WRITING AS THERAPY FOR MY DEEP PERSONAL TRAUMA

In this chapter, the author presents writing as therapy for her deep personal trauma. She utilizes her experience of uncertainty and fear in the middle of terrible grief of being orphaned to persuade people that they really should do something to safeguard their children. The author starts to work out how to best tell her parents' story so that her children and future generations could see them as real people, not monsters and victims, or simply statistics. It took the author nearly a decade to earn a first-class degree and a master's in creative writing and in that time, she began to write their story. Having lived with this story since 1969, she learned some valuable lessons by writing it as a novel. The author's writing means that their story has been told and generations to come will have the opportunity to get to know the real people behind the awful tragedy.