Trigger Warnings: Writings on Narrow Escapes from Sexual Assault - Paperback

by Joan Hawkins (Editor), Kalynn H. Brower (Editor)

We began this volume in 2017, shortly after Donald Trump was elected. We began working on it in response to the outrage we felt over the Access Hollywood Tape, in which Trump openly admitted that he randomly assaulted women. While previous presidential candidates' campaigns had been derailed when sex scandals were reported by the press (Gary Hart, for example), Trump seemingly faced no consequences, even when multiple accusations of physical molestation and rape were made against him. His election and imperviousness to charges of assault seemed to signal a new step in the normalization of rape culture. That while lamentable, sexual harassment and assault didn't really matter in the political arena. Or at least had no public service consequences for perpetrators. It was in this climate that we began soliciting stories, poems, essays and nonfiction pieces about the assault and attempted assault that is a striking aspect of so many women's psychosexual histories. The original working title of the book was "Rape Escapes" because the pieces we solicited focused on deflection, escape and survival. We renamed the volume "Trigger Warnings" to set a different tone and to reflect the fact that so many of the pieces-workshopped and developed in public readings-required trigger warnings to the audience. As we worked on the book, sexual harassment, rape, and the brutalization of women continued to serially dominate the news cycle. Even though Trump himself remained immune to prosecution, other powerful men-many in the media industry-were fired or resigned in the face of the newly emergent #MeToo Movement's revelations. Every time we sponsored public readings of contributions to this volume, audience members would approach us to say that they, too, had a story, and ask if we were we still accepting submissions. We were also asked why we felt the need to tell such painful stories. "Because of Maya Angelou," we invariably said. Angelou was raped when quite young and lost the ability to speak for 5 years. When she finally recovered her voice, she found she had a lot to say. Her wonderful autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is banned in many schools because of its frank and graphic depiction of rape. People frequently asked Angelou why she'd felt the need to describe the assault in such detail. Her response comes very close to our purpose in compiling this volume. She habitually said that she wanted people to understand the complexities of rape, and that she hoped any rape survivor reading her work would be able to move beyond blaming herself, open her own cage, and fly free. We hold the same wish for our readers, and recommend they read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as a companion volume. All but one of the pieces in this anthology were authored by writers who belong to The Writers Guild at Bloomington, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting written and spoken word in Bloomington, Indiana and its environs. Most of us are published writers and all of us have other careers. Ruth Novaczek, the author of the Introductory piece in the book, is a London-based filmmaker and artist. We contacted her when she posted an earlier version of this story on her Facebook page. It was such a strong piece, we thought it would be perfect as a kind of thematic introduction. "Rape-escapes," she wrote when she sent us permission to use her story, "are a good way to show that every young woman has probably had one, and we're the lucky ones."