...

The Rosebush has published a new article: On Making Trauma Legible: How Interactive Fiction Identifies Trauma. One of the games featured is After the Accident by Amanda Walker- who wrote the game based off of a revised poem of mine I had submitted to Seedcomp as a poem prompt.

It was definitely the highlight of my day to see it featured in the article. The original poem had been scrawled in my diary as a teenager, shortly after starting trauma processing work in therapy. Years later, I had gone through some of my old diaries- I've kept up the habit on and off since 2013, and stumbled across the original version of the poem.

It was odd, seeing such a sharply accurate view into the accident, years removed from the fact. The poem was subject to heavy fictionalization, before I submitted it to Seedcomp. That was a decision that I had some trouble with initially, but am glad that I made.

That distance between the truth of the accident- (which has left me with PTSD), and its portrayal in the poem, allowed me to finish it and hand it off to other people to make of it what they would. Had it hewn any closer to the truth, it would have been too painful to slice out that part of my life and memory for others to cut up and re-imagine.

I wes, and am still, astounded by the game that Amanda produced from my poem. It was a deeply empathetic, and terrific reading. It's essentially all that I could have hoped for in a rendition of a deeply, deeply personal work. I felt understood, in the cathartic way poetry has so often been a source of recognition of the self in others for me.

Teenage me would have been astounded and thrilled that a developer they looked up to had made a game based off of my work, and that it was written about in a venue shared by one of my writing idols.