By Marlene Heloise Oeffinger May 14 2014

How do you describe suffering and trauma? How do you portray resilience and survival? These are questions that almost every writer asks him- or herself at some point. Myself included. These questions had recently become even more relevant to me as I was setting out to tell the life stories of my two grandmothers, Katharina and Marie.

Marie, my paternal grandmother, was born in 1912 in Brno, which back then was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She grew up during its collapse in World War I and the chaos that followed after. Katharina, my mother’s mother was born just after, in 1920, in Vienna. Her childhood was marked by poverty, in her own family as well as all around her. Food was scarce, money even more so. Both women’s lives changed during World War II – and not for the better. Both women lived through tragedy and hardship. Marie lost her father, becoming the sole breadwinner of the family at age 20. At the same time she also had to protect her family from captivation by the Nazis: she was Jewish, living in Nazi occupied Brno. To do so, she sold her soul in more ways than one. The fact that she spoke seven languages saved her from concentration camp. People like her were sought after – especially as censors in German prisoners of war camps. Her sudden marriage to a German SS doctor using forged documents also played a large part in avoiding incarceration. But the price she paid was steep; her mother was deported to camp Frauenkirchen in 1940.

Katharina also lived through adversity. Her first husband died young during the early days of the war under mysterious circumstances, making her too the breadwinner of her own family and her mother-in-law. She worked her way up in professions she had no education for, mostly with astuteness and innate intelligence, sometimes with lies. Later during the war, she lost another man to happenstance, the love of her life, she always claimed, marrying another instead to secure her position in the harsh post-war world.

And theses are only small glimpses into their stories. Their experiences shaped them into the women I later met and admired. But how to tell their stories and do them justice? How to best allow the reader to live through their experiences and emotions with them? Three writers, Ann Charney, Koethi Zan and Elise Moser, asked themselves the same questions when they worked on their recently published books, ‘Life Class’, ‘The Never List’ and ‘Lily & Taylor’, and spoke about their experiences in ‘writing about women living and surviving trauma’ at the CBC’s Cinq à Six at Montreal’s Metropolis Bleu Literary Festival 2014. Each of their books deals with women living through adverse situations, and the consequences and effects it has on them. But each writer approached the subject differently. I was curious to learn about their approaches and experiences.

“For me it was about how our past experiences can be bleed through and color our present-day decisions”, Ann Charney told the show’s host, Jeanette Kelly. For her book, ‘Life Class’, she drew from experiences growing up as a child during war. Nerina, her main character, grew up during the war in former Yugoslavia. Yet despite her gruesome past experiences, Nerina tries to faces her current life with optimism and resourcefulness. Charney describes Nerina’s past through memories of her childhood, but never very graphically or explicit.

It’s a very different story for ‘The Never List’ and one I can somewhat relate to. “I grew up in the 80s, back when there were television shows about kidnapping cases”, Koethi Zan remembered. She recalled how parents at the time didn’t seem to be aware that their children paid attention to these shows. But to her, hearing these, often horrific, stories, was influential. Enough so that it inspired ‘The Never List’, the story of a pair of young women abducted from college even after they carefully followed every precaution imaginable, and held prisoner for years in a dark cellar. Zan’s background story is one I can relate to. I also grew up watching shows like “Files XYZ Unresolved”, which explicitly discussed the details of horrifying kidnapping cases, most of them children, teenagers and young women. These stories shaped how I was always aware of my surroundings and looked over my shoulder in dark streets later in life. Interestingly, unlike Charney, Zan describes the suffering of her main characters, both physical and emotional, in stark and graphic detail, similar to the shows that influenced her book. “It wasn’t for shock value or sensationalism, but I wanted to show what it was that these women went through on all levels. What affected their later lives, the consequences it had on their lives, after they escaped”, she explains. Her approach works. Excerpts from the book show it to be a compelling tale on the futility of ceaseless preclusion, but rather the necessity of perseverance and what it entails for different people, even after having gone through one and the same experience side-by-side.

Elise Moser’s story, ‘Lily & Taylor’, is not the result of past experiences or TV shows. “It was a short story about a girl that I wrote some time ago, and as I went back to it once again, it evolved into something bigger, darker.” Her book tells the story of two young women that are domestically abused, first by their parents and later in life by their partners. Moser doesn’t hold back in the telling of the story. Her images are bleak, the situations often violent and the language explicit. A short excerpt from the beginning of the book, where we find ourselves in the morgue with Taylor viewing her older sisters body after she had been murdered in an incident of domestic violence, holds a grim violent tone that carries on through much of the book. But despite the violence, sex and harsh language that weaves through her story – or maybe just because of it – it is a gripping emotional, cautionary tale, exemplifying that the use of harsh language can be so much more than for shock value. In her case, it made the book real, putting us in the shoes of Lily and Taylor, living their lives through their eyes.

So what is the best approach to writing trauma and survival? To tell stories such as those of Katharina and Marie, my grandmothers? In the end, the fact of the matter is that there is none. There is no right or wrong approach, no too much or too little, because after all it always depends on the story you are telling, its characters, its setting, its time – and you as a writer. Words are a limitless toolbox at our disposal, and in the end it is up to us as writers on how to use them to weave a powerful tale that will captivate the readers.