting themselves in a pulpit. But instead, you shoot from down here. So how did you avoid that in both books? How did you write it, and from what level place did you decide to write?

Jessica: That’s such a good question, and it’s so absolutely delicious to talk craft of writing, so I just wanted to thank you again for the chance to do this because it’s my favorite thing in the whole wide world.

Marion: Me too.

Jessica: Go figure. I do struggle to answer this question though, because for me, I guess I feel like there was no risk of that because really, this is just very, very frank, I don’t have pride or a sense of heroism in terms of anything that I’ve done in my life. That framework doesn’t fit for me. I actually wrote a piece for Daily Beast about heroism and how I think actually it ends up creating a trap, and it ends up dehumanizing everybody. Both people who are put on this pedestal and lionized as heroes, and everybody else who doesn’t realize.

We end up not realizing that we actually can take steps every single day toward goodness, toward right action. If we think that heroes are somebody else, then we won’t necessarily take advantage of our own agency. So that’s the larger trappings. But from a writing perspective, for me, the position from which I wrote the first book is quite literally underwater, because I worked in the engine room on fireboat John J. Harvey, I was brand new, I hadn’t grown up around boats.

I grew up in New England, and a lot of times people assume like, “Ah, you were a water person.” And I really wasn’t other than this whale watching trip which I recount very briefly in My River Chronicles where I basically just threw up my crab meat sandwich. That’s it. I was not a mariner.

Marion: Yeah, you did.

Jessica: Yeah. Sorry. It just paints the picture of the naif that I was is when I started out. My father’s a mechanic, and he has a brilliant mechanical mind and is always coming up with interesting solutions for problems with whatever he has on hand, and that experience has been very, very, very helpful in terms of my work on the boat. So I did come with that, but not a maritime thing. So the way it works on the boat is it’s a bell boat. So what that means is that the actual changes to the propellers that move the boat through the water, the changes are made in the engine room by me, at the time that I was working there at the control pedestal.

And so that means I’m quite literally in the boat, so I’m dry, but I’m underwater, and my view was a waterline view. And so that was the tangible, lived reality for me, and so perhaps that’s what informed the writerly position. Really, I’m just infinitely curious. I was meeting the most incredible people, I was so hungry to understand this harbor that had… I had a vague sense of the historic heft and all of the change and history that had been made in this harbor, but I couldn’t see anything except a pothole view.

And so I was fascinated, and that position of fascination and curiosity, and just genuine love for learning about what was going on around me and what had gone around me for 400 years, that’s a position from which I wrote because that’s just genuinely how I felt.

Marion: I love it. From the portal, from the water line, it’s great, and it’s exactly the kind of answer that we need. You talked earlier about what you were doing on September 12th. But another thing you were doing on September 12th was standing in front of a downtown message board on which people had left instructions to, and about those who were missing. We all remember seeing those message boards. You had a reporter’s notebook in your hand, and you wrote them down.

You didn’t quite know what you were doing at that moment except for you were doing what we do. I want to talk about that reporter’s notebook for a second. In my career at The New York Times, in my many years of reporting since, that notebook has been what stands between me and either total terror, utter despair, complete naivety sometimes. You go running out of a building to cover your first murder, fire or whatever, and suddenly all you got on you was the notebook.

This is of course pre-phone, where we see everybody just recording everything. What does that notebook do?

Jessica: Wow. Well, it can do a lot of things for good and evil, I feel like. Maybe not evil, that’s a bit overstated, but we can use it as a shield in the way that you’ve described. I imagine it’s probably the same as somebody who’s a photojournalist or who’s filming something in that there’s the camera between you and the horror that’s unfolding, if that’s what you’re documenting, and that can feel like a shield. But there’s this whole barrage of things that are coming to me in having to address this question.

One is the reality that it used to be that a press pass and a shield would be enough that you could go into a riot on the street or something, a protest, a something, and that would be enough to protect you, and it is not the case anymore because there are all of these really horrific examples of that idea that being part of the press could shield you from what’s unfolding around you. That’s not there anymore. We no longer can walk out with that confidence.

So that’s one piece that’s occurring to me. The other thing is that in a way, using it as a shield, it’s adaptive, but it’s also false because it creates a divide between us and our sources. And so I’m sure as recording devices come in, we all had this moment where as soon as we hit stop on the recorder, that’s when the amazing thing comes out. It’s almost like the recording device is serving as a barrier between us and our sources. So that’s one thing. Or I guess that’s two things.

