Writing workshop helps wildfire victims heal from 'surreal days'

A painting created out of ash hung on a wall at the Santa Rosa Arts Center where eight wildfire survivors gathered with paper and pens in hand on a quiet Saturday in June.

They studied the ash with fascination, reminded of the overnight flames that left debris and devastation in October.

Then they wrote.

“Hot winds cooked our skin and a burning sky of embers and detritus too thick I couldn’t see clear to the neighbors’ doors the forceful air pushed us back like a hand we pushed forward…” wrote Danielle Bryant, who lost her Coffey Park home in the fires.

The free Healing by Writing workshop led by instructor Margo Perin had no critiques for the flow of words that poured out of the fire survivors. Instead, the group was encouraged to write, share, and process the grief and trauma of the fires.

Perin, who has taught writing for over 30 years, prompted the group with questions. What brought you to the workshop? What’s your fire story? What past traumas were triggered by the fires? How has this changed your relationship with nature? What did you learn? What messages would you like to share with the community?

“We kept writing and writing and writing. I was surprised at how much people wrote,” said Cynthia Phipps, a 53-year-old Bennett Valley homeowner who heard about the workshop on the Santa Rosa Firestorm Update page on Facebook. “I think writing is very healing.”

During the first of two sessions of the workshop - June 2 and 16 - Phipps realized through her writing that the fires had triggered her fear of losing someone close to her. When the group read their work aloud to each other, at least half of them cried.

“The only way out is through,” Perin said. “When you are able to put your experiences into words, it does something much more concrete. You’re able to externalize it.”

A few students mentioned to Perin how they often heard people say the fires are long over and it’s useless to keep thinking about them, which the group wholeheartedly disagreed with. “It’s not something you should expect people to move on from overnight. It takes time to process,” said Phipps, who wrote.

During the workshop, Danielle Bryant, 49, wrote about the night of the Tubbs fires in her poem “The Last Night.” She and her husband fled their home on the eastern end of Coffey Park, and when they returned in the morning - like thousands of others - their house was burned to the ground.

“We are just irreversibly changed,” Bryant said. “I think there are very few visible signs of trauma unless you go to the neighborhoods that burned.”

She visits her homesite at least once a week, which she says is almost like visiting a gravesite - “a place to grieve, a place to hope.” And it’s always eerie to drive past the one intact home nearby, then come across burned trees and homesites, she said.

They plan to rebuild. She misses her old neighborhood community, books, artwork, paintings she inherited from her great-grandmother. “Your whole identity, your whole history is annihilated. It’s so different going back. Everything’s turned upside down,” Bryant said.

“Everyone was living a nightmare,” she added.

Bryant always enjoyed writing, but after the fires she found it difficult to focus on putting pen to paper. She turned to contemporary dance, an art form she felt was easier than writing in the wake of the fires. She put her journal away for months. She felt her emotions were too dark, too heavy to put into words.

When she saw a post about the Healing through Writing workshop in June, she told herself, OK Danielle, it’s time.

The workshop attendees, most of them strangers at the start of the workshop, quickly bonded over the shared experience of surviving the wildfires.

“It still affects us,” Bryant said. “It certainly bonds us in a way that nothing else has or ever will.”

While the workshop was a “painful, but cathartic experience,” Bryant said the group was in full favor of another session.

The free writing workshop was funded by a grant from the Poets & Writers, a national literary nonprofit organization. Perin plans to apply for other grants to fund another writing workshop for wildfire victims in the fall, close to the first anniversary of the wildfires that devastated the region.

Maya Khosla, poet laureate of Sonoma County, expressed the desire to film the next workshop for a documentary, Perin said.

With fire season in full swing now, some residents are feeling retraumatized, Perin said. Hundreds of people can go through the same thing but different people are affected differently.

“The workshop provides not only personal transformation, but community transformation. There is a collective intent,” Perin said.

Perin has conducted other writing workshops with a focus on healing for medical professionals, cancer patients, migrants, refugees and incarcerated men and women at the San Francisco Jail, the Sonoma County Jail and the San Quentin State Prison.

“I think these workshops are vital and we need more of them,” Phipps said. “Our society doesn’t give a lot of room for grief, but it does deserve that time.”

The workshop inspired Bryant to write a second poem called “Ending Days,” which she read aloud. “Surreal days followed more surreal days / And a searing pain without end,” she wrote.

But life is full of ups and downs. During one visit to her homesite earlier this summer, Bryant noticed wildflowers growing. Five foot tall dandelions, weeds, chamomile and Swiss chard. Growth among the ruins.

She cried tears of joy this time.

“Oh, this is so beautiful. This is a sign of hope,” she said recalling her reaction.

You can reach Staff Writer Susan Minichiello at 707-521-5216 or susan.minichiello@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter@susanmini.