Survival KitWriting Collective

Someone told me once that when I spoke with my abuser, I needed to bring an umbrella, to protect myself from the inevitable storm of those encounters. But umbrellas rarely hold in storms like those. They upend. They fly away. At least for me. There I go, literalizing metaphors again.

I've been part of so many spaces in my life that had the trappings and signals of safety but were ultimately not safe, because of certain people, or certain policies, or both. As a queer person, I found it difficult to locate safety in spaces often built and protected for cis, white, heterosexual men. For a long time, I believed that being safe meant morphing myself into more palatable shapes and forms.

A big aspect of queerness is feeling unhomed and the imperative to build a new, safer home. This is a human feeling, though it beats deep in queer hearts that are constantly taught that they are empty or dysfunctional.

We begin with gratitude because it is extremely difficult to produce luminous sentences while narrating your own downfall in the background. Gratitude adjusts the spotlight. Suddenly, you are less tragic third act and more the witches foretelling the future of the world in Macbeth (because let's be honest, the witches are the epic heroes of that play).

Second, we practice noticing because that's where the real witchy work lies. The way that cloud looked like your mother's face when you lied about where you really were that night. That perfect Elton John metaphor that popped into your mind in the shower (maybe you sang it!). There is no separate "writing life" floating above your real one. It's all the same fabric. We are our own ghosts.

Lastly, we name what we're working on in our writing, or in our relationship with our writing, because saying it out loud keeps us from ghosting ourselves.

Small posts. Ongoing rhythm. A way to stay connected with the spirits of yourself and your work.

If you don't feel like you can answer all three, focus on the ones that call to you today. This process is not about perfection.

Pathways to speaking about trauma often open precisely when we stop trying to write directly about it. I learned that myself. The first hundred times I tried to write my own experiences, it failed. Then I started writing letters to Buffy Summers, and all of a sudden, memories I was never before able to write or speak started arriving on the page. For the first time, it didn't feel like my trauma was a grave I was buried in. I was the one with the shovel. With the pen. With control.

Here's what that has looked like in practice:

What all of these writers share: they came in wanting to write about something — people, memories, moments — and they left feeling unburdened by the imperative to bleed on the page. They learned that craft is its own form of protection. That a myth or a film or a fragment or a persona can hold what the body has been holding alone.

Trauma isn't a watch. It doesn't keep time the way we want it to. But writing can give it a form. And form is how we survive it.

This is not a space where someone sits in the corner and tells you what your work should be based on their guidelines of good writing. We go by what the author thinks. That is the voice we honor every time we discuss someone's work. Always.

No one is ever required to share anything. You can show up to read, to listen, to think, to write privately. Part of what makes us good writers is being good readers, and part of the way we know what we want to write is by listening to what other people write.

If someone ruptures the safety of this space, this will no longer be a space they are invited into. I've never had to enforce that. But I say it anyway, because safety isn't implied. It's designed.

I can't promise perfection. But I can promise that I will always actively seek to be aware of people's needs, actively build around them, and listen more than I speak. Hopefully, in this space, we can put away our umbrellas.

Erik Fuhrer is a queer, nonbinary poet, playwright, and scarf tie aficionado whose fashion sense is part Buffy Summers, part Blanche Devereaux, and part the lion from The Wizard of Oz. Their most recent book, Gellar Studies (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023) — hailed as "exceptionally delectable and devastating" by Addie Tsai — creatively engages with the work of icon Sarah Michelle Gellar to unfold personal narratives of queer trauma.

Erik was a 2024 final judge for UCLA's Allegra Johnson Writing Contest and was the featured poet at the 32nd Annual Virginia Woolf conference in 2023. They have taught high school, worked as a college counselor, and worked at numerous colleges, including The University of Notre Dame, The University of Iowa, and UCLA Extension.

Erik is also the author of 6 additional books of poetry and one play. A combination of My Little Pony and watching Sarah Michelle Gellar chew the scenery in All My Children, and everything since, solidified their queerness at a young age. Their Tenderheart Bear obsession may or may not be over.

Their memoir, My Buffed Up Life, which features Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a fictional interlocutor to express narratives of personal trauma and memory, will be released by Spuyten Duyvil in 2026.