But what was happening for me that day and what I was writing in the notebook, which I still have, it wasn’t an official message board at all. It was literally missives written in the dust. So it was desperate messages from family members, and so I just remember very vividly, it was Lieutenant John Kriskey call home, and it was only years later that I found out that he was among the firefighters who had not returned home. So I didn’t realize that he was among the dead in that moment, and there were bits of poetry that people had written down, and it was just this desperate writing of words to send a message, to cry out in grief and pain, to say we’re never going to surrender, all of these things.

And so it’s so interesting to think about the written word and all the weight it carries for us. For me, pulling out that notebook, maybe it was an attempt to shield, I don’t know. It’s hard to reconstruct. It was absolutely instinctual. I just had to put these things into words in some sense that maybe someday I would understand what the hell had happened here. I don’t know if I do understand, but it was absolutely necessary. It was mandatory. And I feel like a same way, it was the same desperation that other people had when they took their fingers, gloved or otherwise, and traced in the dust of the people that we were looking for to write those messages.

Marion: That’s exactly it. And I think you write so beautifully that for some years, you avoided conversation about your time at Ground Zero. And I’m going to quote you here when you write, “I was wary of taking this on. A decade after the terrorist attacks, I still struggled with the psychological fallout from my service at Ground Zero.” And you write in this beautiful, generous, and terribly revelatory piece in Brevity magazine about receiving the opening salvo from your editor suggesting another book.

Specifically, she encourages you to expand a piece you had published about the spontaneous boat evacuation, and you’re reluctant. So here’s my question. What are we asking a memoir writer to do when we ask her to go back into trauma? Are we asking her to reanimate it? Are we asking her to look at it from here? I coach memoir writers all day, and this discussion is daily. You work with writers as a book editor. What do you say when the place in which they are reporting is some previous trauma? What advice, both personal and writerly, do you give to people?

What are we asking them to do and how do you get them to go do it?

Jessica: Such a big question with so many different pieces to it. And I spend all day on this as well as you. I think one thing that’s really, really interesting to me is the changed public consciousness of trauma and what that means. Now, of course the danger is that the word gets overused and misapplied to things that are challenging, not traumatic. But what is really interesting to me is the neuroscience. And in my next life, I’m going to be a neuroscientist so I can figure this all out, because I find it so fascinating.

Marion: Okay, good.

Jessica: So I’ll get it worked out, and then I’ll come back in time and tell everybody what I learned. But the power of narrative, even just from a healing perspective, not from a craft perspective. From a healing perspective, the narratives that we tell ourselves are absolutely transformative. They can transform our lives from version A to version B, and there are moments where all of these tools that different mental health providers are marshaling to make that happen.

So first off, I bring this mindfulness of some of the healing modalities around trauma, and it’s something that I’ve independently researched a lot so that I can be an informed guide as people do the hard work, as my clients do the hard work through memoir. One thing I tell people is that separating out… So say you have your list of your core scenes you need to cover. Some of those are going to be pleasant to write. Is writing ever pleasant? I don’t know.

But they will be relatively easy. The emotional tenor of that is go going to be maybe uplifting even. And then there are the neutral scenes where it’s just like, “I need to get these details down and da, da, da, da, da,” and then they’re the ones that are going to take a toll, and so mapping that out ahead of time to the extent that you can. Obviously, scenes come and go as you’re crafting a memoir. But mapping that out so that you can balance out the workload and not do all the heavy stuff all at once, and give yourself options.

So if you’re deep in a scene that is just taking you into a really bad spiral, you can stop, and then we’ll answer also about adaptive strategies in that bad spiral moment that you can still be moving forward on your project, but in work that will take less of a toll. So that’s one thing. The other is I try to listen really carefully and hear, in my clients, the subtext, the thing that they’re not saying, their resistance, and be mindful about where that’s coming from, and to try to buoy and support the work that needs to be done to make sure that they are pushing, but in a sort of gentle way.

And I’m sure you do this too. So sometimes it’s like, “Okay, you have this really hard bit that you need to write, and what are you going to do? What scaffolding can we erect before and after? How can we put you in a place, make sure that you have a buffer so that you’re not going straight into some marketing meeting for work immediately afterwards where you have to like…” And also honoring and encouraging people to pay attention to their bodies, because so often the trauma will have physiological effects.

I’m working on a project right now where the author is having all of these health issues, as very much in tandem, I won’t say as a result of, but certainly in tandem with the deepest work that she’s doing about the trauma. So helping people remember that we are corporeal beings, and that this is another way that these things manifest is something that I do too.

Marion: Those are just great perceptions and tremendously helpful. You write a lot about the pressure on you, the cost to you. Well, you don’t say the pressure on you, but I perceive it to be the pressure on you of writing your second book. It’s called Saved at the Seawall: Stories from the September 11th Boat Lift. And it Chronicles the largest boat lift in history. It’s bigger than Dunkirk, bigger than anything ever in the history of water rescue.

