by Patty Somlo
I discovered that writing could be healing decades before starting this book.
At the beginning, though, that knowledge was unconscious. I first started writing as a freelance—and later staff—journalist. While my initial attraction to journalism was that I wanted to write, I soon discovered that I enjoyed interviewing and getting to know people and learning about issues.
Journalism also attracted me because I liked having the opportunity to delve into personal stories, as a way to shed light on complex, and often divisive, issues. For this reason, I was drawn to social issues reporting, tackling subjects such as criminal justice, immigration, healthcare, poverty and mental health.
Needing a Break from Journalism, I Turned to Poetry
I loved the moment when, after hours of research and interviews, I got to write. As someone who had unknowingly suffered from depression and anxiety for years, it was a relief to be able to lose myself in writing.
I turned to writing for more of its healing qualities when I grew tired of journalism, or “worn out” might be a better description. I had worked for close to a year on an investigative project about the connections between the FBI and rightwing paramilitary forces known as “death squads” that were murdering civilians in El Salvador. To fulfill the grant requirements, I needed to get the final article or articles published.
A few days before my article was scheduled to be published in This World (the then-Sunday magazine section of the San Francisco Chronicle), one of the central interviewees for my piece, a woman refugee from El Salvador living in the United States, asked that I remove her story from the article, as she had gotten very scared.
Taking her out of the piece at the last minute would have killed it. Thankfully, with help from her attorney, I was able to convince the woman to let me use her story, and the piece ran. Once it did, I was more than ready, after a year of working on a depressing and difficult story, to take a break from journalism.
But I still wanted to write. So, I signed up for an undergraduate poetry class at San Francisco State University and dove into writing verse. Those early poems were awful, I’m sure, but working on poetry, I realized that writing could be healing.
And the poetry writing led me to eventually apply, and get accepted, to the Creative Writing Program at San Francisco State University. While in the program, I shifted my focus from poetry to writing fiction. Gradually, in creating short stories, I tapped into more of writing’s healing power.
How Writing Helped Me Transform Pain Into Art
Most of the stories in this linked collection, Hairway to Heaven Stories, have a magical realist element. Magical realism allows me to tackle serious subjects, while giving them a somewhat fantastical twist. It makes it possible to have sadness and joy mingle in the same story—and within a character.
Leticia Williams, the main character in the title story, reappears throughout Hairway to Heaven. She was my vehicle for getting into this book. Leticia is a recovering alcoholic—and occasional drug abuser—on the way to building a new, much healthier and happy life. I grew up in an alcoholic family, in which both my parents drank. A career Air Force officer, my father was away from us a lot. That left my mother with the task of raising three children mostly on her own, and she wasn’t equipped for that.
I first had the idea about Leticia Williams’ story when a phrase popped into my mind, that Leticia Williams had seen Jesus on her very last day of rehab. Leticia Williams not only quit drinking, but she has a faith that enables her to believe she can do anything she wants.
Unlike Leticia, who has found a certain inner strength, my mother felt and acted like a victim, something she taught me to be. My mother never stopped drinking, was depressed and felt hopeless about changing her life. The wonderful healing power of writing Hairway to Heaven was that I could take the reality of a difficult childhood I couldn’t do anything about, rewrite the story, and transform the pain into art.
In addition to Leticia, several characters in the book struggle with substance abuse. Yet, each of those characters finds a way to escape the tragic circumstances of their lives. With the street musician known as Horn Man, his music lifts him up from the sidewalk where he spends much of his time.
Writing Hairway, I had a very rough idea about this world that I wanted to portray. At the same time, I let the story take me where it wanted to go. I didn’t know ahead of time where the book would lead me. That miraculous part of writing is, I think, the most exciting, and of course healing, part.
While I managed to steer clear of alcohol and drugs in my life, so as not to end up like my mother, I have struggled with depression and what my former therapist referred to as “learned helplessness,” which I inherited from my mother.
Writing Hairway, I was able to discover brightness in even the most difficult lives, and that made me feel more hopeful and empowered.
Writing Fiction Gives You Freedom to Rewrite Parts of Your Life
I have written memoir pieces about my life in which I have struggled with how much personal information to reveal. Sometimes, that has been hard. A wonderful aspect of writing fiction is that, yes, the story and characters are connected to me, but they’re far enough removed that it’s not a struggle to write about them. Instead, Hairway allowed me to rewrite parts of my life and tell a more transformative story.
Hairway is set in what had been a predominantly African American neighborhood that is now in the process of gentrifying. Over the years, I lived in several neighborhoods like the one in Hairway—in Washington, D.C.; Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon; and San Francisco. Much of Hairway was inspired by people I saw every day on the streets near my Portland house.
I lived around the corner from a methadone clinic, and the bus I took downtown every day to work stopped there, to pick up clients and drop them off. We had a lot of drug dealing and many homeless people on the streets in our neighborhood, including a small group of Native Americans who sat on the stoop across from my house, smoking and drinking all day.
Just as I couldn’t change my childhood, I couldn’t alter the reality of these folks’ lives, which depressed me. But in Hairway, I could reimagine their stories being a bit different. And that made me feel better.
Writing Allowed Me to Feel Loss as a Normal Part of Life
As a military kid, I moved with my family once a year or every two years and continued that nomadic life as an adult. Until recently, I never quite felt at home anywhere. For the longest time, I didn’t understand that I needed to come to grips with the repeated losses I had experienced, in order to leave the past behind and move forward.
