My past has included long and complex trauma and my present includes the fallout from that. I am vulnerable because of it, but so are many people and so many more than you can imagine. In the current climate, I think this is something which warrants long & careful consideration.

So, if you are working with someone who is writing about things that have been personally very difficult for them, if you are their publisher, editor, or agent, check in on them. Not to analyse, but just to say hello. Feeling okay? If you are editing work from someone, a thought.

Writers can readily get too close to their work and struggle to see sluggish bits or things that are clear to them but which do not translate to their reader. There is always that gap; it's partly why everyone needs a great editor. Say someone is writing about their own life now.

This might be the first time they have formed into words an experience which felt intractable, possibly something which had required therapeutic support or something which failed to find it. Folks, it took me 25 years to find appropriate help. Let that sink in. Delicacy required.

I'm learning more about this now as I edit others'. I'm not a health professional, but I do know a thing or two about how this goes because people talk to me & because I have written auto-fiction about trauma & threaded it through other work - like my last novel, Saving Lucia.

So yes, check in - & writers, have YOU got someone to talk to as you do this? Bubbles come up & I know I have felt destabilised (coda: later, jubilant, because I knew I had helped others). If you are running memoir workshops or classes, it's really something to reflect on, I bet

Even if someone were not previously feeling vulnerable, it's possible they may start to feel that way & it is essential to listen - not saying anything which appears off-hand, dismissive. Why? Because that writer may, repeatedly, have had the veracity of their story doubted.

By which I mean, they were told or had it implied that what happened to them was insignificant or, in fact, that none of it happened. This can and does occur in families and within communities. So go cautiously & reflectively. I hope I have expressed these thoughts well.

By the way, I am not talking about me being particularly vulnerable at the moment, I mean in general terms and about practice in this area. x