After the plane’s collided with the towers, and before the coast guard put out a call for all available boats, it’s this astonishing spontaneity of boats coming and taking somewhere between 400 and 500,000 civilians from Manhattan in less than nine hours. Whoa. And we talk in publishing about finding a market differentiator. Few people recognize the significance of the evacuation effort that unfolded that day, and this book takes that on. Nobody else had written that. But that’s a lot of pressure on you.

And so let’s talk about that pressure to take on this one thing that nobody else has chronicled. You wrote about how, when you chronicled the 400 years of the Hudson history, you thought that was a big job. This is just one day. Maybe this will be easier, and then you discovered it wasn’t. How did you keep your distance in that? You covered it a little bit for other people, but for you specifically, how did you maintain? Is it exercise? Is it knowing that you’re hovering over it, or you unable to keep your distance some days from this astonishing assignment?

Jessica: Very much all of the above. There were days that were extremely hard. And it was the reporting, the writing, the structuring, that just knocked me out. And also, if this is a show for writers, the realities of publishing. This book went through, and I’m not even going to get into it, but it was ill fated at so many levels. The marketing department blew up, and all these things. So all of these barriers that stood in the way of me doing what I really did feel the pressure. I still do feel the pressure of the fact that there are people who told their story to me, who they hadn’t told anybody else.

They had protected their family members from even the darkest stuff and the raw details, and we cried together. When you’re doing this work, whether it’s with sources or if you are doing this work with clients who are writing memoir, when you’re walking with people through their most harrowing moments, there’s a huge responsibility that comes with that. And I remember actually making sure that by the end of our call, I guess I won’t reveal who the individual was, but at the time, my source had a newborn and we had all these technical difficulties of trying to have this conversation, and then it was like, when’s the baby going to wake up?

And I had to make sure that I got my source back to safety in their story before we hung up, because I didn’t want to leave them hanging in a desperate moment. And so I feel tremendous pressure to do right by the sources who gave so much to share this history, and I feel an obligation to history because what happened was 10 years had gone by, and still this story had basically gone untold. That just became impossible to me, and so I was determined that the story had to be told, and I knew that I had a very particular lens that I could lend to this story. This was my community.

And my allergic reaction to the whole hero narrative, I guess I don’t think I had the clarity that I have now all these years later, but I feel like that drove my decision to do this and to do my best by it.

Marion: That’s good. I like that. And you mentioned structure before, and you have this terrific recounting that you do about an aha! moment you had with structure. I know these things can happen because I’ve had my head on my desk many times, rolling it back and forth over the keyboard, begging for help. And usually, it’s because I’m shooting from the wrong angle. And then you go to a movie or you get in a conversation with a child, and somehow something pops into your head. Some metaphor, some slant of light, and suddenly you see a new way to tell the tale.

And these things can be really hard to trust, but they are very real, these revelations, and they should be heated. And you write that your manuscript was headed straight for the rocks, which I completely get, and then you pick up a copy of Walter Lord’s among other books, Walter Lord’s great book A Night to Remember, that chronicles of the final moments of the Titanic. And you start to shoot from a different point of view. You talk about pointillistic painting.

So just please, for the listeners, explain pointillistic painting is that dot, dot, dot, dot dashes of color that unmixed color goes directly onto the canvas. I’ll help people with that a little bit. But tell me how the pointillistic aspects, Lord, what does he do? He has a rapid fire list of names at the beginning of the book, and you realize that he’s going to skip through those people, or it’s going to be very fast, or there’s something you get from that. Can you just let us in onto what happened to you that allowed you to finish this book?

Jessica: So the pointillism was absolutely huge, and I was worried about it coming off as some sort of… I guess I was worried that it was weird, but how do you trust these things when these flashes come? In my case, it was absolute desperation. I had no other options. So I had to just go with it because really, what I realized was that fractions of inches or fractions of seconds determined everything in terms of people’s fate that day.

The Venn diagrams that got created for time and space, and I poured over maps and aerial views and before the attacks and after the attacks and how space and time connected, and timelines, and all this stuff. And I overlaid these, and I started drawing… I’m not an artist. I started drawing and mapping out how people’s stories intersected. What was amazing was that stories that had nothing to do with each other ostensibly, actually ended up overlapping in particular on this one particular vessel called fireboat John D. McKean, where all of these disparate characters ended up converging at a certain point, which was extremely helpful obviously to realize that.

But the pointillism, that whole idea is that they use color theory, pointillist painters, and they just put the green next to the… I’m not going to get this right. But the green next to the red, next to the blue, whatever, and the colors blend, and our eye fills in the detail. What I was noticing was that that’s the same way that constellations work. Is that you have this night sky, all of these individual sparks of light, and people have created stories around those.

