Laura Milner teaches writing and healing, addiction and recovery writing, and composition at Georgia Southern University.  An associate professor in the Department of Writing and Linguistics, she holds a PhD in English and a master’s in Liberal Studies. Her doctoral dissertation was on grief writing, and her primary research explores the therapeutic benefits of writing and telling trauma. Her academic narratives have appeared in Out in the South (Temple University Press, 2001) and in journals such as Women’s Studies Quarterly, Intertexts, JAEPL (Journal of the Assembly on Expanded Perspectives in Learning), Lore: an e-journal, and in the forthcoming issue of Disability Studies Quarterly. In addition to college teaching, she has led community-based writing workshops for diverse groups:  people with HIV/AIDS, mothers whose sons were murdered, and business/professional women in Savannah, Georgia. She has studied trauma with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk and received grants to bring creative writers such as Dorothy Allison, Mary Karr, and Abraham Verghese to southeast Georgia.  Last October, she presented “Action Beyond Autobiography: Breaking Silence on Sins of the Father” at a trauma conference in Arizona, and she recently developed a new course, Writers and Writing in Film. Before moving into academe in 1993, she wrote for metropolitan daily newspapers in Birmingham, AL, Nashville, TN, Savannah, GA, and Norwich, CT

LAURA’S TECHNIQUES TO UNLOCK YOUR STORY:

As both a writer and long-time teacher of writing and healing, I lean on author Dorothy Allison’s advice in Skin:  “Tell the story you are most afraid to tell . . . there is magic in it.”  Isn’t this what film wants most, magic that moves an audience to feel or think differently? I ask reluctant or blocked writers to explore questions such as: Where does this story live in your body? Who are you protecting by not telling?  And who might be well-served if you let the story out? Many find their way into the story in the process of answering these questions. I also invite them to consider the larger, cultural context of their story—race, gender, size, sexual orientation, disability, socioeconomic and educational status, and other factors that shape people and events. I urge writers to steer clear of demonizing or deifying characters and to focus, instead, on the thread of human desire that connects us all.