“That someone else will know it, too”

Reauthoring Trauma through Narrative Witnessing and Verity Laughton’s Burning

Abstract

This creative-critical hybrid essay explores the author’s personal experience of adapting bodily traumas into collaborative art through a process of being witnessed, while also witnessing another’s unknowable traumas through the script of Verity Laughton’s play, Burning. The author draws on trauma theory and narrative studies to demonstrate the recursive nature of trauma and our adaptive relationship to stories, from participant to witness.