So that you see Orion’s Belt, and you see the Big Dipper, and the Little Dipper, and Copernicus or whatever. I’m not an expert on astrology or astronomy either. But just the way that the mind can fill in the blanks, and that, I realized, was what was happening on the pages of Walter Lord’s book. That this cascade of names is just pouring over you, and it’s almost sending a message to the reader that it’s not any one of these individuals whose stories are going to carry the lead. Instead, it’s the wash of them coming over you.

That’s what I endeavored to do with Saved at the Seawall, is to just tell you little bits and pieces about these individuals so that the whole story comes together in an amalgamation almost, a juxtaposition that is informative in some way.

Marion: That’s great, and I get it. The idea of trusting it, as you said, it came to you in true desperation. And I told a story before about I wrote and reported a book for a year and a half on behind the scenes in the world of forensic science, and I kept just writing it from the pulpit. It was like every other book on forensic science has ever been written from up here. From you people can’t see what I see. And then in desperation, took myself to an afternoon movie, and it just happened to be that football movie, “Any Given Sunday.”

And it’s all shot from the turf, which we just don’t see football that way anymore. Now it’s all shot from drones and stuff. And I literally got up in the… It was like, “I got it. I figured it out. I know how to do this.” I was with my husband at the time and he was like, “You might be over caffeinated,” because he just…

Jessica: Oh, the people who go on this journey with us.

Marion: Yes. They do deserve a special honor because they listen to this stuff, or worse, you don’t tell them. You don’t say it out loud. Or they just look blank. There’s no discussing this at Thanksgiving dinner with your in-laws from wherever. They’re like, “Yeah, whatever, honey. Have another glass of wine.” You’re honoring this great tradition of annotation. We have on us a lot, and we have to pull from it. As we start to wrap this up, I’m so curious.

You have such an astonishing range. You’ve published in CNN.com, Newsweek International, Rolling Stone, Psychology Today, New York History, Huffington Post, it goes on and on. But also, the topics that you’ve taken on, everything from gender to this marvelous world of the waterfront, and I wonder what you’re pulling from. Whenever anyone asks me to explain my eye, I always say that I’m a sports writer’s daughter, because I am. My dad was a sports writer, which is a sort of portamento profession that combines the delight in the games that people play, and the precise language that allows us to chronicle those games.

And I watched him love his life, and I wanted that too. So you’re also a postpartum doula. Hello. Define that for people, please, and then just let me in, please. Just tell me, when does that piece of you get pulled from in your writing life? I just wonder how she gets annotated.

Jessica: Oh, so interesting. Okay. So postpartum doula is basically someone who helps families, newly expanded or newly made families, reckon with the fact that there is now a newborn that has arrived, and now what do we do? And so the integration of this new baby into the home, and how do we manage? And so the idea is coaching and guiding and evidence-based information, as opposed to a baby nurse or other things where someone will swoop in with their magical nanny, baby whisperer cape and just take care of it for you.

So it actually, very much, very much connects with my work with clients to help their book dreams come true. And so it’s walking side by side with somebody as they are creating a manuscript. Manuscript obviously, that’s a late stage of this because there’s so much other work that goes in before you even get to the drafting stage a lot of times. But helping to guide people through that is just really immensely satisfying. Books are puzzles, and telling a story is a puzzle.

And so I find that I’m just insatiable, and I love figuring out new ways to make the story come together, and I love thinking about it from the reader’s perspective, as well as what do they need? I was just totally stubborn when people told me that you needed a beat. I was a freelancer starting out, they’re like, “You need a beat. You can’t be all over the map.” And I was just like, “No.” I just stomped my feet and banged my fist, and I said, “I’m so curious.”

I’m immersed in the Hungarian revolution right now, I’m immersed in itinerant preachers in the south, I have all of these clients working on all of these different things, and I just love learning about these things and jumping into a world, and then saying, “Hey, look at this cool thing I learned,” and putting it on the page in a way that the reader can receive it the best way possible.

Marion: Well, that absolutely connects you to the postpartum doula in just the best way. Thank you, thank you so much, Jessica. It’s been an absolute joy to talk to you. I’m so grateful that you came along today.

Jessica: Oh, such a pleasure, and I thank you for this. I feel very indulged that I was able to talk about writing craft, because so often I’m just talking about the story. So thank you so much. It’s such a treat.

Marion: You’re welcome. The author is Jessica DuLong. Get her books, Saved at the Seawall: Stories from the September 11th Boat Lift, and My River Chronicles: Rediscovering the Work that Built America wherever books are sold. See more on her at jessicadulong dot com. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont, our assistant is Lorna Bailey.

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