I was not plan­ning to start post­ing again until I could begin in earnest the series I want to do on clas­si­cal Iran­ian lit­er­a­ture – and inter­rup­tion after inter­rup­tion after inter­rup­tion has kept me from get­ting to the point where I am ready to do that – but some­thing hap­pened this week relat­ing to a for­mer stu­dents of mine that I need to write about. It is actu­ally quite urgent, prob­a­bly not to any­one who reads this blog, but cer­tainly to the woman whose mes­sage is at the root of this post, and it makes a point that can­not be made strongly or fre­quently enough: We, espe­cially but not only those of us who have sur­vived sex­ual abuse of any kind and are strong enough to do so, need, need, need, need, need to speak up loudly and often about the real­i­ties of that abuse and how it has shaped our lives (because, whether we real­ize it or not, it shapes the lives even of those of us who have not been abused, either because we know some­one who has or because it shapes the cul­ture in which we live.) You may have seen this post in which I put up a YouTube video of an inter­view I gave to Jack­son Heights Poetry Fes­ti­val, an orga­ni­za­tion on whose advi­sory board I sit. In the inter­view, I talk about the rela­tion­ship between my expe­ri­ence of child sex­ual abuse and the fact that I became a poet. The sub­stance of what I said there is not impor­tant here. What is impor­tant is that watch­ing this video moved a for­mer stu­dent of mine to send me a mes­sage in which she told me – and the tone of the mes­sage sug­gests that I am the first per­son she has told – that she was sodom­ized a cou­ple of years ago and had been try­ing to deal with it by pre­tend­ing it didn\‘t hap­pen. Even more impor­tantly, though, and more urgently, she said that she sus­pects her three-year-old daugh­ter is being sex­u­ally abused at the girl\‘s father\‘s house and that she [my for­mer stu­dent] freaks out just think­ing about the pos­si­bil­ity. As I read the mes­sage, it sounded to me like she was say­ing this freak­ing out keeps her from act­ing on what she intu­its, which is scary, because even if it turns out she is wrong – and there was no indi­ca­tion in the mes­sage that she has any vin­dic­tive­ness towards the girl\‘s father that would lead her to make a false accu­sa­tion (my point being that she might be wrong in good faith) – she needs to tell some­body, first to make sure that her daugh­ter is safe and, sec­ond, to alle­vi­ate her own anx­i­eties (and maybe under­stand, if she is wrong, what trig­gered her unfounded sus­pi­cions in the first place).

I responded in all the pre­dictable ways – thank­ing her for her trust, acknowled­ing the courage it took for her to speak out, and encour­ag­ing her to get in touch with some­one about her daughter\‘s sita­tion, though since I was run­ning out the door, I couldn\‘t take the time to look up cri­sis hot­lines or other phone num­bers – and I am hop­ing to hear back from her, but what her mes­sage made me think about was, as I said above, just how impor­tant it is for us as a soci­ety to talk openly about the real­ity of sex­ual abuse. More, though, it made me think about how impor­tant it is to talk about that real­ity not just in con­texts where sex­ual abuse is the topic – i.e., talk shows, con­fer­ences, sem­i­nars, etc. that are set aside for the spe­cific pur­pose of address­ing sex­ual abuse – but also, sim­ply, merely, in the con­texts of our daily lives, because abuse is always already part of our daily lives. Because you never know who is lis­ten­ing and how impor­tant your words might be to them.

