A Year on the Trauma Circuit: Taking Your Poetry to New Audiences
- elichvar
- Apr 1
- 5 min read
April 1, 2025
by Lynnell Edwards, poetry faculty and associate programs director
On the eve of the Kentucky Book Festival last November, a novelist friend came up to me at the writer’s reception and joked, “I saw that you were on the trauma panel.” I laughed, realizing of course, yes, my new release, The Bearable Slant of Light, had in fact landed me a moderator spot on a panel of authors whose new works grappled with stories of mental health and difficult life paths. Initially, I wasn’t sure what to make of this new categorization of my work, though I couldn’t very well deny that the book’s core poems, with their focus on my younger son’s onset and struggle with bipolar disorder, did, in fact, represent ten years of trauma for him, and for our family.
But what I didn’t then realize was that this focus would open up a whole new set of forums for sharing my work. While of course I hoped that the work would find readers among lovers of poetry generally, including the academic poetry community, as it has turned out, spending a year on the “trauma panel”—or, more accurately, the “trauma circuit”—has allowed me to take the work to audiences well beyond the ones I initially envisioned.
Over the course of my six collections of poetry, opportunities for reading and sharing my work have fallen into a few categories: bookstores, of course; a handful of book festivals, which rarely do a good job of promoting poetry; campus venues (usually the only opportunities for a paid appearance); and independent reading series, typically hosted in a bar or coffee shop. A few exceptions over the years have included a museum of glass in Tacoma, Washington, where I read from Kings of the Rock and Roll Hot Shop, a chapbook exclusively about glass-blowing, and the Filson Historical Society with This Great Green Valley, a chapbook of poems retelling well-known narratives of Kentucky’s pioneer history.
But over the course of this first year with The Bearable Slant of Light, I have had opportunities to take my work to audiences and venues not typically host to poetry readings.
Not surprisingly, I have found audiences within the mental health provider and support communities, including two virtual readings, combined with a brief writing activity, for parent support groups. Like the clinicians, social workers, therapists, doctors, and lawyers who often present as part of these groups’ educational programming, I offered, through poetry, another tool for helping family members understand and support a loved one struggling with the many-faceted challenges of mental illness. I framed my work, and the expansive language of poetry, as another way to tell the story of mental illness and to discover meaningful ways of navigating their own emotional challenges.
Locally, I appeared in person with a psychiatrist for a NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) member event that was part presentation, part Q & A. I was surprised at the number of books I sold to people who confessed, as I signed their copy, that they usually didn’t read poetry.
The bookstore reading has offered another opportunity to frame the work in ways that might engage different audiences as well. At my local independent bookstore, readings and book signings are often promoted as conversations between the author and, usually, another author in a similar genre. For my local launch there, I asked a friend who was also the director of the social work program at the University of Louisville and whose son also struggled with mental illness to join me. Additionally, the bookstore worked to secure a sponsor for the event: a local behavioral health organization that produces a music festival each summer. The organization promoted the reading through its networks. For my Portland, Oregon, launch, my conversation partner was a local doctor who founded and is president of the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative. Our conversation ranged over the challenges and importance of creating meaningful narratives out of the chaos of mental illness, interspersed with readings of several poems. In this first year I also shared my work with a local musicians’ and artists’ cooperative as a “Wellness Wednesday” event for co-op members in conjunction with one of Louisville’s public radio stations, earning me a radio spot as well as a new audience.
While I have always enjoyed and felt greatly affirmed by audiences and colleagues who have invited me to read at their campus, in the current financial climate those opportunities are disappearing. I did do a number of unpaid undergraduate class visits regionally in part as recruiting outreach, but I also spoke with the students in a graduate course in Spalding University’s doctoral program in clinical psychology. And it was in this class that I received the most thoughtful questions and perspectives about the work, which was itself reward enough.
Though I hope that the poetry in The Bearable Slant of Light will continue to find audiences long beyond this first year on the “trauma circuit,” my experiences with alternative audiences have suggested that there are many opportunities for sharing work beyond the bookstore, the campus reading, the noisy bar or coffee shop.
Not all collections of poetry are “concept” books, and it may not be as obvious where your work might find unexpected audiences. But thinking broadly about major themes and subjects in a collection can open up opportunities for reaching new audiences.
Maybe you have an anchoring sequence of poems that explore the natural world. Propose a reading for the membership of an environmental organization, or at a state park or natural history museum. Include the director or a board member as your conversation partner. Poems that speak to history and/or current events might find audiences with a local historical society, various themed museums, or member events for advocacy organizations. Work that broadly reflects on grief might find an audience with a hospice organization; poems about illness or addiction would find eager listeners in a support group. A handful of ekphrastic poems is an easy pitch to a museum or gallery; consider bringing in an artist—even the exhibiting artist— for a broader conversation about how an ekphrastic poem continues the conversation a work of art has begun. And do I really need to enumerate the opportunities for sharing work about parenting? Or spiritual writing? And always, always seek out co-readers or conversation partners who bring something, in addition to affection for poetry, to the discussion.
In each of the unconventional spaces where I have discussed and shared my work, I have left the conversation unexpectedly energized, newly convinced of poetry’s power to reflect the human experience and speak to a broad range of communities. As poetry has its brief moment in the sun during National Poetry Month, more than ever, we poets have the chance to take our work into unexpected places. And when you do, be prepared to receive just as much as you give.
Lynnell Edwards is poetry faculty and Associate Programs Director for the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. The author of six books of poetry, her most recent collection is The Bearable Slant of Light (Red Hen Press, 2024). More about her other writing, including reviews and essays, at lynnelledwards.com.