"Living Through the Flood": Meet Madeline Jones, River River Books Intern

My name is Madeline Jones; friends call me Maddie. I am a fifth-year writing student at Grand Valley State University in Michigan and an intern this fall for River River Books and Moist Poetry Journal. I hope to graduate in the spring with a major in writing and minor in digital studies. I have loved writing since I was a child, and so I am thrilled about the chance to work with this press and journal. Poetry to me is an exercise in freedom — from convention, from worrying about grammar or spelling, even from a writer’s own self-judgment. The only prerequisite is inspiration.

Inspiration sprouts under specific conditions. Poetry has taught me that stress or anger can be a catalyst for growth. Intense feelings are perfect soil for your words to grow in. The first time I experienced the feverish inspiration that led me to poetry I was seventeen, sitting in an English class while angst bubbled up inside me like carbonation in a dropped Coke can before spilling words onto the page. If it sounds uncomfortable, that’s because it was. Similar to the need to eat or sleep, I needed to fill pages to feel revitalized. I found that I could use writing as a form of meditation. All those awful feelings about change diminished when I captured them in writing; fear felt inconsequential once I wrote it down. Tumultuous times became valuable writing opportunities.

I was going through a period of my life that involved what I called hideous change; change was hideous because it involved uncertainty and loss of control. I had known hideous change — outside of my mind's inner turmoil — in the patterns of Michigan’s beautifully unpredictable weather, where salmon sunsets erupt into violent windstorms within the same half hour.

I felt this wrath of change on the afternoon of May 22, 2019. In the early hours of the morning, the Poseyville dam on the Tittabawassee river in Michigan burst due to the heavy rainfall received the night before. The land mass containing the water within the Poseyville dam was pushed to the side, causing a severe flood in the township of Freeland. Millions of gallons of water reclaimed its natural floodplain. Some townspeople remain in their homes until the flood water captured the whole first floor. The national guard arrived on boats to retrieve those who remained in their sunken homes. On Sanford Lake, a pontoon was sucked under a bridge and crushed while onlookers recorded a video feet from the edge of the rushing water. Trees were ripped from their roots and an entire house was carried from its residential neighborhood to the post office parking lot.

Sanford Lake was gone, emptied into the basements, ditches, and driveways of the lakeside residents. Belongings were scattered, across yards and driveways as if every house were having a garage sale. The property damage was catastrophic — and residents close to the river were not covered by insurance because they lived in a floodplain. Mother Nature had shown me hideous change in the landscape of my childhood.

When I lived through the flood, I felt a certain kinship to the destructive water. I also knew what it was like to explode with improperly contained force. Thankfully now I have an outlet to use when the water gets too high. Writing as a form of therapy is incredibly useful and cheap enough for even a college kid such as myself. In “Writing Can Help Us Help From Trauma” published by the Harvard Business Review, Deborah Siegel-Acevedo writes, “Expressive writing is expansively defined as writing that helps us make sense of our thoughts and emotions.” Most professionals do expressive writing within a certain set of stipulations to ensure a positive outcome for patients, such as linking concrete details of a stressful event to the emotional reaction they had to them. Some researchers suggest that it works by freeing up cognitive resources and changing the way our brain organizes information. The research suggests that there needs to be a “learning opportunity” or silver lining found by the author for them to fully grasp the activity. This helps writers to use their intense feelings as motivation for forward growth instead of lamentation.

I don’t think that writing for therapy is a replacement for professional counsel. I will certainly assert that professional advice from a licensed therapist will always be a better way toward personal growth. There is a right and wrong place to be using writing as a therapeutic tool. It is not an appropriate safety net for all mental health concerns. However, in the case of minor inconveniences or dealing with the normal turmoil that comes with being human, writing is an incredible way for people to organize their feelings. It is another tool that I’ve found to be important in my mental health toolbox, as well as a great way to create beauty from hideous change. I hope that I can spread this skill to others and during my internship with River River Books and Moist.