I am remem­ber­ing as I write this some­thing that I have writ­ten about before, that I was not even think­ing about when I started, but that is worth talk­ing about here: An inde­pen­dent study I did five or seven years ago with two women who told me they wanted specif­i­cally to work on per­sonal essays that dealt with the sex­ual abuse they had expe­ri­enced when they were girls. They were both in a cre­ative non­fic­tion class I was teach­ing and one had writ­ten an essay about her abuse that, while obvi­ously cathar­tic for her, worked nei­ther as a pub­lic doc­u­ment of per­sonal tes­ti­mony nor as art, and it was art she was try­ing to cre­ate. The prob­lems in the essay were indica­tive of the dif­fi­cul­ties abuse sur­vivors have speak­ing out about their expe­ri­ence. Under nor­mal class­room cir­cum­stances, I han­dle this by direct­ing the stu­dent to some exam­ples of writ­ers who had dealt with sim­i­lar top­ics; I might have a kind of \“ther­a­peu­tic\” con­ver­sa­tion (and I put that word in quotes because I do not mean that I would try to do ther­apy) to explore whether or not the stu­dent was really will­ing and able to delve into the topic at the depth and level of com­plex­ity it required. (I do, after all, have to assign a grade to the work my stu­dents hand me, and the last thing I would want is to give a low grade to an essay in which some­one is strug­gling to come to terms with, or even just to name, the sex­ual abuse they\‘d sur­vived because they were not yet able to write about the expe­ri­ence at the col­lege level.) If the answer is no, then I offer the stu­dent the chance to write about some­thing else; if the answer is yes, then I try to get them to artic­u­late some of the dif­fi­cul­ties they were hav­ing in writ­ing the paper as a means of talk­ing about how to deal with them in writerly terms; and I always encour­age such stu­dents, if they are not in ther­apy, to seek counseling.

The woman in my cre­ative non­fic­tion class, how­ever, was not sim­ply ful­fill­ing an assign­ment I had given. She wanted to be a writer and she told me quite explic­itly that she saw me as a role model, and so I was faced with the deci­sion of whether to share with her my own expe­ri­ence of try­ing to write cre­atively, to make art, out of the fact that I had sur­vived child sex­ual abuse. For rea­sons that are not so rel­e­vant here, I decided to do so. Then, when a sec­ond woman in the class also began to write about her expe­ri­ence of child sex­ual abuse, and she told me that she too wanted to be a writer, and she was a damned good writer, when the first woman approached me about doing an inde­pen­dent study, I sug­gested that the two of them might work together. The story of that inde­pen­dent study is really quite remark­able, but the part of it that is rel­e­vant here is this: At the end of the semes­ter, all inde­pen­dent study stu­dents at my col­lege are required to present their work at a col­lo­quium; if they don\‘t, they don\‘t get credit. As the day of the col­lo­quium drew near, my stu­dents grew increas­ingly ner­vous, for all of the pre­dictable rea­sons, but one that stood out was their con­cern that the fac­ulty and admin­is­tra­tors present would think the sub­ject of their work inap­pro­pri­ate for an aca­d­e­mic con­text. So I told my stu­dents that I would intro­duce them by talk­ing about my own expe­ri­ence of abuse and how mean­ing­ful it had been to me to be for them the kind of mentor/role model that just was not avail­able to me in the 1980s when I started to talk about my own abuse. At that time, peo­ple were just start­ing to rec­og­nize the sex­ual abuse of girls. No one, as fas as I know, as talk­ing in any sub­stan­tive way – or at least was being given a forum to talk in any sub­stan­tive way – about the fact that boys were being sex­u­ally abused as well.

And that\‘s what I did: I intro­duced those two women by nam­ing myself as a sur­vivor of sex­ual abuse and telling a lit­tle bit of my own story. It was a water­shed moment in my life and in my career as a teacher. Not that I had any prob­lem talk­ing about my abuse, but I had always kept that part of my life sep­a­rate from my pro­fes­sional life. It was \“per­sonal,\” and so I had not really thought much about the degree to which it informed my prac­tice as a teacher and a writer, my polit­i­cal stances in the world, etc. and so on. There is a great deal more to say about what it has meant to me to inte­grate these parts of myself, and I will, I hope write more about that. What I want to say here is sim­ply that, if it were not for that inde­pen­dent study and the women who worked with me that semes­ter, I would never have talked in that inter­view about the rela­tion­ship between my abuse and my becom­ing a writer as eas­ily as I did, and I would never have had the chance to encour­age my for­mer stu­dent to act on her feel­ings about her daughter\‘s sit­u­a­tion, and my encour­age­ment might turn out to be the thing that moves her to act, and we all know what kind of dif­fer­ence that could make in her daughter\‘s life (if she is being abused), and in my for­mer student\‘s life as well.