Transplant Talk: Writing Your Story

Writing Your Story: Finding Narrative Wisdom in Your Body

This month’s Transplant Talk, hosted by the Lung Transplant Foundation, features best-selling author Emily Rapp Black and lung transplant recipient Rosa Singer discussing how writing can help you tap into the narrative wisdom of your body. The talk covered the importance of creative writing as a tool to explore and reclaim your story, especially when dealing with medical trauma.

The Power of Reclaiming Your Narrative

Emily Rapp Black, a creative nonfiction author with a self described non-normative body and a history of medical trauma, discussed how writing can provide a “privacy firewall” against intrusive questions from others. Instead of having to constantly explain personal medical experiences to strangers, writing allows you to frame your own story and share it on your own terms. This act of telling your story is a way of metabolizing experiences that may feel unmanageable and putting a narrative frame around what may feel “unframable”.

According to Emily, writing about medical trauma and non-normative physical experiences is an act of service to others and to the long history of human stories. By writing, you are carving new ways to be in the world.

The “5 Moments of Rupture” Writing Exercise

Emily shared a simple yet powerful writing exercise called “5 Moments of Rupture”. This exercise helps you explore and write about a medically traumatic experience by breaking it down into five key moments. A moment of rupture is a point in time after which everything changed for you.

To do the exercise, simply list the first five moments of rupture that come to mind. Don’t overthink it; just trust your instinct. The moments can be from a single event, like a bad day, or a long-term journey.

Once you have your five moments, you can approach them in a few different ways:

• Sensory Dump: For each moment, write down everything you remember about it using your senses—sights, sounds, smells, and how it felt. This doesn’t have to be a perfect narrative; it can be just a list of memories.
• Narrative Building: More complex moments, like a memorial, can be explored more fully with different components, like a short story.
• Connecting the Moments: After writing about each moment, look for how they connect to each other. This can help you find a cohesive narrative with a beginning, middle, and end.

This exercise, while simple, is deeply embodied and helps bring forward things your mind wants to talk about but might not have immediate intellectual access to. The goal is to trust your subconscious mind, which is “so much smarter than you give it credit for”.

A Reminder for All Writers

Emily reminds us that there is “no wrong way to do it” and “no right way to do it”. The only important thing is “the doing of it”. Everything you need to write a compelling story already exists within you. By putting words to your experience, you can create something evocative and surprising, and ultimately, teach the reader something about themselves.

Lung Transplant recipient Rosa Singer also shares several of her poems and short essays, as well as discusses her writing process and the way that poetry and pieces of creative nonfiction take shape in her mind.