In Hairway, many of the characters have lost their homes, either because they are immigrants, have become homeless for some reason, or as a result of other circumstances, including divorce. So, these characters have all experienced loss.
Some, like Horn Man or the African immigrant minister, Dr. Abdullah, have lost nearly everything in their lives. But they have held onto something that keeps them going. In Horn Man’s case, it’s his music. In the case of Eva, who sleeps on the stoop, she has held onto the memories of when she lived in her pueblo and still practiced her Native American traditions.
As a child, I was not encouraged to talk about or grieve the losses, when I had to say goodbye to friends, schools, homes and favorite places, and move away. Instead, the message was simply to be stoic and look ahead. I learned this lesson well. But writing about loss, as I did in Hairway, allowed me to see and feel loss as a normal part of life, which one should grieve, and that something positive and hopeful endures, even after a dark time.
Writing Helped Me Feel More Empathy for My Mother
Creating believable characters requires that they be given flaws, along with positive qualities. Especially in my teenage years and after, I was only able to see my mother’s faults. I desperately wanted what I considered to be a “normal” mother, like I thought my friends had, one who didn’t drink and complain all the time, and who took care of me, rather than me feeling that I needed to take care of her.
It would have been impossible for me to create interesting and compelling characters with substance abuse problems if I didn’t have empathy for them. I definitely came away from the experience with more empathy for my mother.
Sometimes Your Own Story Bleeds Into the Book
I think my process included both consciously pulling from my own story and unconsciously having my story bleed into the book.
The conscious part was that I was drawn to focus on a traditionally African American neighborhood in the process of being gentrified after I heard a story on National Public Radio about the gentrification of affordable African American neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. and the subsequent pricing out of longtime residents. The story interested me because I had lived in D.C. in the sixties and seventies and was priced out of several neighborhoods after they had become gentrified.
I had also moved to Portland, Oregon in 2000, after rents in San Francisco, where I had lived for many years, became too expensive for my husband and me. Since I had lived in many gentrifying neighborhoods, I used my experiences in those areas, and even based some of the characters on people I knew or observed.
The unconscious part is that certain themes reappear in all of my work, both fiction and nonfiction. There is almost always a focus on place. I am often drawn to write about places where strangers come together and interact, and sometimes connect, and this happens in Hairway.
Part of this, I think, is that as an adult, I have mostly lived in cities where you frequently have lots of interactions with strangers that can be profound. For instance, Horn Man was partially inspired by a homeless man who many residents in my old Portland neighborhood knew in some way. He always had a dog with him, and one day the dog bit someone. After that incident, the police took the dog away. This turned into a huge issue in the neighborhood because everyone knew this guy, cared about him, and understood how much the dog meant to him.
Another theme that reappears in my work, and does so in Hairway, is faith. The characters in the book have strong beliefs that sustain them, which is true for me. As with these characters, faith in my life is connected to hope.
My process in this book was that I started with a thread and then followed it. Much of the initial writing was unplanned. But as the book evolved, I began to think about what it needed and plotted more of that out in a conscious way.
How Fiction Writing for Healing Differs from Journaling for Healing
The first thing I would say is that writing fiction or creative nonfiction is not the same as journaling. Journaling can also serve a healing function, but the end product of writing fiction or creative nonfiction needs to rise above delving into one’s problems to become art.
If a writer creates characters and stories too close to her real story, then memoir would certainly be a better genre, than fiction. Yet even with memoir, the writer needs to create a story that changes over time and has deep meaning, instead of being merely a recounting of events.
I think writing is most healing when the writer has a regular process, in which he or she enters the writing place, as if going into a sacred space. The more writing becomes a regular practice—every day, if possible—I think there’s a greater chance of reaping the transformative rewards that writing can give.
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Patty Somlo has received four Pushcart Prize nominations, been nominated for storySouth Million Writers Award and had an essay selected as a Notable Essay of 2013 for Best American Essays 2014. Her second book, The First to Disappear (Spuyten Duyvil), was a Finalist in the Fiction: Short Story category of the 2016 International Book Awards.
Her work has appeared in journals, including the Los Angeles Review, the Santa Clara Review, Under the Sun, Guernica, Gravel, Sheepshead Review, and WomenArts Quarterly, and numerous anthologies. She has two forthcoming books: a memoir, Even When Trapped Behind Clouds (WiDo Publishing), and Hairway to Heaven Stories (Cherry Castle Publishing).
Find more information on her and her work on her website and Amazon, or connect with her on Twitter.
Read more about Patty and her work on her previous Writing and Wellness posts:
- Featured Writer on Wellness: Patty Somlo
- Writing About the Pieces of Ourselves that We Leave Behind
- Why Writers Feel Depressed and How to Deal
Hairway to Heaven Stories: Weaving together the real and the fantastic, the 15 linked stories in Hairway to Heaven Stories introduce a diverse cast of characters living in a once predominantly African American neighborhood, now in the midst of gentrification.
In these 15 stories, faith plays a key role, either through traditional religion, spirituality linked to nature or belief in the promise of a better life. The stories also present a microcosm of many neighborhoods in cities throughout the country, in which people of different races, ethnicities, class and sexual orientation are living in close proximity to one another, with neighbors being both strangers and friends.
The collection was published by Cherry Castle Publishing, a black-owned press “that honors the vibrant multicultural voice of American literature” and embraces work “informed by the social, political and cultural vigor of our times.”
Available at Cherry Castle Publishing,